This doctoral thesis examines the militarization of the Southern border of Hungary as a process of spatial formation, expanding the debate on borders from the political to the architectural arena. Combining spatial theory with empirical research on the case study, the thesis rethinks the border as a complex spatial system, with an agency of its own. From this perspective, it contests the enforcement of spatial boundaries from the above and related ideas of fixity. It brings attention to the agency of space in the advancement of a material becoming; the role of migration in the redefinition of meanings and functions of space; and the action of technologies in the strategic manipulation of measures and scales. While conceptualizing the border as a space in formation, this thesis builds a diagrammatic method of study and moves the research in an onto-epistemological direction. With the aim of fostering a change in those structures that control the partition and governance of space, this doctoral study calls the discipline of architecture to review its questions, methods, and practices. It invites to use architectural knowledge to engage with borders’ complexity and challenge their established meanings and makings.@en

On June 15, 2015, the Hungarian government ordered the construction of a temporary border lock of approximately 175 km along its Southern frontier. The intervention was aimed at stopping the growing influx of migrants moving northward along the Balkan Route. The Hungarian strategy, although very controversial, is not an isolated case. Since 2015, more or less temporary barriers have proliferated across the Balkans and Central-Eastern Europe exposing a wide area, where the so-called external EU border becomes ambiguous. There, the lines to dissolve and those to ‘protect’ intertwine and overlap, while tensions and violence increase. By examining in detail the Hungarian case, the poster observes the fortification of the border as a process of space formation. It questions how a new spatial form comes to be in the modulation of forces of control and migration, while interacting with existing social and natural environments. The site survey conducted along selected sections of the Hungarian Southern border serves as a basis for analyzing spatial and material traces. Objects and spatial elements are proposed as testimonies of the entanglement of past traumas of separation and current struggles of unequal mobility. The analysis takes distance from the reduction of the fence to mere closure functions and ideas of fixity. Rather, it shifts from the scale of objects to that of territories and invites to search for relationships of material and geographic nature that underline different modes of moving. The poster introduces the concept of plasticity as a both discursive and material feature. While unfolding a concrete characteristic of border space, plasticity also expresses a political potential, including both human and non-human agencies in the process of space formation. @en

After 9/11, the regulation of global mobility witnessed substantial changes. Suspicion of movement intensified and the need to detect, classify, and eventually stop any threat from outside became the priority of state authorities. As a consequence, national and international airports progressively assumed the role of biopolitical infrastructures. In the restless search for the "anomalous" and "irregular", not only luggage and possessions are subject to intense scrutiny; identities, histories, and finances are also inspected. By implementing sophisticated surveillance technologies, the airports reproduce several homeland security strategies, such as the control of cross-border movements and migration management. From this perspective, airport surveillance practices, as border structures, dynamically redefine and construct the relation between bodies in motion and material boundaries.@en