Abstract
Borders exist in various forms and strengths worldwide. They indicate the extent of a nation’s geographical territories and geopolitical controls. However, the notion and interpretation of borders are mostly viewed as an indicator of incompatibility and ideological differences in the socio-economic, political, and religious conditions on either side of a border. Borders are created in response to these economic, political, and social polarities and shaped by hard borders at one extreme and soft borders at the other, often appearing as ‘in between’ in a blurred delimitation. Characteristically, lines on a map, in reality, are the political or legal markers suggesting the historical struggle of power dominance with the propensities for expanding or shrinking the authority by border re-configuration. This power struggle originates from religious ideologies, ethnicity, economic strength, and other hosts of resource inequality. Borders customarily incite competition and influence trade relations and financial contests, leading to neighbouring nations’ growth or instability. In addition, they can be sources of conflict and discontentment, particularly in many parts of the world where conflicting political or religious views exacerbate disputes in land ownership and generate fragmented and temporal architectural formation at borderlands and affect life qualities. These typologies expose various spatial configurations, fragmented geospatial borderlands, polarisations of power and politics, disruptive trade relations, and spur vulnerability-induced (natural and artificial) migrations. The debate here is, can border issues be defined through architectural and urbanism discourse? This chapter exhibits a range of analyses on border typologies based on a series of pedagogical debates in Masters of Architecture discourse at the Scott Sutherland School of Architecture and Built Environment, Robert Gordon University, in 2008. The exercise exemplifies the prospects of discussing border issues in the built environment discourse by examining numerous border phenomena. Unfortunately, the discussion of borders is seldom addressed in the design discipline. The exploration in this section attempted research on various relationships using the border as a metaphor for socio-economic and political tools. Examples are drawn from the Chinese trade to ethnicity, the information age, and liminal boundary. The views in these short studies postulate a prospect for further analysis. It also underscores the significance of the interface between border issues and the built environment.
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Notes
- 1.
Bangla language originated in 3500 B.C. from the Indo-European language family, which later traversed into the Indo-Aryan languages—Sanskrit, which eventually evolved into the many dialects spoken in the sub-continent.
- 2.
Urdu originated in north India around Delhi in about the twelfth century, based and influenced by the hybrid form of Arabic and Persian, as well as Turkish.
- 3.
Sources: The ambiguity of fast-changing Israeli borders, explained (trtworld.com).
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Oxford English Dictionary. Ed. J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. OED Online Oxford 23, 2007.
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Nordic Work with Traumatised Refugees: Do We Really Care, edited by Gwynyth Overland, Eugene Guribye, Birgit (2014).
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Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges the contribution of the following graduate architects, formerly students of Stage 6, Masters in Architecture course, Robert Gordon University, mainly in the form of graphical interpretation of the border issues and its studies contributed in this article: Andrew Kirwan, Julie Nelson, Matthew Holmes, Andrew Pacitti, Patrick Sim. The graphics were part of the research under the Elective Module: AC4012—Contemporary Issues in Urban Design and Development, offered in 2018.
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Zaman, Q.M. (2023). Border Discourse: Pedagogical Perspective in Architecture and Urbanism. In: Zaman, Q.M., Hall, G.G. (eds) Border Urbanism. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06604-7_30
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