borders

Article: Critical Imagination

The Racism Onion

The racism onion has discrimination at its core.  You do not need to be American to be moved by the seismic events that shook cities and mobilized people around the world in response to police brutality against Black people in the US in the summer of 2020. However, if you have ever been subjected to […]
Article: Critical Imagination

The Other City Map

Urban spaces are usually identified through the borders and boundaries drawn on a geographical map. City lines, streets and corridors are often worked out in great detail. Today, however, another city has emerged, which cannot be detected directly from physical characteristics, with borders that are no longer easy to identify – a computational city. Cities […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

State of Exception

The objects left behind in the desert by undocumented migrants on their journey to the U.S. are the unnoticed traces of the human experience of transit. Forced and illegal migration may receive a lot of attention in the media and political debate, but on a human level, it often remains distant and is rarely discussed. […]
Article: Critical Imagination
Military check point in the street, Kimihurura Neighborhood, Kigali, 2017.

Contemporary Urban Paranoia

Why We Should Look into the Surveillance Camera The permanent spatial state of exception in the urban environment is a much-discussed topic in postmodern discourse, yet a critical re-assessment of the contemporary situation is needed. The global proliferation of urban enclaves, and in consequence their ghettoization, indicates an urgent need for social sustainability.1 There is […]
Article: Critical Imagination

Lost Cities and Losing oneself in the City

What if we gave up the wish to contain cities and citizenships? The ambition to welcome newcomers within spaces of hos(ti)pitality1 such as camps, asylum and detention centres is not only an assured formula for segregation, but it fuels fear amongst localities and (trans)national imaginaries.2 It fundamentally conditions citizenship, (urban) identity and human relationship to […]
Article: Wishful Thinking
Borders - Ania Ruminska - 2014

Borders

The red-white border brutally cuts through the landscape on the premise of protecting cyclists on a path that meanders for its largest part right in the middle of nowhere. Protecting from what? – one might ask. Perhaps from forgetting that they have left the city and the rule of order that reigns there. To what […]