Your farm is completely surrounded by a foreign country because the king lost it in a game of cards. You live in Cooch Behar.

You  are eating at a cafe when you are informed that it must close. If you'll just shift to a table in the other country, service is still available. This cafe is in Baarle/Hertog.

You work in the mayor's office. Down the hall is a parallel mayor's office with a whole mirror set of city officials to govern the other half of your city. You work in Texarkana.

Border towns are the extreme edge of where geography and politics collide. They throw the abstractions of governance into sharp physical relief. They are a fertile site for investigation into questions of security, freedom, architecture, immigration, trade, smuggling, sovereignty, and identity.

Border Town was a 10-week, multi-participant collaborative design studio run by Tim Maly and Emily Horne in 2011, that investigated the conditions that surround life in cities situated on borders, divided by borders, or located in conflict zones. By investigating these strange specimens of political geography, we can being to think and design about the interaction of legal and physical architecture and how these forces shape the built environment and the lives of the people living in it. The final products were displayed in an exhibition at the Detroit Creative Corridor Centre. 

 

Click through for images and video from the Border Town project.