Action Plan for Cross-Border Cooperation Between Rostock and Guldborgsund Along the Scandria® Corridor
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
ACTION PLAN for cross-border cooperation between Hansestadt Rostock and Guldborgsund Municipality along the Scandria® corridor Action plan for cross-border cooperation between Rostock and Guldborgsund along the Scandria® corridor I. Introduction Rostock and Guldborgsund have intentionally cooperated from the early 1990s on. Both municipalities decided to officially enter a durable twinning partnership with effect of November 2014. Thus, this new twinning will unite the Hanseatic City of Rostock (about 203,000 inhabitants) with the municipality Guldborgsund with about 61,000 inhabitants. Priority development aim of the Hanseatic City of Rostock is to become a regiopolis region in the Baltic Sea Region. Thus, Rostock and the surrounding county plus interactional area Ribnitz-Damgarten form a regiopolis region1 with about 450,000 inhabitants. This region generates centripetal forces which give the regiopolis region Rostock a particular role within the metropolis triangle Copenhagen, Hamburg and Berlin. Priority development aim of Guldborgsund Municipality is to utilize its position in the South Baltic Sea and along the transport corridors E 55 and E47, to cooperate with its neighboring countries and regions for the joint development of job creation and economic growth. Guldborgsund Municipality will therefore cooperate with the Rostock Regiopolis initiative and enter a twinning partnership with Hanseatic City of Rostock. The cooperation between Rostock and Guldborgsund that has tremendously increased from 1990 on needed only little political incentives; the advantages of neighborly cooperation spoke for themselves. Rostock and Guldborgsund have been unified by their good location over years; the neighbours are located only 52 km waterways away from each other, the regions’ inhabitants live up to the same values and are aware of the advantages of such a neighbourhood. The interlinking with Rostock needs special attention; as a self-determined neighbourhood has been possible in Rostock only after 1991. Both municipalities are located in the sphere of the three metropolises Hamburg, Copenhagen and Berlin. As Guldborgsund has been the bridgehead to Scandinavia for Rostock, Rostock and Luebeck are Guldborgsund’s bridgeheads towards Germany. Rostock is 200 km away from the metropolises Hamburg and Berlin; Guldborgsund only 1 A regiopolis is a city outside a metropolitan area that acts as a driving force for development for the city itself and its suburban region. The concept is not only seen as a phrase for city marketing, but it has also the potential to bring these urban regions back on the national and European map. To use and further develop their (economic) potential a strong cooperation between the city and its surrounding municipalities (the Regiopolis region) is needed and should be accompanied by cooperation’s with other interest groups and the local business sector. 2 130 km from Copenhagen. While the large city Rostock combines economic power and prosperity, Guldborgsund increasingly profits from the booming Öresund region. Due to this, the joint efforts have mainly addressed an improvement of transport relations in passenger and cargo traffic so far. Over the last funding period from 2007-2013, the Trans-European transport axis I via Berlin and Rostock to Copenhagen was successfully expanded. Thus, not only Guldborgsund is able to profit from North-South-traffics as well as from East-West- traffics as far as these are not only transits through the municipality territory. Hence, the north-south oriented Scandria alliance was started as development alliance between Berlin, Rostock and Guldborgsund and resulted into the EU-Scandinavia-Mediterranean Sea-Corridor (TEN-T) in 2014. Likewise, Guldborgsund is actively engaged into the development axis Copenhagen-Guldborgsund-Puttgarden. By acting in a coordinated way, integration into the eligible area of the new “Interreg Programme IVA South Baltic Sea Region” was successfully achieved. The neighbourly integration proceeds rapidly. The public transport systems and ferry crossings have already been harmonized and integrated for a considerable period of time now. Guldborgsund is connected to Copenhagen at hourly intervals, Rostock to Berlin and Hamburg in two-hour intervals. The preconditions for cross-border regional integration have remained good. Strategic objective to reach a status of ensured competitiveness before the Fehmarn-Belt crossing is commissioned. Resulting from the joint commitment, local, regional, national and EU protagonists meet in Rostock and Guldborgsund in the new Scandinavia-Mediterranean Sea development corridor, important access routes (via Berlin) cross Rostock