The Strategic urban region Eurodelta (SURE) comprises the lower river basins of the Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt. A polycentric area, comprising a network of metropolises with medium-large cities and cross-border regions. In its capacity of an entrance gate for goods and persons to Europe, it has developed into a densely populated and economically strong area. Within 3 hours of travel, over 50 million people can be reached. This makes it a global hub for goods, services and knowledge. This role has brought economic prosperity but also major territorial, environmental and liveability issues. For instance, transport is responsible for a substantially large share of CO2 emissions in the region, with further increases forecasted, while EU ambitions and national climate debates or policy plans point to the need for a drastic reduction of them. The Strategic urban region Eurodelta faces indeed major challenges: energy transition, climate adaptation, accommodation of economic and demographic growth, ensuring connectivity and accessibility of urban networks, and sustainable land use. Decarbonising the transport sector plays a crucial role in tackling these challenges. The area has four internal national borders (NL-DE, NL-BE, BE-FR, DE-BE) that European integration and globalization have tended to abolish. These borders are crossed by people, goods or services and national and regional/local policy makers feel the urgency to collaborate more closely on policy solutions to address this wide range of flows and achieve more sustainable development. The analysis considers the research area against its surroundings, but not in a static way. International flows can concern transport and secondary spatial flows to and from megacities in the ring around the SURE, like London, Paris or up to Frankfurt and Hamburg. This can give a measure of the strength of the relationship between the SURE and these cities. Finally, responding to current events, it has become clear again that crises can affect transport severely. The COVID-19 crisis affects drastically, besides the health of people, free movement of persons and has a huge impact also on free movements of goods with the sudden and unexpected recurrence of borders. It could also bring an economic crisis. On the long term, we may face more sanatory crises, economic crises and crises of other kinds, e.g. energy or digital crises, which may affect cities, cross-border movements and transport.
