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This article describes how a cartographic solution, originally implemented to circumvent copyright issues, has revealed collateral advantages, notably its capacity to efficiently convey cartographic message, its adaptability for web mapping and its diffusion potential.

In order to improve the relevance, efficiency and effectiveness of the policy making and implementation process regarding functional urban areas and other functional regions, it is essential to have data, indicators and analysis tools that can help to better understand the drivers for growth and inclusive social development in these areas across Europe. By now significant data gaps exist to be able to understand their contribution to polycentric and balanced territorial development. This project will fill the existing data gaps, complement the work of Eurostat, OECD and DG Joint Research Center in this field and will facilitate policy debates at various levels, for instance within Urban Agenda for the EU Partnership on Sustainable Use of Land.

This Atlas contains detailed descriptions of 13 European examples of soft territorial cooperation areas. The selection of cases presented makes no claim to comprehensiveness nor (statistical) representativeness. Cases were selected out of a multitude of identified examples with a view on fitting the project's definition of soft territorial cooperation. Soft territorial cooperation areas were defined as initiatives that define the sectoral scope and geographical boundaries in an ‘open' or ‘fuzzy' way, based on a notion of ‘community of intent' as a voluntary collaboration open to public and private actors who decide to jointly address territory-specific opportunities and challenges. Their other main characteristics are: • a medium to long term integrative perspective (i.e. not limited to the implementation of a single project); • seeking to enhance the capacities of involved players, making them actors of their own development; • renewing relations between institutional levels, sectors of activity and types of actors (e.g. NGOs, private companies, local and regional authorities, agencies…). The soft territorial cooperation areas presented in this Atlas show variations of these characteristics and “openness” in how they define their cooperation area, partnership, thematic scope, type of interventions and governance structure. The way in which case study descriptions are structured shall allow the reader to quickly capture case study characteristics, make cross-connections between the different cases and draw his/ her own conclusions from the presented material. The project team's findings and conclusions can be found in the main project report.

This handbook builds on the lessons distilled from 24 case studies on soft territorial cooperation in different parts of Europe that were undertaken in the scope of the ESPON ACTAREA project on “Thinking and planning in areas of territorial cooperation”. Case studies focused on analysing and characterising soft territorial cooperation areas regarding - the strategic purpose they pursue; - approaches to region-building they take; - organisational structures they have set up and resources they draw on; - strategies to motivate actors to participate and overcome barriers to cooperation they have developed; and - the policy frameworks and strategies under which they have been create.

Combining diverse material gathered from the analysis of the Swiss policy context and the exploration of the 12 Swiss AAs, this separate report is aimed at providing a comprehensive view on the Swiss experience with soft territorial cooperation. Chapter 2 introduces the policy context relevant for the analysis of the Swiss AAs. Chapter 3 presents the different supra-regional collaborations taking place on Action Area level, framing them in their territorial context, and proposes an analytical grid to analysing them. Chapter 4 synthetises results obtained from the analysis of the 12 Swiss AAs, classifying them based on their maturity of cooperation and summarises policy options as expressed by field actors. Chapter 5 is set up as an Atlas, offering in-depth presentation of the 12 Swiss AAs.

This guidance document aims at summarizing the global strategy followed by the ESPON 2020 MapKits project for creating the ESPON MapKits : (1) Enlarging mapping possibilities and support the growing availability of data in a European perspective. (2) Focus on uses and quality. (3) Promote the dissemination of open source information. The last part (4) describes the data sources used to create the layers included in ESPON MapKits.

ESPON ACTAREA has analysed 24 examples of ‘soft territorial cooperation areas' across Europe, taking as a starting point Swiss efforts to promote thinking and planning in so-called ‘Action Areas' (AAs), i.e. new forms of soft governance spaces with fuzzy, flexible boundaries that span across national and regional administrative boundaries and link urban and rural development policies. It has identified good practices and developed tools to describe and develop cooperation across Europe, considering both individual cooperation instances and cooperation frameworks put in place primarily by national authorities. Soft territorial cooperation areas are instances of territorial governance. They bring together actors concerned by a set of territorial challenges and opportunities and who are prepared to elaborate and implement strategies to address them jointly. Their sectoral scope and geographical boundaries are generally defined in an ‘open' or ‘fuzzy' way. When choosing case studies, the project focused on initiatives with the following characteristics: • a medium to long term integrative perspective (i.e. are not limited to the implementation of a single project); • an ambition to enhance the capacities of involved players, making them actors of their own development; • a determination to renew relations between institutional levels, sectors of activity and types of actors (e.g. NGOs, private companies, local and regional authorities, agencies…). Soft territorial cooperation instances can also be approached as ‘communities of intent'. The existence of such a ‘community' is the output of a cooperation process. However, it only emerges if a convergence of interest between involved actors can be achieved. Proponents of soft territorial cooperation are therefore typically actors that manage to identify potential such ‘communities' and to facilitate the process leading to their emergence. This require concrete competencies in fields such as process design and workshop facilitation, combined with intimate knowledge of local and regional contexts (‘Fingerspitzengefühl').