along the North Sea-Baltic Sea and Orient/East-Mediterran corridor. The essential conclusion of numerous cross-border or transnational cooperation projects is that time has come to establish joint projects not only related to the favoured cooperation areas transport and business development but also in the fields of culture, sport, education and civic commitment in the future. Cooperation in the areas of labour market mobility and renewable energy supply are also relevant for the two municipalities. The Baltic Sea region-wide Interreg project „BSR Transgovernance“ provided the opportunity to practically test the EU’s multilevel governance approach. Positive experiences have been gained over the past years, as where federal government, state government, Region Rostock, Hanseatic City of Rostock and private companies like Scandlines combined their efforts. On the Danish side the municipality Guldborgsund, 3 Region Zealand, the central government and private companies acted jointly too, with the aimed effect of deeper territorial cross border integration. As, due to this, a lot has already been achieved regarding hard infrastructure modernization even before 2014, the BSR Transgovernance project selected the cross border neighbourhood Rostock-Guldborgsund to test, through the example of an intensifying neighbourhood relationship between Rostock and Guldborgsund, the transition from a “bottleneck” on an important European transport corridor into a cross- border – crossing the Baltic Sea - regional development axis. The focus was placed on removing a weak point, the cross-border car-free intermodal passenger traffic. The tasks specified jointly by Guldborgsund and Rostock in an outline action plan, sometimes even far from the traffic development objectives, demonstrate that the path which has been pursued was the right one. The already quite well established traffic corridor from Berlin to Copenhagen is a “fertile soil” for various interlinking relationships between Guldborgsund and Rostock. The cargo and passenger traffic corridor converts into a regional cross-border axis section along the development from Berlin to Copenhagen. Even more than before, this development needs coordination as it by now influences much more than the cooperation in the field of transport infrastructure development. Three cross-border oriented workshops and, to prepare and implement them, various regional meetings (see image) took place in the context of the project. The cross-border phone calls, emails and personal meetings can hardly be counted anymore. Aim was to promote the intended transition of a transport corridor into a cross-border regional development axis via targeted project activities. Thus, the joint efforts addressed the function of the passenger and cargo transport “hub” at the sites Rostock and Guldborgsund and, directly and indirectly, transport promotion. Workshop Date & Responsible partners Partici- Location pants R4 Regional Workshop Region Rostock 19 March 2014, Planning Association 39 “Potentials for cooperation in the Scandria transport corridor Fuglsang Rostock Region / between Northern Germany and Southern Denmark” Guldborgsund municipality R5 Regional Workshop, Region Guldborgsund 13 June 2014, Guldborgsund municipality 29 “Transport and business development in the North-South Falster Transport corridor in Guldborgsund Municipality” Center T3 Thematic Workshop Passengers services, ports, MoS 11 December City of Rostock / Planning 39 “Challenges and cooperation potentials for passenger and 2013, Rostock Association Rostock cargo traffic along the Scandria©-Corridor” Region 4 The Interreg BSR IVB project BSR Transgovernance provided partners from Rostock and Guldborgsund with an opportunity to elaborate an action plan for the future cooperation between Guldborgsund and Rostock. The “Outline Action Plan” will specify the twinning city agreement between Rostock and Guldborgsund. Furthermore, the joint regional development between Rostock and Guldborgsund got valuable inspiration from gained insights into partially comparable – Baltic Sea crossing – neighbourhood relationships, between Helsinki and Tallinn as well as between Umeå and Vaasa. By the end of the project „BSR Transgovernance“ Rostock and Guldborgsund will be able to proof that, even with the partial implementation of the multilevel governance concept in the traffic sector, growth and prosperity have been achieved in the transport sector as well as in other regional development fields. Increasing co-operations initiate passenger traffic demands, increasing demands, again, justify a commitment for improving the cross-border intermodal passenger transport. The continued cooperation related to the topics agreed upon in the action plan shall stabilize and enhance this development. 5 II. Topics and measures for cross-border cooperation A.