Life on the Border / Seminar
Life on the Border: History, Theory and Praxis is a seminar that investigates the hybridity of the borderlands environments as natural and constructed – as cultural, political, and physical constructs that are in constant change. It recognizes that borders have historically been designed and built as fixed entities – where colonialist operative forces of alienation, segregation, division, violence, and surveillance act on the natural and cultural landscapes that they operate on, compromising their systemic ecologies.
This seminar is concerned with the historical, theoretical, and practical aspects of the spatial complexities of borders, using as a main case study the México/US borderlands. It is interested in providing a global perspective to the local conflicts and conditions of these liminal spaces. The discussions spoke to other contemporary and historically contested places.
The seminar explored how the built environment and its projective tools like maps, plans, signage, and patterns of use, have been used for the control of state and institutional space. By acknowledging the discordant nature of borders and the landscapes they occupy, this course explored the potential in bordered environments and environments as sites for discourse around politics, immigration, human rights, and economic equity; as places of political contestation where design policies have radically altered the natural, cultural, and technological landscapes.
The students selected one of three typologies (Cultural, Commercial, or Infrastructure) to develop a research project. Each typology was used to center a cartographic/diagram/mapping study that analyzed the layered environmental, geographical, political, social, economic, gender and racial, and cultural complexities present in its built environment. Understanding the political implications of producing radical decolonizing cartographies, diagrams, and maps, the students redrew a specific site of the Cd. Juárez/El Paso borderlands.
The Post-Borderzone / Studio
The American wall at the México/US Borderlands is a settler colonial infrastructure that is the result of a “historical and ongoing systemic dispossession and genocide of Indigenous nations.”1During the last years, it has gone through several waves of political and media attention. Portrayed generally as a segregation and division mechanism the architectural discipline has narrowly continued to view the México/United States border as only a fortification problem to solve. This frames the border as a static architectural object and entirely overlooks the border’s quality as a filtering mechanism.
By defining the border as a boundary or wall, we limit the types of geographies, typologies, spatial qualities, and citizenships it can generate. The border, when viewed as a filtering mechanism, expands its affected geography and brings attention to other social, political and economic activities. The full extent and reach of the border can also be traced not only through the built environment but also through the human and non-human subjects that are shaped by it.
The Post-Borderzone understands the México/United States borderlands as a series of territories where residents often interchange places, and have daily access to cultural, social, and commercial activities across political divides. The studio is interested in questioning concepts like hybridization and how it can illuminate architecture’s understanding of a border culture. It will see border cities as alternative and experimental spaces that, while resisting the assimilation of the prevailing raging capitalism and colonialism, allows a multiplicity of fronterizo voices. It explores the potential of architecture to resist and contain natural and political borders in the post-global warming/pandemic landscape. In this workshop, students will present proposals where commercial, cultural, and infrastructure spaces act as places of hybridization, resistance, or reconstruction of human relations between Mexico and the United States on the border. By challenging the political infrastructure(s) deployed at the borderlands to “secure” them, the group will challenge the settler colonial state apparatus.
The Project
Using the research documentation generated in the fall seminar course, The Post-Borderzone, will begin its dismantling and reconstruction project at the level of three spatial typologies – commercial, cultural, and infrastructure – that will offer spaces that will question the relations between México and the United States. The objective for these projects is to promote the emergence of a new type of citizenship that abolishes political divisions, promotes demilitarization, indigenous autonomy, inclusive community making, and acknowledges the primacy of nature (mother earth). By acknowledging the border as a filtering system we will propose spatial interventions that will generate emancipatory, abolitionist, anti-imperialistic, and decolonial future worlds at the México/US Borderlands. A “world where many worlds fit.”
In general, a filter is a subjective device, where passage is dictated by need or desire. The border as a filter, constructs a subjective experience for those seeking to cross or circumvent.. Through design research processes, and utilizing the concept of the border as a filtering mechanism we will understand how the border can produce spaces for hybridization, resistance or reconstruction. Hybridization of cultures, typologies, and programs. Resistance to capitalism, colonialism, and oppression. And in that way offer possibilities for reconstruction, where recycling, reutilization, and reenvisioning of spaces, relationships, and power dynamics offer alternative futures for the borderlands.In creating alternative ways of designing and addressing the built environment of the borders, we would provide perspective on the significance of political conversations about migration/immigration, community making, urban equity, environmental responsibility, resistance, and the abolition of imperial borders.
