Urban Borders

La planificación territorial en Colombia ha sido predominantemente urbano-centrista, dejando relegadas las áreas suburbanas y rurales. En forma no planificada, la huella urbana se sigue expandiendo sin control, imponiendo patrones urbanos en áreas rurales, afectando ecosistemas, productividad rural y tejido social. Este artículo resume una investigación financiada por la Universidad de Nariño (Colombia), en el contexto de los centros poblados corregimentales de Cabrera, San Fernando y La Laguna en el municipio de Pasto. Se estudia el fenómeno de rururbanización, el cual integra elementos urbanos y rurales. Se propone un Nodo de Desarrollo Rururbano como alternativa para mejorar la calidad de vida de sus habitantes originarios, la productividad rural y la soberanía alimentaria. La investigación analiza la ocupación del territorio y propone criterios para la sostenibilidad de la ruralidad. El estudio busca contribuir a la planificación rururbana en Pasto y definir características claves de este nodo de desarrollo. Palabras clave: comunidades rurales, habitante ruralano, nodo de desarrollo, rururbanización. Bloque temático: análisis y proyecto territorial.

Mobilities are shaped by social inequalities and spatial unevenness as demonstrated in a range of existing studies across disciplines. These inequalities are manifest at different scales, from the very local spaces of everyday life to global spaces of accelerated mobilities. Mobile spaces, however distant, are connected through common everyday practices and the sociocultural contexts in which they are produced. In this paper, we argue that researching these interconnectivities and commonalities requires a particular methodological approach that accounts for the situatedness of experience. Our focus is on the ways in which inequalities according to gender and generation are generated through urban designed spaces. We suggest that drawing in to a shared material and 'border' object, the urban bench, provides a point of reflection on these distant yet parallel expressions of mobile inequality.

Communal cemeteries of Istanbul were located outside the city’s borders in each historical period from Antiquity to the Byzantine and Ottoman times. In the 5th century, with the advent of the Theodosian walls, the burial topography shifted towards outside these walls, while the former burial grounds in the city’s former Constantinian walls remained untouched. In Ottoman period, the land outside the Theodosian walls was established as the city’s legitimate burial place and continues its function to this day. This peripheral condition stands out as one of the greatest continuities in the city’s history. This thesis will study the extramural burial topography to investigate the reciprocal relation between the cemeteries and urban development. A close reading reveals that beyond marking the city’s physical borders, cemeteries define the ‘perceived’ borders of the city. The prominent cases of Mokius cemetery in the Byzantine period and the burial site of Eyüp in the Ottoman period exemplify this observation. By discussing the influence of the sacred sites, society’s changing attitudes towards death, social stratification, and the social phenomenon of desire for visibility on cemeteries’ development, how the marginal condition of cemeteries was formed in close connection to the city’s social constructions will be elucidated regarding the continuities and transformations between the Byzantine and Ottoman periods.

Two recent books on Northeast India-Jungle Passports by Malini Sur, and Ceasefire City by Dolly Kikon and Duncan McDuie-Ra, engage with the intersections of frontier dynamics and everyday life in the region. Sur, who conducted ethnographic fieldwork at the Northeast India-Bangladesh frontiers, examines how the border shapes mobility, identity and citizenship of borderland communities. Kikon and McDuie-Ra on the other hand, carried out urban ethnographic research in Dimpaur, the largest tribal city in Northeast India, and joins the discourse on frontier urbanism through an analysis of everyday spaces and stories in the city. While both books seek to expand the understanding of frontiers and borders using different approaches, there are several interesting thematic overlaps in their observations and analysis, that will be discussed in this review essay. Frontiers are zones of transition within which borders emerge or intersect and border dynamics play out, and where the distinctions between communities and spaces often become blurry, since these are the spaces where one set of social, political and economic geography fade into another (Korf & Raeymaekers, 2013). Such fluid sociospatialities in frontiers are usually separated by the drawing of political borders to secure the state territory. However, the notions of borders and frontiers are not limited to the margins of the state; they proliferate and become manifest across different contexts and multiple scales (Rumford, 2006; Leaf, 2016). Through reflecting on the two books, this review essay stresses the value of studying borders and frontiers at multiple scales. It also suggests that the lens of urban geopolitics can be effectively used for such multi-scalar conceptualization. Northeast India, which is connected by the narrow Siliguri corridor to the rest of the country, is a frontier region that has long grappled with border-making and re

