- A Bilingual Cooperative Planning Process on the Swiss-French Border in the Basel Area   587 kb by    Fischer, Susanne | Susanne.fischer@bud.bl.ch    Short Outline Three municipalities based their future development on the commitment of a cross-border planning to overcome national, linguistic and cultural borders. Abstract Due to the location of Basel on the national border to France in the western part and the border to Germany in the north, three different political and administrative authorities are responsible for the urban agglomeration. More than in other regions, cross-border planning projects have traditionally been very advantageous and important for the Basel area as an approach of development. Today, trinational cross-border activities and organisations are well established and supported by Interreg or Euro-District programs. In 2005 the Interreg project for the future development of the greenlands on the Swiss-French border was set up. To create a sustainable common planning culture, a bilingual cooperative planning process was implemented. The idea was: • to avoid top-down strategy in Interreg supported programs • to prepare the ground for a more communal based Euro-District • to involve important stakeholders and municipalities • to introduce France to the method of cooperative planning The three involved municipalities (Allschwil / CH, Hegenheim / F, St. Louis / F) had to cover the topics of: • future development of greenlands while maintaining its character • possibilities of inter-national industrial zones for emerging biotechnology enterprises • improvement of transport caused by cross-border commuting car-traffic. As a result of the participation process, a consolidated spatial concept of the cross-border area was developed, based on a broad agreement. But we suppose the more important result of the one year planning process was the mutual understanding of two different political systems, the different planning culture, the language, and the persons involved, in order to establish a common base for future cross-border avtivities. Susanne Fischer, Basel Keywords bilingual cooperative planning Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2007: Urban Trialogues   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper