This chapter highlights the context of the neighbourhoods issue. This is an uneasy one, because globalisation has become a dominant paradigm. What need would then scientists and decision-makers have to pay attention to neighbours, when the global world is at stake and within reach? Yet, we give the factors that explain the rise of the regionalisation –i.e. the neighbourhoods– issue, as a complementary pattern, along with the “globalisation” pattern, of the internationalisation of human activities in the last four decades. We also explain why this issue is poorly addressed in scientific literature in particular in Europe. Indeed, the EU is the most advanced experience of regional integration worldwide. But for many reasons, it overlooks relationships with its developing neighbour countries. We assume here that Europe and its neighbours constitute one major region. Despite unrest and wars in these neighbourhoods, we assume that they offer more opportunities than threats. We provide a territorial analysis of these, showing the tough methodological challenges we had to overcome when it comes to access to reliable data and geometries delineation, which are indispensable if one wants to draw an overall vision of this region.