Over the last three decades of the 20th century, Greece was transformed from an emigration into an immigration countryand, more recently, into a country combining emigration and immigration. Initially, immigration from the ‘Balkans’ wasat the heart of the country’s migration debates. However, since the early 2000s, migration inflows have been highlydifferentiated, and the numbers have increased for both Asian and African migrants. During the era of austerity,Bangladeshis have followed diverse employment pathways and spatial trajectories. Their so-called ‘constellations of(im)mobility’ cover an array of socio-spatial mobility patterns, ranging from being entrapped in precarious jobs to gainingaccess to/ striving towards more prestigious occupational positions (self-employed occupations). Drawing on recent empirical research, this paper seeks to explore the multidimensional precarity of Bangladeshi migrants living in Greek urban and rural areas. Given the dynamic interplay between mac...

This contribution focuses on the urban environment of Berlin and the role of walking as a generator of cosmopolitan citizenship that builds on migrant agency as a prime contribution to city-making. It explores the re-shaping of Berlin in the course of the “refugee crisis” and the resulting engagement by displaced persons and urban practitioners to foster interaction between a wide array of participants, independent of their citizenship status. By building on Thomas Nail’s kino-political approach to migration, which identifies in the migrant’s pedetic force a prime source of agency, three urban projects involving the act of walking are analyzed. While these initiatives vary in terms of project articulation, they all use the urban fabric of Berlin as a key terrain for discussion and critique. The walking conversations become an expression of exercising cultural citizenship, whereby the right of membership exists prior to the allocation of official statuses. This seemingly mundane expe...

Over the last three decades of the 20th century, Greece was transformed from an emigration into an immigration countryand, more recently, into a country combining emigration and immigration. Initially, immigration from the ‘Balkans’ wasat the heart of the country’s migration debates. However, since the early 2000s, migration inflows have been highlydifferentiated, and the numbers have increased for both Asian and African migrants. During the era of austerity,Bangladeshis have followed diverse employment pathways and spatial trajectories. Their so-called ‘constellations of(im)mobility’ cover an array of socio-spatial mobility patterns, ranging from being entrapped in precarious jobs to gainingaccess to/ striving towards more prestigious occupational positions (self-employed occupations). Drawing on recent empirical research, this paper seeks to explore the multidimensional precarity of Bangladeshi migrants living in Greek urban and rural areas. Given the dynamic interplay between mac...

This contribution focuses on the urban environment of Berlin and the role of walking tours for generating a cosmopolitan citizenship that builds on migrant agency as a prime contribution to city-making. It explores the re-shaping of Berlin in the course of the so-called “refugee crisis” and the resulting engagement by asylum seekers, refugees and urban practitioners, amongst others, to foster interaction between a wide array of participants, independent of their citizenship status. By building on Thomas Nail’s kino-political approach to migration, which identifies in the migrant’s pedetic force a prime source of agency, three urban projects involving the act of walking are analyzed. While these initiatives vary in terms of project articulation, they all use the urban fabric and public spaces of Berlin as a key terrain for discussion and critique. The walking conversations also become an expression of exercising cultural citizenship, whereby the right of membership exists prior to the allocation of official statuses. The seemingly mundane experience of walking in the city plays a relevant role in reinstating the defining feature of the migrant as that of movement, in contrast with the constraints of camp life that asylum seekers experience. The three cases illustrate how the successive instances of leaving the camp, exploring Berlin’s spaces and taking the lead in narrating the city contribute to the reinforcement of a cosmopolitan perspective.

