Day 3: The Networked Trace of Urban Border Crossers

In identifying the sets of invisible urban borders, we came to see the important role of personal experiences crossing borders, thresholds, divides in the city. Urban borders are not self-evident in the built environment as they are on maps. The boundaries become visible through personal experience, border stories reveal the hidden lines.

the path to a work permit in Moscow

In this video, a migrant worker documents just one of the sites of friction that is encountered along the path to a work permit in Moscow. For citizens of the CIS, the “simplified procedure” to attain a work visa involves crossing many urban borders.

The Border Line Effect

20 years after the fall of the Soviet Union several young directors come to the borders of previously united countries. Their personal stories dedicated to people, who find a way to remain united, despite the new borders.

There is a point at which borders cease to be geographical lines and filters between states (always an over-simplified idea) and emerge instead as increasingly interoperable assemblages of control technologies strung out across the world’s infrastructures, circulations, cities, and bodies.

“There is a point at which borders cease to be geographical lines and filters between states (always an over-simplified idea) and emerge instead as increasingly interoperable assemblages of control technologies strung out across the world’s infrastructures, circulations, cities, and bodies.”

– Stephen Graham, Cities Under Siege