Towards development of the cross-border functional area on the French-Luxembourg border?

With Luxembourg’s PDAT (Territorial Development Master Plan) adopted in 2023 forecasting up to 154,000 additional cross-border workers by 2050, what capacity do the French, Belgian and German border territories have to support this development and accommodate these new cross-border workers while ensuring their own development? What are the impacts and challenges in terms of development for the territories in the Luxembourg functional area?  

The first session provided an opportunity to put the PDAT’s ambitions to the test of local realities. The various contributions highlighted the need to take better account of Luxembourg’s development forecasts in French territorial planning documents, and above all the need for cross-border planning in order to assess and take account of the capacity of Luxembourg’s border territories to accommodate people in order to avoid a future development crisis. 

These issues were then put into perspective with the experience of Greater Geneva, with the presentation of its ‘Cross-border territorial vision’, to show the interest, beyond shared challenges, of drawing up a cross-border territorial planning scheme, and to discuss how this could be reproduced at the scale of the Luxembourg functional area. 

 Lastly, a final session discussed the opportunities and challenges of cross-border development: at what scales, with what governance, and to meet what objectives could a cross-border development scheme see the light of day? Some of the highlights of the discussion: 

• The interest in collectively constructing a shared and balanced vision of the territorial development of the Luxembourg functional area, which takes into account of the issues of land conservation, adaptation to climate change and social cohesion that constrain the development of border territories. 
• The need to cooperate and consider cross-border spatial planning at an intermediate working scale between the Grande Région and local cooperation areas, in order to take account of the metropolitan challenges of the functional area. 

Several concrete avenues of work were proposed: the drafting of a Franco-Luxembourg development plan, which will be placed on the agenda of the next IGC; increased cooperation in terms of data, particularly for the drafting of cross-border forecasts; and experimentation with cross-border pilot projects developing planning tools adapted to the challenges of the cross-border territory (e.g. rehabilitation of cross-border brownfield sites).