CROSS-BORDER REGIONS
Since the end of the eighties, cross-border region building processes have gained momentum. A cross-border region is actually a special case of a micro-region, whereby the micro-region spreads across different states.
An example of a dynamic cross-border region in North America is the so-called "Cascadia", at the western edge of the US-Canadian border.
Cascadia, in fact, is presented as a rather flexible notion. Depending on the interests and agendas involved, different 'boundaries' of Cascadia are constructed. Mappings of Cascadia range from a conceptualisation that includes only the watershed of the Georgia Basin and Puget Sound to one called "Main Street", running from Vancouver south through Seattle to Portland and Eugene; to a depiction of a two-state, one province agglomeration of British Columbia, Washington State and sometimes even Oregon; to a much larger approach envisioning the cross-border entity as a "Pacific Northwest Economic Region", including five states, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Alaska, and two provinces, British Columbia and Alberta.
Some scholars state that these presentations of variously scaled partnerships are not geopolitical in the sense that they represent areas of influence or conflict, but are rather geo-economic framings of the region.
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