Architecture In The Borderlands - Unsustainability In The Afterlife Of Colonialism And Designing The City Of Sustainment

Abstract

Borderlands are places that used to be part of the colonial or developing countries discourse and currently experience the afterlife of their imposed existence. They experience unsustainability as more than the biophysical impacts of the city; they face its modes of defuturing via structures of socio-economic classification, physical and cognitive de-skilling, population growth and ghettoisation, artificialisation of food, surveillance and exclusion. By ontologically designing their inhabitants, borderland cities nourish conditions of conflict and survivalism, which will subsequently lead to revolt and chaos. Despite being perceived as destined to become non-places or ghost cities, borderland cities could consist of a paradigm of sustainment and social resilience, ecology and values of the Common. Part of this proposal is the introduction of the borderland city as the reconfigured space of learning in the framework of unlearning and relearning, by adopting as its main educational platform praxis deriving from theory, re-coding of need and desire and establishment of design concepts such as metrofitting, re-use and elimination by design. In this context, the implications of the contemporary global unsettlement due to climate change and geopolitical conditions will be addressed and the role of architecture as a re-directive practice will be discussed under the burden of urban dysfunctionality and population endangerment.