The book you hold in your hands did not try to describe what borders are. As discussed in the introduction, our focus from the beginning was on the ways we can resist borders through spatial practices. We approached borders firstly from their political and social perspective—and the types of spatial relations they produced—and only then, if necessary, from their physical dimensionality. For us this is an epistemic position that emerged from our own interest in the topic but also from the personal involvement of many of this book’s contributors with the borders they describe. The majority of scholars in this book have lived the borders they study. They have experienced them at an intimate scale and they have felt their impact in their everyday lives, even before acquiring the skills to study them. For many, this engagement with borders is both situated and personal. We believe that such an approach, when it manages to overcome biases and political propagandas, can create new ways to negotiate borders: as places of meaningful adjacencies, where fruitful osmosis can over-turn their dividing role. […]

On March 1, 2020, Greece closed its borders, denying refugees the right to seek political asylum, a reaction to Turkey’s decision to strategically refuse its role as gatekeeper to the European Union. A few weeks later, Italy, France, Belgium, and Spain closed their borders as the global COVID-19 pandemic spread. China had already closed its borders a few weeks earlier and other countries quickly followed suit. As planes were grounded, the stark reality of immobility was revealed to a global class accustomed to frictionless travel across the planet. On a more intimate scale, innumerable citizens, from New Zealand to Brazil, were confined to their homes, with some needing an official permit to simply go out for a walk or to buy food. Invisible boundaries proliferated in public space with the call to maintain a 1.5 meter distance between people to guard against the spread of the respiratory virus. As nationwide lockdowns became the norm, they revealed discrepancies between white-collar workers able to carry on working and earning from the comfort of their homes and frontline workers and laborers who were required to be present physically in their places of work. Such untenable aspects of lockdowns were perhaps more apparent in the global South, where most people rely on daily wages, as well as in those countries that chose to implement restrictions in specific neighborhoods and regions, producing internal divisions that rein-forced labor, class, and wealth disparities. [...]

Seeking out affect in the exceptional zone of the refugee camp, this chapter follows a method of “documented witnessing” of undocumented migration. Written by two academic scholars who share a belonging to feminist post-humanist thought and a Muslim upbringing, we turn our attention to the everyday violence of the border regime in the hope of developing an architectural research methodology for working with precarious lives. A question that animates this chapter is what kinds of violence can/should we bear testimony to through our role as architects in relation to the spatial violence endured in refugee camps and in the circulatory movements of the undocumented? We address this question through a feminist lineage approaching witnessing as an embodied spatial practice. Emphasising the centrality of the body alongside an investment in the way emotions circulate across difference produces what we term “affective witnessing”. Through discussing an architectural design studio, we explore how we might register our affective witnessing basing it in a politics of belonging as distinct from the approach of humanitarian NGOs whose professionalised practice of witnessing is often a strategic exercise designed to produce evidence within institutional or legal contexts.

Through discussing the persistent present of displacement the essay argues that a politics of time is being mobilised as a biopolitical means of control in migrant lives. This can be seen in the circularity of displacement, deportation and return, where waiting and disorientation become forms of control. The discussion emerges from field research and interviews I carried out in the villages of north Punjab, Pakistan, where many people are caught in this chronopolitics of migration. The migrant experience of borders is read alongside a critical interrogation of the computational technologies deployed in border management, including EuroDAC and iMap. They produce a form of imperial temporality for which the horizon acts as a constitutive trope of progress, while simultaneously producing a sense of a horizonless world through the networked logic and ubiquity of datafication. I end with a discussion of how it may be possible to find other orientations within these normative spatiotemporalities of a bordered world.

This “Border Topologies” themed section draws a series of texts that explore what design and artistic research could contribute to an understanding of border conditions in a context of rising inequalities, conflict, and climate change. The common aim of the articles is to interrogate contemporary borders through the practices that produce them by focusing on how the border appears and reappears at different scales, in unexpected places and configurations. In doing so, some of the articles collected here insist on a planetary scale that questions the geopolitical as an organizing construct.