The architecture of borders: infrastructures, relations, and everyday practices
Leads: Deljana Iossifova and Debapriya Chakrabarti
This thematic call seeks to reposition architecture as a critical site in the making and unmaking of borders. Drawing attention to the spatialised mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, it challenges the discipline to account for the fine-grained, often invisible ways in which borders are produced and sustained across multiple and nested scales. It also foregrounds architecture’s potential to disrupt and reimagine bordering practices, contributing to broader debates on spatial justice, planetary urbanisation, and the politics of difference.
Borders are spatially and temporally produced through architecture, infrastructure, and everyday life. From fortified boundaries and biometric surveillance systems to informal barriers and symbolic divisions within cities, architecture plays a central role in shaping how borders are enacted, experienced, and contested. Critically, these bordering processes are not confined to the edges of nation-states but proliferate across urban territories, informal settlements, and infrastructures of sanitation, mobility, and care.
We call for contributions that foreground the relational and processual nature of borders, examining how borders are continuously made and remade through the socio-material infrastructures that shape everyday (urban) life, and how architectural practices participate in or resist these logics. The aim is to move beyond securitised or state-centric accounts of border architecture and to interrogate bordering as a dispersed, multiscalar, and contested condition.
How do borders operate within cities, manifesting as differentiated access to infrastructure, housing, and services? How are architectures of division internalised in the urban fabric, and how do they produce exclusions along lines of class, caste, gender, race, citizenship, and species? How do architectural interventions contribute to the reconfiguration of bordering practices, whether through solidarity infrastructures, spaces of cohabitation, or territorial resistance?
Call for Papers: We invite scholarship that critically interrogates bordering as an architectural and infrastructural process. Submissions may explore empirical cases, conceptual frameworks, or methodological interventions that reframe architecture’s role in the spatialisation of inclusion and exclusion. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
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Architectures and infrastructures of state control, including fortified borders, checkpoints, surveillance systems, and detention architectures.
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Bordering within cities: infrastructural divisions, infrastructural borders, uneven service provision, and spatial segregation.
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Informal and everyday architectures of migration, settlement, and cohabitation in borderland, peri-urban, or fragmented urban contexts.
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Transcalar bordering practices: from urban peripheries to regional corridors and planetary logistics.
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Architectures of solidarity and resistance: cross-border networks, activist infrastructures, and spaces of encounter.
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The legal, economic, and algorithmic governance of mobility and access, and their spatial ramifications.
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Architectural engagements with ‘slow violence’ and ecological bordering, including environmental displacement and territorial degradation.
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Methodological approaches to studying borders through architectural ethnography, material semiotics, or relational infrastructure theory.