Ninon BRIOT, ENS de Lyon, France
This communication intends to demonstrate the importance of city-to-city cooperations in the European Union and invites to rethink the geography of Europe. The presentation stem from a doctoral research in geography defended in 2021.
City-to-city cooperations are mainly studied by political sciences, as part of a reflexion on the renewal of international relations, which are increasingly being taken over by non-state actors, such as cities. Those studies show how these relations have evolved, from twinnings to very large city associations. Those relations form a “city diplomacy” and raise new issues, such as climate change. Geographers have remained on the sidelines of this subject, but my work, based on pioneer researches, supports that a spatial analysis of those links is meaningful.
This research is based on mixed methods. 3 databases census the different types of cooperations between cities at a global level. Those databases were analysed through network, spatial and statistical analysis. Then, interviews were made with actors involved in those cooperations.
The results show that the epicentre of these cooperations is in Europe, and specifically in the European Union. 30% of the cities involved in a city association are European cities. European projects, which are a type of cooperation financed by the cohesion policy, is the only type of cooperation financed by a regional organisation. This is the consequence of the involvement of the EU in the funding and the incentives of these relations, in order to link up the community territory. Therefore, a new geography of the EU arises, with the involvement of urban actors. It depicts a meshed Europe by political and cooperative links, and underlines the dynamism of the European project, which seems more complex when it is analysed at the state level. Those links bring to light new political stakes, such as the environmental issue or the health crisis management, in order to find good practices at the urban level.
Mots clés : europeanisation|cities|cooperation
A102868NB