Borderline City

Even before the spread of COVID 19 across the globe during the crisis of 2020, cities and regions acted as venues and drivers for a dualistic development dynamic by both creating and dissolving borders. The results obtained from various university seminars and a European summer school form the basis for a crisis manuscript, while serving to review the planning and design activities in different European cities and regions. For the first time ever, a network of students from the urban planning and design departments at 19 European universities have defined common requirements for crisis-resistant and people-friendly urban planning in Europe: On the one hand, crisis-related experiences act as catalysts for fundamental social, economic, and ecological changes, and, on the other hand, they accelerate changes that are already underway with regard to urban development policies. The crisis and border situations explored in this joint investigation extend beyond the mere operating principles of European cities and regions. In fact, as an endurance test and didactic example, they provide a guide for crisis-proof urban renewal in Europe. They lead the way in building a bridge between the European architecture and planning disciplines to create vibrant border landscapes. Bereits vor der weltweiten Ausbreitung des Covid-19-Virus im Krisenjahr 2020 waren Städte und Regionen Austragungsorte und Treiber einer dualistischen Entwicklungsdynamik von Entgrenzung und Abgrenzung. Ergebnisse aus der Hochschullehre und einer europäischen Sommerschule eröffnen ein Palimpsest der Krisen und eine Überprüfung europäischer Planung und Gestaltung von Städten und Regionen. Erstmals erarbeitete ein Netzwerk aus Studierenden von 19 europäischen Universitäten im Bereich Planung und Stadtgestaltung eine Formulierung gemeinsamer Anforderungen für eine krisensichere und menschengerechte Stadtentwicklung in Europa: Einerseits sind Krisenerfahrungen Impulsgeber für grundlegende Veränderungen in Gesellschaft, Wirtschaft und Ökologie, andererseits wirken sie als Beschleuniger bereits vorhandener Veränderungen in der Stadtentwicklungspolitik. Die gemeinsam hinterfragten Krisen- und Grenzsituationen zeigen nicht nur die Funktionsweisen europäischer Städte und Regionen auf. Vielmehr vermitteln sie als Belastungs- und Lehrproben einen Leitfaden für einen krisenfesten Stadtumbau in Europa. Wegweisend entwickeln sie einen europäischen Brückenschlag der Architektur- und Planungsdisziplin zur Gestaltung lebendiger Grenzlandschaften.

From Matamoros to Tijuana, Mexican border cities have long evoked for their neighbors to the north images of cheap tourist playgrounds and, more recently, industrial satellites of American industry. These sensationalized and simplified perceptions fail to convey the complexity and diversity of urban form and function—and of cultural personality—that characterize these places. The Mexican Border Cities draws on extensive field research to examine eighteen settlements along the 2,000-mile border, ranging from towns of less than 10,000 people to dynamic metropolises of nearly a million. The authors chronicle the cities' growth and compare their urban structure, analyzing them in terms of tourist districts, commercial landscapes, residential areas, and industrial and transportation quarters. Arreola and Curtis contend that, despite their proximity to the United States, the border cities are fundamentally Mexican places, as distinguished by their cultural landscapes, including town plan, land-use pattern, and building fabric. Their study, richly illustrated with over 75 maps and photographs, offers a provocative and insightful interpretation of the geographic anatomy and personality of these fascinating—and rapidly changing—communities.

An Immortal Emperor reborn in a city, acting tough and slapping his face, courting a girl, and then leaving in a good mood!

Architecture on the Borderline interrogates space and territory in a turbulent present where nation-state borders are porous to a few but impermeable to many. It asks how these uneven and conflicted social realities are embodied in the physical and material conditions imagined, produced or experienced through architecture and urbanism. Drawing on historical, global examples, this rich collection of essays illustrates how empires, nations and cities expand their frontiers and contest boundaries, but equally how borderline identities of people and places influence or expose these processes. Empirical chapters covering Central Asia, the Asia Pacific region, the American continent, Europe and the Middle East offer multiple critical insights into the ways in which our spatial imagination is contingent on ‘border-thinking’; on the ways of being and navigating frontiers, boundaries and margins, the three themes used to organise their content. The underlying premise of the book is that sensitisation to border conditions can alter our understanding of the static physical spaces that service political or cultural ideologies, and that the view from the periphery opens up new ways of understanding sovereignty. In exploring these various spaces and their transformative subjectivities, this book also reveals the unrelenting precarity of contesting and living on the margins, and related spaces and discourses that are neglected or suppressed.

The volume is a cutting-edge, interdisciplinary approach to analyzing an enormously significant region in ways that clarify the kind of everyday life and work that is generated in a major urban global manufacturing site amid insecurity, inequality, and a virtually absent state.

Crossing Central Europe is a pioneering volume that focuses on the complex networks of transcultural interrelations in Central Europe from 1900 to 2000. Scholars from Canada, the United States, and Europe identify the motifs, topics, and ways of artistic creation that define this cross-cultural region. This interdisciplinary volume is divided into two historical periods and includes analyses of literature, film, music, architecture, and media. By focusing first on the interrelations in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century, the contributors reveal a complex trans-ethnic network at play that disseminated aesthetic ideals. This network continued to be a force of aesthetic influence leading into the twenty-first century despite globalization and the influence of mass media. Helga Mitterbauer and Carrie Smith-Prei have embarked on a study of the overlapping artistic influences that have outlasted both the National Socialist regime and the Cold War.

Th e poetry in this book was written at diff erent times in my life, through the good and bad times, some I lost in my years of moving around. Some of my earlier writings, I have just asked to be returned to me from my cousin, who eventually lived at my grandmothers apartment but has moved forward. But my earlier stuff never returned. Interject here, she texted and said she doesnt know where they are at. My soul is well with that, and I know God will allow me to write some new stuff to be encouraging for that is my main intention.

Exploring human trafficking in the US - Mexico borderlands as a regional expression of a pressing global problem, Borderline Slavery sheds light on the contexts and causes of trafficking, offering policy recommendations for addressing it that do justice to border communities' complex circumstances. This book focuses on both sexual and labor trafficking, proceeding thematically from global to regional levels to provide an empirically grounded, theoretically informed, and policy-relevant approach, which examines the problem through the eyes of scholars and researchers from various fields, as well as journalists, public officials, law enforcement personnel, victims' advocates and NGO representatives. Discussing the multinational networks, global economics, and personal motives that fuel a multibillion dollar trade in human beings as cheap labor, Borderline Slavery suggests future directions for effective policies and law enforcement strategies to prevent the advance of human trafficking. As such, it will be of interest to both policy makers and scholars across the social sciences working in the fields of migration, exploitation and trafficking.