Les ambiguïtés de l'Eurométropole Lille-Kortrijk-Tournai, à travers ses représentations régionales

Abstract

First cross-border territory to form an EGTC (European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation, in 2008), the Lille-Kortrijk-Tournai Eurometropolis is already strongly institutionalized, but still struggles to (re)present itself as an entity readable by its inhabitants, consistent for the actors and visible from the outside. This article is part of a work in progress which considers the territorial construction through the prism of its spatial representations, assuming that they inform us about the way it is thought, worn, used. The concept of region, and its multiple meanings, is here a tool to enter the vast corpus of these representations and to organize it, according to three axes of analysis: the eurometropolis as a cross-border region, as a tri-regional metropolis or as a metropolitan inter-region. Several ambiguities in the definition of this territory thus emerge; they suggest that “inter-territoriality” is now an important challenge to be represented.

Keywords

• regions
• cross-border territory
• eurometropolis
• spatial images
• territorial patterns
• inter-territoriality