Most attention in Berlin goes out either to its history of division between East and West Berlin, or to its diverse, exiting and ´hip´ centre, where ´everything is possible´. Berlins is often presented as ‘the capital of freedom’, a representation wherein the supposed freedom of today – ‘in all areas and at all levels’ – is opposed to the city’s divided past. When looking closer however, various bordering and ordering dynamics are present on the stage of urban space Berlin. These borders are not as physically present as the past Berlin Wall, but rather they are interwoven into different levels of life in the city, affecting mostly those people that have been living there the longest and those that do not possess much money or the ‘right’ citizenship. Given their invisible nature, it is not only challenging to put a finger on these present b/ordering dynamics and to show their hierarchical, categorical and excluding consequences. Also identifying the various working mechanisms that create, facilitate, sustain or even exacerbate them, asks for a look behind Berlin’s stage into particular policy instruments and strategies, regulations and rhetoric.
This research deals with the multiple present b/ordering dynamics and their working mechanisms in Berlin. Furthermore, it explores creative forms of border deconstruction that can contribute to ´put a finger´ and deal with these complex interwoven dynamics and mechanisms in yet another manner. It does not seek to find precise numbers, but rather it presents stories, opinions and experiences deriving from various places of the city. Used for this aim is a mix of qualitative research methods: ethnographic flâneries, interviews with City Locality Coordinators and various creatives, participations in creative projects, analysations of official Berlin documents and the city website, observations and photography.
The idea is adopted that one should no longer understand the border as a static clear-cut line, but rather as a dynamic process and as a verb; bordering. A process that needs certain symbolisations and imaginations in order to function and have a meaning. By looking at the city as a whole through a border lens, this research provides a unique insight into how developments taking place in different parts of urban space Berlin relate to each other and how various phenomena that are generally studied apart interact, collide and cohere. Rather than zooming into one specific place of phenomenon, it thus offers a look on ´the bigger picture´. Thereby, it sheds light on those developments and dynamics that should gain more attention, because they rather invisibly border and order the various areas and actors on the stage of urban space Berlin today.

This paper ethnographically explores the border-crossing experience of sub-Saharan African migrants in Athens. The everyday social visibility and spatial mobility of migrants in the city is viewed through a critical phenomenological perspective centering on irregularity and border-crossing as a lived experience which, in times of financial crisis, is shared by other vulnerable urban dwellers beyond the migrant/non-migrant dichotomy. The salience of such practices for current discourses and policies concerning migration, urban public space, citizenship and identity in a series of socio-political scales is explored. As migrants' im/mobility and in/visibility intersect with emerging, crisis-induced patterns of social in/ equality in Greece, they become strategic actors who construct new understandings of self and other, indicate emergent political and social configurations, and daily reassert their 'right to the city' in the 'city of Others'.

Tension and conflict between political-spatial units in different local, regional, national, and global aspects have been a part of the human beings history on this planet. The nation-state countries as the most basic political units of sovereignty and authority in the territorial space, which is under their own control, have experienced relations based on tension and conflict with their neighbors due to their quest for national survival and expansion of their sphere of and to achieve national interests. In many cases, governments, because of their perspectives toward geographical and geopolitical factors and values both within and outside their territory, have hold inharmonious views with neighbors or regional and global powers and in such a case tension and conflict occurs. Considering the importance of factors causing tension and conflict in countries relations, different and various perspectives from different scholars and experts from various disciplines such as geography, political science, sociology, management, international relations, geopolitics as well as different schools of thought in this area have been presented. The research hypothesis is that most of the theories presented by professionals and scholars relating to the sources of tension and conflict between countries have uni-factor or multifactor essence and none of them have succeeded in providing a comprehensive theoretical model. Accordingly, this paper by using descriptive-analytic approaches and using library resources attempts to assess and evaluate theories related to the origins of conflict and tension between countries and by the means of criticism and analysis of theories provides a new theory in the field of factors causing conflict in countries relations.

Keywords: Tension, Conflict, Geopolitics, International Relations, Nation-State.