1201 | 986 | Addressing the challenge of management of common spaces affected by an internal border. The area of Mont-rebei (Serra de Montsec/Noguera Ribagorçana river, Autonomous Communities of Catalonia and Aragon) as a case study | Joan Tort Donada, Verónica García Morales, Alexis Sancho Reinoso
Planning and managing spaces adjacent to an internal border (a complex task in itself) has an added difficulty when this border runs through a space distinguished by its geographical unity, whether in the strictly physiognomic or formal order, or from the perspective of its uses or its functionality. The exposed problem has, in Spain, a paradigmatic manifestation in the valley of the Noguera Ribagorçana river, in the Pyrenees: a fluvial course that runs from north to south, along 140 km, and which, at the same time, coincides, in most of its route, with an “internal border”: the limit between the autonomous communities of Catalonia and Aragon. This circumstance makes coordination essential in public policies – especially in the sense of ensuring the homogeneous management of the concurrent problems on both sides of the limit, and to avoid the generation of a “barrier effect”, in a material sense, in the border zone. Within the exposed framework, in the communication we propose to analyse the legal and management problems, in different orders (and particularly regarding to the development of tourism), that arise in the so-called Estret de Mont-rebei and its closest environment. This area, crossed by the course of the Noguera Ribagorçana river (in the surroundings of Montsec mountain range) and shared, therefore, by the autonomous communities of Aragon and Catalonia, has emerged in the last two decades as a kind of “symbolic space” in different senses, due to its high natural values. The results of the analysis carried out, and the risk of the “barrier effect”, lead us to emphasize, facing the future, the need of tackling the law of the public management of this space from a basic premise of coordination and cooperation.
Joan Tort Donada, Verónica García Morales, Alexis Sancho Reinoso
Universitat de Barcelona, Universitaet Wien
ID Abstract: 986