Architectures of Resistance : Negotiating Borders Through Spatial Practices

Abstract

Spatial borders as sites of meaningful adjacencies and exchange.

Borders between countries, neighbourhoods, people, beliefs, and policies are proliferating and expanding despite what self-proclaimed progressive societies wish or choose to believe. For a wide variety of reasons, the early 21st century is caught struggling between breaking down barriers and raising them. Architecture is complicit in both. It is central to the perpetuation of borders, and key to their dismantling. Architectures of Resistance: Negotiating Borders Through Spatial Practices approaches borders as sites of meaningful encounter between others (other cultures, other nations, other perspectives), guided not by fear or hatred but by respect and tolerance. The contributors to this volume - including architects, urban planners, artists, human geographers, and political scientists - address spatial boundaries as places where social and political conditions are intensified and where new spatial practices of architectural resistance arise. Moving across contemporary, historical, and speculative conditions of borders, Architectures of Resistance discusses new and innovative forms of architectural, artistic, and political practice that facilitate constructive human interaction.