The latest instalment of our series of AR Reading Lists: seven carefully chosen pieces from our archive, free for registered users
Lines are drawn to make sense of things. Boundaries articulating here from there, inside from outside, each delineation also defines belonging and exclusion – pointed and particular and cut through with cruelty, the boundary line decides who has been lucky and who has been left in the cold.
This week’s reading list looks at borders, boundary zones, outer limits and spaces between. Whether the border is built up in a wall or dwells in the deadly ambiguity of the unmarked ocean; whether a thin line cut between nations or the thick, imprecise belt of the city’s suburbs, these boundaries are critical sites of spatial politics, in which the harshest inequalities are made visible.
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Pushing boundaries: a moveable border, Francesca Hughes, AR October 2020
‘In an imminent future where wars are fought over water (and not oil), geography will again become paramount in the articulation of borders as the watershed (more than the river) will be the border that counts’
The Globalising Wall: globalisation, conflict and division, Danae Stratou and Yanis Varoufakis, AR June 2018
‘The more globalisation was meant to give reasons for dismantling the dividing lines, the less powerful the forces working to dismantle them were proving’
Outrage: Zones charting unhappy political realities should not be turned into tasteless tourist spectacles, Oliver Wainwright, AR February 2018
‘In contrast to the ghoulish propaganda peddled by the US military, which revels in seeing no end in sight to the state of permanent warfare, the impression given in the North was of the real tragedy of a divided nation.’
Lives laid along the line: the lived realities of the borderlands, Maria McLintock, AR June 2019
‘Relationships, and places within and along these borderlands, exist only in relation to one another. This wound is a geographical scar that is also a frontier; it is a necessary border that puts “them” and “us” in different countries’
White flight, red lining, block busting and panic peddling, Nory Miller, AR October 1977
‘What is common speculation is that absentee landlords hire teenagers to set the fires to get the last scrap out of their properties’ insurance. On the other hand, taking a perfectly stable neighbourhood, turning it from white middle class to black middle class and then letting it disintegrate was even more profitable’
Tour de banlieue: the grands ensembles of Paris’s periphery, Manon Mollard, AR May 2019
‘Stark divides between centre and periphery, inside and outside, belonging and exclusion, are in the genes of the French capital and its outer rings’
Liquid violence: investigations of boundaries at sea by Forensic Oceanography, Lorenzo Pezzani, AR April 2019
‘Overlaps, conflicts of delimitation, and differing interpretations are not a malfunction but rather a structural characteristic of the maritime borders that have allowed states to simultaneously extend their sovereign privileges through forms of mobile government and elude the responsibilities that come with it’
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