Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman | Architecture Pioneering Consultants | Simple Architecture | Hannah Arendt | ABCD Collaborative | Insitu Project | Vide Terra | Sadar + Vuga | MASS Design Group
Last year was the deadliest year on record for migrants according to the International Organization for Migration. People risk their lives daily to cross a line drawn on a map.
The border is best understood, Harsha Walia argues in this issue’s keynote, ‘as an elastic regime that multiplies and thickens across space and time’. It operates at multiple scales; the 40‑year‑old Schengen Agreement defines certain European citizens as ‘desirables’ and the rest of the world as ‘undesirables’ , while regions such as Kurdistan straddle multiple internationally recognised borders. Reporting from Bersive camp, Ylenia Gostoli finds Yazidi communities are caught between hostile nations and their homelands, between permanence and impermanence.
At the national level, disputed borders pose material challenges for a hospital located between Somalia and Ethiopia and conflict frustrates conservation efforts at the tripoint of Rwanda, the DRC and Uganda. Waves of migration, such as those seen from Myanmar into Thailand, require new infrastructures in hosting nations, as Pirasri Povatong writes from Mae Sot.
Within cities, partitioning also results in irreversible transformation. Checkpoint Charlie, the notorious Cold War crossing on Friedrichstraße in Berlin, has left deep scars in its surroundings. In Ahmedabad, local authorities are razing the homes of lower castes and religious minorities to reconfigure neighbourhoods along exclusionary lines.
While architectures of control rely on distinct, insular subjects that can be managed, Christina Varvia closes the issue by reminding us that: ‘Our bodies do not have any borders. Our presence is planetary.’
1525: Borders
cover (above)The border between Mexico and the US stretches over 3,000km, around a third of which is defined by a wall, like this section between Sonora and Arizona. While US borders are hardening in the rhetoric of president Donald Trump, on the ground, a door can sometimes be left ajar. Credit: Daniel Ochoa de Olza / Panos Pictures
folio (lead image) Woven Chronicle by Reena Saini Kallat, here in its 2015 iteration, maps migrant routes in strands that simultaneously symbolise transmission and conjure spools of barbed wire, unravelling across the planet
keynote
The multiplying border
Harsha Walia
building
Community stations by Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman in San Diego, US, and Tijuana, Mexico
Michael Snyder
building
District hospital by Architectural Pioneering Consultants in Burtinle, Somalia
Peter Muiruri
building
Hway Ka Loke School by Simple Architecture in Mae Sot, Thailand
Pirasri Povatong
reputations
Hannah Arendt
Jan-Werner Müller
building
Community centre and housing prototypes by Insitu Project, ABCD Collaborative and Vide Terra in Bersive and Chamishku camps, Iraq
Ylenia Gostoli
outrage
Bulldozer urbanism in India
Nitin Bathla
revisit
Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, Germany
Sophie Lovell
building
Railway station and underpass by Sadar + Vuga in Nova Gorica, Slovenia
Tomà Berlanda
building
Wildlife conservation campus by MASS Design Group in Kinigi, Rwanda
Aimable Twahirwa
essay
Bodies without borders
Christina Varvia
book review
Schengen from below
Owen Hatherley
film review
Doorway to Europe
Abiba Coulibaly
exhibition review
Baltic borderlands
Martynas Germanavičius
