It All Starts With a Wall: To (Re)permeate the Border

Abstract

The researched thematic concerns the phenomenon of cross-border smuggling at the mountainous desert region of Balochistan situated in Pakistan. Balochistan is the most precarious province of the country, bordering both with Iran - at the West - and Afghanistan - on the North. The region has been the homeland of the Balochi people, whose territory has once been divided by the Iran-Pakistan frontier. Balochs have been engaged in cross-border smuggling for years, as a result of the province’s economic negligence, lack of developed job market and investments, as well as an effect of massive resource extraction, led by the Pakistani state and China that pursues their New Silk Road. Despite being an extremely dangerous activity, smuggling has become one of few ways to survive in the economic misery of this desertic land and effectively, has created the region’s standalone economy. The Balochs smuggle oil and diesel food, building materials, drugs, and people mainly using their tuned blue pick-ups. However, the most characteristic commodity smuggled in Balochistan that maintains a core of the local economy is oil and diesel.

The research positions itself in a multi-disciplinary scope, deriving not only from spatial domains such as architecture or urbanism but also, even more importantly, from various social sciences such as ethnography, sociology, anthropology, and politics. Hence, the used sources comprise trans-disciplinary works, often operating on the edge of the above disciplines as well as include diverse media types such as books, official reports, online articles, Instagram posts, or YouTube videos.

The crucial part of the research constituted analyzing the physical aspects of the existing Iran-Pakistan border. Having traced the course of the border on satellite images, several places where the border fortifications are disrupted were observed. Most of these disruptions were naturally created by the periodic penetrating the border fortifications. Eventually, the collection of the areas around the border gaps has become a starting set of sites for the design concept. Basing on the locations around the gaps in the border fortifications, the concept envisions model spatial premises, that would enable smugglers to maintain their occupation and reside in their independent cross-border settlements built along the riverbeds. Adapting to the changing perimeter of the periodic river, the design maintains constant self-transformation. Most importantly, however, the complex, labyrinthic structure of these premises, thanks to its quality of obscurity and confusion, is expected to help smugglers avoiding law enforcement forces pursuits, that currently deter them from trading. The project, therefore, spatializes the condition of the ‘hide and seek’ game that is being repeatedly played out by smugglers from both sides of the border and law enforcement forces. The design takes advantage of a great variety of resources available locally - such as mining minerals, bamboo, or clay, mixed with reused left-overs of smuggled commodities such as car particles, solar panels, or oil barrels. Eventually, to accommodate the spatial strategy to the site-specific conditions, the grasshopper script generating instances of labyrinths adapted to the specific gap indicated in the course of the border was created.