Este trabajo pretende ser una primera aproximación a la dimensión del despilfarro de recursos públicos en infraestructuras en España desde 1995 hasta la actualidad en los distintos niveles de gobierno. A partir de algunas precisiones sobre los conceptos de despilfarro y corrupción, se analiza, de una parte, la inversión y los sobrecostes en infraestructuras innecesarias impulsadas y ejecutadas por la Administración General del Estado en el ámbito de sus competencias, y de otra, infraestructuras, proyectos, eventos e inversiones fallidas, vacías o infrautilizadas acometidas por las Comunidades Autónomas y los gobiernos locales. Se abordan los déficit de marco institucional y de gobernanza territorial y se sugiere una posible agenda de reformas a partir de unas conclusiones generales.

Territorial cohesion policies are a priority for the European Union. For over thirty years, they have aimed not only to provide greater social and economic development across all European space, but also to contribute to balancing g internal social and economic inequalities. On the other hand, European institutions have adopted regional scale as the optimal to achieve this broad goal. Consequently, the ability of these policies to solve the problems faced by some of these regions has been one of the most widely researched areas in numerous scientific disciplines. This article aims to assess the impact, over a fifteen-year perspective, of cooperation funds focusing on a specific area, the cross-border, and, in particular, the border area separating Spain and France. Specifically, the analyses of data from operative programmes IV and V of the INTERREG-A projects produces contradictory results. While the aim of European institutions was to use the European Territorial Cooperation instrument to achieve a greater, better real impact of funds in cross-border areas, and to progress towards territorial cohesion, the results show that, conversely, they have largely contributed to reinforcing unequal development. In the analysed border, the dynamics are an increasing distance between the more and less developed areas in the direct border space, and a privilege of urban areas, even if they are far from the borderline. A relevant conclusion of the text is that these unexpected results are partly a consequence of the design of the European programmes.

Environmental activism, with decades of relevant presence already, is a fundamental element for the preservation of natural and cultural values. Theories around their bases, protagonists, methods, instruments and results proliferate in a period of obliged ecological transition. Here, we present an investigation in the region of Girona (Catalunya, Spain), with the main objective of reflecting on environmental activism and its singular impact on the territorial reality of this area. The specific interest of this case resides in the longevity of the mobilizations (50 years) and the number of cases and actors; for its causes (a territory endowed with a very socialized narrative linking landscape to identity, and subject to multiple and powerful transformative pressures); and for its effective results. Through collaborative research and different data sources, we display map-based results about environmental movements and conflicts, and quantitative results about typologies of movements, conflict triggers, outcomes of the cases, and conversion rate to nature or heritage protection figures. The discussion, and by extension the conclusions, proposes answers to the exceptional nature of the case in the Catalan context, its relationship with NIMBY processes, and the notable incidence of these mobilizations in the landscape quality and land planning of Girona.

Observing boundaries as an empirical manifestation of the spatial and temporal limits of societies (Jacob, Von Asche, 2014) is an exciting research perspective in social science. From the second half of the 19th Century to the beginning of the 20th Century, geographers have been working continuously on borders, in relation to various themes: political division of space, territoriality and exercise of power. All this research has been one of the most obvious manifestations of the link between ...

El texto propone una visión de los espacios transfronterizos desde la perspectiva de los soft spaces —los espacios blandos— con relación al planeamiento territorial. Con ella se consigue una interpretación mucho más ajustada de la realidad de las áreas transfronterizas, así como de sus dinámicas. Por otra parte, el artículo hace un repaso a lo que ha sido la cooperación transfronteriza en Europa desde sus orígenes hasta llegar al presente. Partiendo de una coincidencia con otros autores en la definición de fases, se acaba proponiendo que la última, iniciada en 2008, se caracterizaría por la tensión entre las fuerzas que reclaman una recuperación de la frontera y la soberanía de los estados y las que, contrariamente, propugnan recuperar la idea de integración europea perdida en la última década. Es decir, precisamente una tensión entre los soft spaces transfronterizos y un rebordering incipiente.