| Summary: | The region that includes the state of Paraná (Brazil), the province of Misiones (Argentina) and the departments of Itapúa and Alto Paraná (Paraguay) contain a group of intermediate and border cities that, in recent times, in their conditions of regional urban centers and/or capitals cities, they have grown demographically, taking possession of themselves as cities with commercial, political, administrative and service functions for a transnational region. In this paper we focus on two large urban border communities, on the one hand, the cities of Encarnación, (Paraguay) and Posadas, (Argentina) and, on the other, the triple border region: the cities of Foz do Iguaçu (Brazil), Puerto Iguazú, (Argentina), and Ciudad del Este (Paraguay). Although located at about 300 km from distance, both conurbations are conditioning the urban dynamics of a network of cities of a smaller scale. The set of these cases presented here can be analyzed under the notion of “twin cities”, where despite not having a common government, economic, cultural, proximity and complementary relations produce impacts reciprocally between the cities, contributing to a specific form transformation of urban space as a whole. For this, it is important to have urban and regional planning and more specific public policies for the urban population in the context of the international border. The available data from the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INDEC), the General Directorate of Statistics, Surveys and Censuses (DGEEC) and the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), respectively from Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, provided information quantitatively relevant, to the analysis proposed here. The relevance of these studies demonstrates the need for a territorial policy of cross-border cooperation between the cities of the triple border, with territorial cohesion that implies economic and social aspects.
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