Contact details:
Departament de Geografia i Sociologia,
Univ. de Lleida,
Plaça Víctor Siurana, 1
25.003 LLEIDA
Spain
Tel (and Fax): +34 (973) 70.20.98
E-mail: Marti.Henneberg@geosoc.udl.es
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Contact details:Departament de Geografia i Sociologia, Tel (and Fax): +34 (973) 70.20.98 E-mail: Marti.Henneberg@geosoc.udl.es |
Current post: "Profesor Titular" of Human Geography. Head of the Department
Postgraduate education:
· 1986 PhD in Geography. Departement of Geography. University of Barcelona.
· 1989 Master in International Management. Escuela Superior de Administración y Dirección de Empresas (ESADE, Barcelona).
Director of projects:
"An Historical Atlas of Lleida (XVIII-XXth centuries)", for the period 1997-2000.
"The regional cohesion in Europe (1850-1995)", for the period 1999-2001.
H.R. Southall
, ‘The Origins of the Depressed Areas: Unemployment, Growth, and Regional Economic Structure in Britain before 1914?tm), Economic History Review, 2nd series, Vol. 41 (1988), pp. 236-258.· Emilio Huguet del Villar (1871-1951). Cincuenta años de lucha por la ciencia, Pensamiento y Método Geográfico, nº 5, Barcelona, Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 1984.
· L'excursionisme científic (The Scientific Alpinism), Barcelona, Alta-Fulla, 1994.
· "Huguet del Villar", Geographers'. Bio-Bibliographical Studies, Oxford, IX, 1985 (55-60).
· "How discussions concerning the Chile-Argentina boundary have stimulated the study of the Andean glaciers", QUIPU", v.6, n.3, Méjico, 1989 (331-338).
· "The regional distribution of the European Community Budget", Proceedings of the 37th Congress of the European Regional Science Association, Rome, 1997, 15 pp.
· "La definición histórica de las regiones en la Europa comunitaria (1850-1995)" (The historical definition of regions in the European Community), Actas del VIII Coloquio Ibérico de Geografía, vol. 2, Lisboa, 1999 (729-734).
· "Regional distribution of Agricultural and European Cohesion Funding", Iberian Studies, Keele University, Staffordshire, 1999 (under publication).
The present project of research is concerned with the evolutionary analysis of the socio-economic unbalance among regions in Western Europe since 1850. The aim is to contribute to the study of the European territorial cohesion from a long-term perspective. The data is taken from the national statistics yearbooks and is used for the purpose of comparative analysis. The geographical units which are taken for the analysis are the administrative divisions present in 1850, which -with the exception of Germany- have been roughly maintained up to now. These units, named for instance "provincias" in Spain and "départements" in France, are the ones which are going to be used for the cartographic representation of the territorial contrasts and the evolutionary comparison of relevant issues, such as the density of population, agricultural productivity, or the industrialisation index. This issues, together with other indicators such as the level of salaries or the collecting of taxes, are detailed in the national statistics yearbooks at a scale of administrative units.
For the purpose of our study, this is the type of information which allow us to quantify the socio-economic unbalance per capita among European regions. Therefore, this is an important previous stage to the elaboration of a digital map reflecting the changes of regional borders. In order to give cartographic shape to the information just mentioned, we need to have a data set with figures actualised every ten years since 1850. This is the reason whereby we have began to digitalize manually the regional borders with the help of ancient maps. The difficulties of this task might be familiar to the audience of this meeting. Nevertheless, is worth stressing here that this cartographic activity has led us to reflect on the different forms adopted by certain administrative divisions through time as well as on their remarkable degree of endurance in other cases.
Basically, we have find out that every country adopts one of these two models: rationalist and historicist. The reference-country as far as the rationalist model is concerned would be France, where a homogeneous and stable organisation in "départements" is to be found since they were first created two hundred years ago. Thereafter, this model was adopted by other countries like Spain, Portugal and Belgium. An outstanding characteristic common to all countries belonging to this group is that the State imposed a territorial organisation without taking seriously into consideration the cultural or historical ground of the different regions. Quite the reverse, in the rest of European countries the administrative divisions generally reflect the age-old borders of the different societies which conform the State. The result is a map with geographical units of very different size. This would be the case, for instance, of Italy, Great Britain, Austria, and Germany before the Second World War. Taking into account all these considerations, we shall be in better conditions to decide which is the most adequate level of administrative division to take for our qualitative study about the socio-economic reality in contemporary Europe.