Planning cultural exchange across borders – first steps towards a common comprehension of planning paradigms in the Greater Region?

Various development trends and crises—such as demographic change and the growing threats posed by climate change—increasingly challenge the strategic spatial development of regions and the provision of equal living conditions. Ensuring the provision of basic public services while adapting spatial structures in a resilient manner to new needs is becoming an urgent issue. It is therefore increasingly important for local and regional authorities to engage in cooperation beyond administrative boundaries. Particularly, rural areas located at the national peripheries might benefit from the complementary provision of services of general interest, such as health care and education (Caesar et al 2025). At the same time, regional disparities, such as socio-economic imbalances, between neighbouring European border regions combined with the Schengen freedoms have led to the automatic pragmatical exploitation of the border differentials by decision-makers, investors and border residents (cf. Braunerhielm et al 2019; Terlouw 2012) and have created strong functional interdependencies with visible spatial effects such as the designation of new settlement areas, fuel stations and shopping centres at the border. Other prominent indicators of cross-border interdependencies are strong commuter flows across the border because of an attractive labour market, and the functional polarisation of the border regions (Decoville & Durand 2017). Additionally, disparities can increase competition between neighbouring regions (Leibenath et al. 2008, 29; Ricq 2006, 142).
Planning practitioners play a key role because they are professionally trained for mitigating and avoiding conflicts of interests and land-uses (cf. Decoville & Durand 2021b, 2). Therefore, there is an increasing need to empower planners from neighbouring countries to exchange across borders and to mitigate contradicting spatial planning developments and conflicts, as well as harmonize and coordinate spatial development in cross-border areas with strong functional interdependencies.
Spatial planning, however, traditionally stops at the national administrative border, because its scope of action and the related competences are legally bound to a nation state. Therefore, a sound and sustainable spatial planning across borders can be even difficult for planners, having national interests in mind while trying to plan for the common good (cf. Durand & Decoville 2021, 10): They need to think ‘outside the box’, transcend several border-related obstacles, and take into account existing cross-border interdependencies that constitute the cross-border region (Decoville and Durand, 2021, 2). Alongside obvious challenges such as linguistic differences and increased bureaucratic efforts (Cerić, 2023, 323), a crucial obstacle spatial planners face in cooperation across borders are different spatial planning cultures that likely clash during the coordination and development of planning processes (cf. Caesar and Evrard, 2020). In addition to explicit elements, like individual spatial planning systems and law, planning cultures comprise many implicit elements such as societal values that are difficult to grasp and address but strongly influence spatial planning practice across borders (Knieling & Othengrafen 2015).
In this context, the UniGR-CBS Spatial Planning Working Group, comprising researchers from the University of the Greater Region, developed an experimental planning game methodology – an innovative, intercultural tool to study and reflect about planning cultures and practices across borders. The game invites planning practitioners, planning students and politicians from the different parts of the Greater Region to collaboratively engage in a fictional cross-border planning process – including national, bilateral and multilateral negotiation phases - and to develop a fictional cross-border planning concept as final output. Through gameplay observations and reflexion rounds, researchers gain insights into players’ practical reasoning and interactions as well as underlying thoughts. Participants benefit from the intercultural and professional training with stakeholders from the neighbouring countries which is facilitated by simultaneous interpretation that helps overcome linguistic barriers.
This contribution firstly explains the developed planning game. Secondly it illustrates first results, i.e. planning cultural differences and similarities that we were derived from the most recently conducted planning game. It particularly focuses on key planning paradigms and underlying individual comprehensions that were invoked by the French, Walloon, German and Luxemburgish participants in their reasoning while explaining their decisions taken during the planning process. Thirdly, the contribution discusses these observations, contextualizes their relevance for the comparison of planning cultures and outlines the potential of our planning game methodology to enhance the mutual intercultural understanding in the spatial planning processes across borders that we consider to be very necessary.