Valga-Valka
Overview
Presentation
Situated on either side of the border between Estonia and Latvia, the towns of Valga and Valka form a conurbation of 20,000 inhabitants.
On the Estonian side, Valga covers 16.5 km2 with a population of 12,917 as of 2010. It is the capital of Valga County, one of the 15 counties of Estonia, and is twelfth largest town in Estonia. Marked by industrialisation during the Soviet period, the town still has multiple brownfield sites and collective housing home to a large Russian-speaking population. Between 1991 and 2010, thet town experienced a significant economic and demographic decline, greater than the national average, which continues to this day.
On the Latvian side, Valka, numbering 6,157 inhabitants spread over 14.5 km2, was the main town of one of the 26 Latvian rajoni or districts, despite ranking only 32nd in size among Latvian towns. There is therefore a certain demographic asymmetry in favour of the Estonian town. With the 2009 reform of Latvian administrative divisions, the rajoni were abolished and Valka became the administrative centre of one of the 110 newly formed municipalities.
A conurbation once at the geographical centre of Livonia, a Baltic region encompassing Latvia and Estonia, its partition was, from the First World War onwards, the subject of extensive negotiations between the two new republics. In 1919, the British-led commission headed S.G. Tallents established the border line on a stream that feeds into the river Pedeli, thus allocating most of the town to Estonia along lines of nationality. This partition was not called into question by either country. However, rather paradoxically, the Soviet occupation made possible the reunification of the town, for a period of fifty years, the border being reduced to a mere administrative boundary. The resurgence of Latvia and Estonia as independent states in 1991 and the re-establishment of the border led to the renewal of the conurbation’s partition (according to the 1919 demarcation), which took no account of the new practices developed by the inhabitants or of the changes to the built environment brought about by the reunification.
The development of the cross-border conurbation project undertaken by the two countries appears as a new chapter in the history of the town.
