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High ResolutionSan Diego/Tijuana
Tourism has been vital to Tijuana since the 19th century. The city was a popular destination during prohibition and again as a place to party after World War II, when San Diego became a Navy town. Its somewhat sleazy reputation as a place where anything goes did not dissuade (and may have attracted) tourists through to the 1970s when tourism numbers peaked. In the wake of strings of kidnappings and drug-cartel-related murders, tourism to Tijuana has collapsed.
The one bright spot is medical tourism. New modern hospitals with bilingual staff and signage are built as close to the border as possible. They serve Americans seeking cosmetic surgery and other elective procedures. Many specialize in gastric bypass surgery.
Today, the Mexico to USA checkpoint is well guarded with long lines segregated according to nationality and carried documentation. The USA to Mexico checkpoint is a turnstile.
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High ResolutionWe’re back. And we’re ridiculously excited about this.
The first Border Town design studio was a stately 10-week investigation into divided cities with assigned readings, groups tours, and an international exhibition in Detroit. For our next trick, we’re going to do it all at high speed.
We’re pleased to announce the first Border Town Design Jam, held in collaboration with ThingTank labs out of UofT. In one whirlwind weekend, we’re going to get a group of artists, architects, writers and designers together and we’re going to divide you into teams. On Friday night, we’re going to give you an assignment. On Sunday evening, you’re going to show your work to the world.
It all happens the first weekend of March. Sign up here.
If you are the reading type, we have more information about the format of the event here. If you aren’t the participating type, you can sign up for the Sunday show and tell here. But we really think you should consider doing the whole thing.
We’re going to be have a lot more to say in the coming days. There’s going to be talks, a movie room, a party, and a whole bunch of Border Town veterans on hand to help make things run smooth. For now, please put us on your calendar.
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“A condominium is a territory jointly administered by two or more countries, often (but not necessarily) a territory on the common border between the parties involved. As one might surmise, such an arrangement depends on the benevolent cooperation of all parties involved — and indeed, historically, most condominiums have not survived very long.
Pheasant Island is not only the oldest surviving condominium, it is also the only one where sovereignty isn’t shared simultaneously, but alternately. For six months a year, Pheasant Island is French; for the other six, it is Spanish.” Frank Jacobs, NYT Opinionator
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High ResolutionThis is the Microfictions installation in Detroit.
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Deb Chachra is one of the godparents of Border Town. More than one, we called her for advice on putting together activities or dealing with unexpected situations as the studio progressed. Here, she talks about Toronto, a border town 140km from the US boundary, but not for logistical reasons.
My hometown, Toronto, is 140 km from the nearest international border, but it’s a border city. Not one that lies between two contiguous geographical regions, but rather one that occupies the cultural space between all the different homelands of the people who live there, and the land of hockey and Tim Hortons and poutine.
(via)
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Our Foreign Correspondent from Monrovia, Matthew Jones, examines the roles of language, religion and even gerrymandering in the making of borders in Africa. (click through for the full text and images)
Perhaps the most often-repeated sentiment about modern African states and the borders that demarcate them are that they were devised by European colonial powers, either as arbitrary lines on a blank canvas of lands and peoples which were unknown, or imposed to divide mercantilist, extractive spoils, or also to intentionally split apart existing kingdoms, chieftaincies, nations, tribes, and peoples in order to weaken and rule over them.
And this is mostly true, although the most nefarious conspiracies of a sophisticated coordination of parsing up a continent are a bit apocryphal. It is also helpful to compare the evolutions of nation-states and the divisions between ethnic groups elsewhere, including Europe itself, as such lines, although less arbitrary, have been subject to periodic, irregular alternations, not least due to war, aggression, empire-building, and subjugation.
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"The line between Gerlach and its neighbor isn’t merely one of land management. It’s one of the most tightly controlled borders in the world, with 24/7 monitoring of ground radar that can pick up a coke can bouncing in the wind, and interstitial agents can be dispatched to check it out within minutes. Access is tightly controlled, vehicles entering are searched. It is actively patrolled by three, sometime four agencies of the law, and even more agents and actors of the city itself."
-Quinn Norton on the uneasy relationship between two towns on the edge of the Black Rock Desert. And then on an entirely different kind of border.
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High ResolutionHow borders breed borders, how they cleave: the chapel, the gate, the road, the plot, the stone, the grave, the sarcophagus, the coffin.
Matthew Battles offers a moving paen to a different kind of border town.
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Niagara Falls
Writer, performer and comedian Heather Gold shares her story of growing up near the “second greatest disappointment in American married life”…Niagara Falls.
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Niagara Falls.
“People live there?” Forget living. I grew up there. Like an accident at the side of the road, it’s a place everyone knows about but no one can imagine staying put in.
Most border towns are known as afterthoughts; only a place because there’s been so much passing through. Niagara Falls the town has Niagara Falls the spectacle. It has natural beauty and power which were famous when natural beauty and power were celebrity. Then it became a place to go officially have sanctioned sex on their honeymoons. It was the ‘honeymoon capital of the world” when your honeymoon was the first time you were officially allowed to have sex. Then it became a place to be sure you got a souvenir from. It went from check list box on the ‘to do’ list of the very cultured and moneyed, to coital, then consumptive. To live beside all this, within the man behind the curtain is to watch us make a place up. You can see the audience see and make the show. Because all tourism and spectacle is brought to the place by the people who visit it. Meanwhile, The water never changed. -
High ResolutionI can get an infinitely reproducible copy of the iconic shot of Conrad Schumann leaping the checkpoint barricade within seconds of googling for it, but the symbolic buttons it presses get pressed much harder when one buys it as a postcard from a shop on Unter den Linden before sitting down among the glistening new constructions of Potsdamer Platz 2.0 to scribble a suitable message on it and send it to a friend back home.
Paul Graham Raven runs Futurismic and has lately become obsessed with our Grim Meathook Future. For Border Town, he takes a sort of break from that, beginning with amoebas and ending with… well, we won’t spoil it for you.
An independent design studio about divided cities, led by Emily Horne & Tim Maly.
