The relationship between architecture and border studies is, rightly, at the forefront of many architectural scholars' minds, and has seen the inception of other publications, most notably Angeliki Sioli, Nishat Awan and Kristopher Palagi’s edited collection Architecture of Resistance: Negotiating Borders through Spatial Practices (KU Leuven, forthcoming) and a special issue of Architecture and Culture, ‘Border Fictions’ edited by Mohamad Hafeda and Samuel Vardy (again forthcoming). We started putting together this issue of field on borders, ‘Across Borders: Questions, Practices and Performances’, the first full collection on architecture and borders to be published, number by defining what we specifically meant by the notion of border. The conventional meaning, as the delineation of territory, has shaped our individual lives: the three of us have moved across borders, territories, communities and languages several times; we have crisscrossed our identities from the colonised Global South, the so called commonwealth colonised antipodes, the settler colonial North America, the (post)communist East of Europe. We have experienced bBorders, as Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr tell us, are not as neutral separation lines: but thethey creatione ofa distinction between centre and periphery, normal and exceptional, belonging and not belonging. Borders enact biopolitics, demarcating (and othering) not only identity but creating zones of exception, a jurisdictions in which bodies (racialised, gendered) can be disciplined and made to conform and cohere. We realised, as we continued our attempt tos of definedefining borders, that any understanding of the bordersthey are is always entangled with other political concepts. The border is the logical consequence of the notion of the utopia that underlies the nation state. An ideal place can only be created if it is set against the other, or its dystopia; the creation of, if there are boundaries, physical or artificial, which make sure that the conditions for the ideal (and the non) place are maintained. Borders, are at once whether material and metaphorical, ; are always at once utopian, colonial, patriarchal, capitalist and hegemonic,
Hernán et al. (Thu,) studied this question.