Border Environments III

The studio investigates the phenomenon of "illegalised" circulations within Europe by mapping the interplay between migrant bodies and the physical, political, and cultural environment they move into. Borders and bordering practices are often analysed as geographically localised, linear, material manifestations of power – a wall separating two territories, a series of checkpoints funnelling and filtering circulations. By taking an environmental perspective, the studio proposes to move beyond such limitations to investigate borders and bordering practices "against the line", as relational, dispersed events bringing together distant geographies, inter-scalar condensations of communitarian and national politics, widespread racism, and colonial refluxes.

In this sense, the environment becomes the site for intersectional, transboundary interventions exploring alliances between urban and environmental activism, political affinities, and cultural continuities. The studio will work through collective and distributed modes of knowledge production, building platforms for politically and materially situated collaborations and opening spaces where emancipatory politics can emerge.

Investigating forms of urban struggle, humanitarian violence, solidarity and the making of inhospitable landscapes as spatial manifestations, the studio aims to expose the weaponisation of urban and non-urban environments in the process of border-making, putting into question notions of citizenship, identity, belonging as they are formed both globally and locally.

Research Questions

• How do migrants’ trajectories influence the conceptualisation of urban and rural spaces?
• How can we analyse the weaponisation of borderscapes using the tools and methodologies of Architecture and City Design?
• How can we understand and articulate the multi and inter-scalar nature of migratory phenomena, given their impact across economic, political, and cultural spheres?
• How can we investigate the diffused and deliberately dispersed infrastructure of care that supports people in transit?

Right to the City: Labour, Migration, and the Struggle for Social Reproduction

This year, Border Environments Studio III is situated in London, aiming to explore migration through the lens of labour – both waged and unwaged – by examining the crucial yet often overlooked activities that sustain our capacity to work, study, and live in the city. Focusing on the intersection between activities such as cooking, sleeping, childbirth, child-rearing, cleaning, and socialising, migration and urbanism, London is viewed as an architecture of reproduction and dependent on workers to maintain the public infrastructures that house, care for, and nurture its diverse population, which are vital for sustaining capitalist modes of production and accumulation.

The studio will investigate various sites across the city – from homes to hospitals – while directly engaging with migrant workers who navigate the challenges posed by the set of policies known as the Hostile Environment. In doing so, we seek to understand how different immigration statuses, from asylum seekers to temporary work permit holders, shape the spatiality of the city and influence social relations that counter the unequal distribution of resources and opportunities for citizens and non-citizens. We will research the mechanism of capital reproduction in relation to migration – together with notions of gender, class, and race – to propose spatial and institutional strategies to counter these dynamics and to imagine an alternative set of values that can guide us in designing better/more inclusive cities.

The aim is to collectively pre-figurate the space of liberated social reproduction processes: what instruments can be mobilised within the field of design and urban planning to build spaces where social reproduction is not only less concealed but prioritised over capital accumulation?

Central to this studio is the question, "Who has the right to the city?" We will explore how one's legal status determines access to or exclusion from social reproduction. This involves examining the inner border geographies of London and understanding how these spaces are governed and by whom. We will scrutinise how the border regime regulates migrant workers, often relegating them to specific industries where they are de-skilled, discriminated and exploited, yet integral to the nation's reproduction – such as in agriculture, transport and logistics, adult care, and domestic work. These borders not only confine their labour but also shape their inclusion or exclusion within the city.

Furthermore, this studio is interested in the significance of unpaid social reproductive activities, such as childcare, housework, education, and community building. These activities are essential for enabling waged labour and supporting the economy, yet they are often unrecognised, underfunded, and disproportionately borne by women and racialised groups. By examining the intersection of social reproduction with precarity, organised abandonment, and the Hostile Environment, we aim to uncover how the pursuit of waged work in both formal and informal economies becomes a matter of survival, particularly for those whose access to the labour market is restricted or controlled by immigration laws.

The studio aims to implement a truly collaborative methodology where students benefit from direct engagement with legal experts, activists, NGOs, scholars, and other key figures active “on the ground”. The methodology of the studio therefore strives not to “report from a distance” the spatial conditions, accidents, and political effects of the borderscape but to “immerse” its operations in the field through collaborative modes of knowledge production, through ethnography, archival practices, and methods of counter-mapping.

The goal is to establish non-extractive, mutually beneficial collaborations mindful of the precarious legal and political conditions in which actors involved in migrant circulations are forced into. The students will engage with a multiplicity of media – film, music, model making, etc. – to investigate inhospitable geographies and the infrastructures of care that are built both in refusal and resistance.

Term 1: City as Archive

In the first term, students will be introduced to the key readings, debates, and terminologies that form the conceptual framework of the studio. This introductory phase will involve exercises focused on visualising the different modes of social reproduction animating our lives, with particular attention to their spatial manifestation.

Following this, students will be divided into small groups, each assigned to one of the core areas related to the reproduction of labour and its infrastructure—such as housing, healthcare, public/civic infrastructure, food systems, and more. Each group will undertake archival research, tracing the genealogy of struggles that have shaped London’s landscape, focusing on movements, campaigns, and prominent actors involved in these issues. The assignment for the first half of the term is to develop this collective archive, being able to present its parts and internal organisation in relation to relevant debates analysed.

Such an archive will then be presented to the public together with its own conceptual and physical “scaffolding”. This part, developed in parallel with the critical “accumulation” of archival material, will focus on translating the existing documentation into two physical support structures - namely the “book” and the “exhibition”. This process of displacing and re-placing the “new originals” into various physical formats will allow a process of synthesis and refinement of the initial research, exploring both editorial and curatorial strategies to resituate archival findings in present contexts. Students will engage with book-making techniques and exhibition design examining the politics of publishing/exhibiting as a critical “scaffolding” for radical political projects.

Term 2: LIVE Project – Interactive Design & Analysis for Migrant Justice

During Term 2, students will participate in a group project investigation in collaboration with a London-based migrant justice organisation. This will provide the opportunity to learn and apply a wide array of digital and non-digital investigative techniques under the direct supervision of experts by experience, as well as to have first-hand experience working with an organisation at the forefront of migratory issues. The submission will be an interactive investigation that will be shared on our partner's online platform.

A core element of this unit is to explore the use of open-source digital tools to conduct investigations into borderspaces: Students will develop an in-depth understanding of the border situation, context and issue, as well as understand the necessary ethical structures for conducting the research. Students should show strong analytical and visual methods for conducting research – including digital mapping, modelling, etc to build an investigative study. Tasked with independently consulting local specialists, policymakers, people with migration experience and a diversity of actors operating in the project context, students will critically explore modes of digital representation and communication in relation to the different forums where the project might be presented.

Term 3: Independent Research Projects

During Term III, students will draw, produce, code, make, craft, compile, edit their own propositional objects. They will explore the tools of speculative design as a way of thinking about possible futures, intervening directly in the space that separates the as it is from the as well as possible, together with those communities and groups that, performing and reproducing such spaces, provoke the political imaginations of the present.

Tutors

Border Environments is led by Riccardo Badano and Helen Brewer.