Borders and Cities: Perspectives from North America and Europe.

The realization of this dossier follows a session entitled ?Borders and Cities,? which was organized by Antoine Decoville, Francisco Lara, Christophe Sohn and Olivier Walther as part of the conference of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) held in 2010 in Washington. The goal pursued comprises two angles. On the one hand, one aim is to question the relations between cities and borders, as well as the forms and processes that derive from them. This choice stems from the observation that the transformations affecting cross-border cities and metropolises are still under-studied, as the attention of many border scholars, especially in Europe, has hitherto been focused more on the phenomenon of ?crossborder regions? and ?cross-border cooperation? without taking account of the urban context and the particularities associated with the presence of cities inserted into the global economy. On the other hand, this dossier brings together work focusing on case studies situated in different geopolitical, institutional and cultural contexts, particularly Europe and North America. In doing so, we aim at continuing the transatlantic dialogue initiated in the early 1980s by border practitioners and scholars (see notably Blatter and Clement 2000; Ganster et al. 1997; Perkmann and Sum 2002). The changes that occurred during the 2000s, both in Europe with the eastward expansion of the EU and the end of the myth of a Europe without borders, and also in North America, with the post 9/11 rebordering process and the increased security along the borders of the United States, calls for re-examination of the processes at work.