As inhabitants of societal landscapes, we look to borders to frame and contextualize our world. Borders, apparent and unapparent, of varying scales define relationships between our built environment and surrounding spaces. Our bodily senses and sensibilities of these landscapes allow us to draw experiences. These aesthetics determine the border of what we filter in. They color how we identify ourselves, relate to others, access resources, and form community. In this way, race has been conceptualized to draw borders between ourselves and others and, as such, denote spatial zones for each group. Social movements arise and fall as we conceive of ideologies and narratives. Borders manifest from the maps we draw, the housing we build, and the cities we plan. Yet, they create a forced focus on the act of division and gloss over the cause of division.
Each border landscape embodies "the heart of political allegiance to the nation-state" (Korf and Raeymaekers 17). As such, borders house both the enforcer and the enforced whether it is at the international border, at distant military bases, or internal colonies. The marginalized populations and their oppressors exist in the same space, representing the entity's true characteristics and values. Noted by Walia (27), the "imagined crises" of our territorial borders are only defined to justify the results of the "actual crises" of capitalism, war, and climate change. Border-making is not a passive result of power expansion; it is the dynamic spatial outtreach by the state and the consequential geographies of domination. In response to this activity, border inhabitants expressedly and unexpressedly challenge the state's authority every day. While the most violent totalitarian suppressions occur here, so do the most creative grassroots insurgencies manifest here.
Still, the border holds a transient yet enclosing character. An unending flux of people, objects, and actions move across and through the border, eroding away and building up institutions. Within local environments in our cities, borders are hidden in their other forms. "Particular constellations of identity, power, and economic accumulation" determine if a border functions as a gate, bridge, rupture, and/or connection point (Korf and Raeymaekers 21). Yet, as Jacobs suggests, they "exert an influence (sucking) the life out of our cities and its neighborhoods" as a "vacuum". Beyond simply identifying the activity of boundaries and frames in our everyday lives, we must actively address their causes and effects. Understanding their implications as not protection but exclusion must be connected with the transformation and redesign of the infrastructure that allows these borders.
To undo these violent border landscapes, we must unravel how they are conceived and function, how we can not act as border agents ourselves in perpetuating those divides, and how we can not reproduce systems of power through our work. The danger in transient, fluid borders is their ability to change shape and form in response to external conditions–the same struggle with a different name. To address these issues, designers can work to develop a strong foundation opposing border-making by connecting with existing communities of resistance. These groups living within the in-between spaces have the greatest experienced in the physical manifestations of politicized decisions. Learning from the passion of fringe communities could adapt design work into a much more humanist practice, which would allow and encourage designers to be passionate and produce meaningful work.
Through design we establish and create borders. We design space and enclosures. Our very work threatens the life of the actual clients of our contended spaces. The individualistic notion of leadership with a lead designer must be challenged by valuing the necessary but overlooked work of numerous other contributors. Elitism, pride, and ego of individualistic leaders have dismantled design practices and social movements. By evaluating urban landscape design as a tool within the social realm, the parallels and intersections of design and social movements can be addressed. Ideologies based on collectivism to share–rather than command–knowledge, skills, and resources would be able to transform the structure, efficacy, and culture of design. We must start this work now, and we must start at the border.