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ON SITE r e v i e w borders and breaches 38: 2021
BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY Berlin, die Sinfonie der Großstadt , directed by Walter Ruttmann Germany, 1927
MAILLART’S BRIDGES Maillarts Brücken, directed by Heinz Emigholz Germany, 2000
ON SITE r e v i e w borders and breaches 38 w i n t e r 2020/21
This issue is based on the premise that a border only reveals its true nature when it is crossed, or breached. Until that point, it is an edge, inert, often invisible. Cross it, inadvertently or purposefully, and all hell breaks loose. When the call for articles was formulated, climate change was the global trans-national constant, owned by no one but highly industrialised societies, suffered by everyone. As a consequence, there is a migration crisis in which borders play a defining role — their closing, their arming, their razor wire, their steel walls against refugees trying to escape some intolerable situation for some other place perceived to be wealthy and empty enough to allow them some small place in it. Weather literally transcends borders, and the speed with which the coronovirus spreads involves borders within the body — cell membranes breached at the microbial level. Ideology admits no borders, although boundaries are marked in its name. Closing a border to an idea or a drought; impossible. Transmission is through ephemeral materials such as words, breath and wind. Ideas, weather and viruses have breached borders with much violence — a paramilitay quelling of protest, an uncontrollable forest fire or the ICU ward. It forces us to question what a political border is actually for . Some of these essays presage a borderless world, others point out the existing ambiguity of the border condition. Some tie borders to resistance and transgression, others to the unexamined ordering systems that borders represent. The present is a condition to look at, decipher and to step over. Literally.
contents
border occupation Lawrence Bird Andrey Chernykh Fionn Byrne, Diana Guo and Jiahui Huang
para || e | A line made by clearing The common border
2 10 14
border dissolution Evelyn Osvath Diana Guo and Mingjia Chen Connor O’Grady
Checkpoint Bravo Floating between borders Softening the edge
20 26 34
walking borders Francisca Lima and Tiago Torres-Campos Jongwan Kwan
Walking dialectics Curbside effect
38 44
coded borders Piper Bernbaum
Mining the edge
48
calls for articles contributors and masthead
On Site review 39: tools ; 40: books who we are
56 57
para ll e l lawrence bird
terms: artefacting : the generation of distortions in an image or sound especially through errors in reproduction. composited : speaks to the mosaic-like quality of the images, Google Earth and similar mapping systems. It’s not composed the way a painting is composed, rather it is collaged from different components. satellite tile : a generally square image of part of the earth which, with others, composes the overall image. Imagine the tiles as a pyramid - from one tile on top showing a large area, to (in several steps down) arrays of tiles each of which shows more detail about a smaller area.
para||e| is an evolving single channel video, harvesting satellite imagery from Google Earth as multiple sequential high-resolution images which are sorted and edited into a single seven-hour long aerial tracking. Audio is comprised of three superimposed tracks, all modified: found music, ambient sound from the International Space Station, and the sound of a border patrol MQ-9 Reaper drone. https://vimeo.com/64061190
This map is also characterised by the failure of its components to align. On close examination, this digital environment is full of contradictions and anomalies.
The 49th parallel determines 2000 kilometres of border between the United States and Canada from the Salish Sea to Lake of the Woods — a seemingly simple straight line and a significant portion of the longest undefended border in the world. A border is above else a representation: a mark on the ground and on a map that defines a political entity, often a cultural one also: who is on which side? how is that mark crossed? what is risked in crossing it? This project, para||e| , examines that representation as translated through another: Google’s three-dimensional mapping of the earth.
The odd, occasionally eerie, imagery resulting from technical errors in media is layered onto a long history of mistakes. The 49th parallel was always an arbitrary boundary. In the Anglo-American Convention of 1818 following the Louisiana Purchase of 1804, the border was defined as where the watershed of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers met the watersheds of the rivers that drained into Hudson’s Bay — a line in practical terms impossible to find. Impossible in theory too, without recourse to geometries developed by mathematicians such as Lewis Carrol later in the century. The 49th parallel was substituted for that watershed border.
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In Google Earth and other digital imaging platforms, the map of the world is composited from thousands of satellite images gathered from an army, or several armies, of satellites and licensed by the builders of each platform. Some of these images are in the public domain (notably images captured by government agencies such as NASA or the US Department of Agriculture); others are proprietary. This hybridity of ownership is characteristic of digital ecosystems.
If Google Earth is a lens, it is full of distortions. These can be revealed through a critical use of tools internal to the platform itself — the Historical Imagery function for example, or manipulation of viewing and touring settings. The images here, captured from along the trajectory of the video, have been directly harvested from Google Earth, along the 49th parallel. They have not been manipulated beyond framing and placement on the page.
Images like these, which date from the early 1990s to the present, reveal an obvious asymmetry between the imagery on the American side of the border — highly defined — and the Canadian side. In this case, the area north of the border is often] presented in a much lower-resolution. This distortion comes from the processes that capture and reproduce the image and map it onto the 3-dimensional model of the Earth’s surface. Pixelation and artefacting create a landscape of a new kind, with its own qualities of darkness and light, opacity and texture; it forms a geography and a materiality in its own right.
We expect that such digital imaging platforms fulfil technology’s promise, now over two hundred years old, of a transparent, complete and seamless mapping of the world. But do they?
The border between satellite images rarely equates exactly to the political border. The edge of the southern satellite tile is typically offset some hundred metres north.
At other times it can be identified by a 6m border vista or by disparities in land use.
The border is frequently invisible.
114º 11’ 15” W, 49°N. Akamena-Kishenena Provincial Park, BC
Yet even that simplified border could not be precisely pinned down. Cumulative surveying errors led to the border monuments straying up to hundreds of feet from the theoretical parallel. Subsequent treaties have defined the border as the wavering line demarcated by these monuments, rather than the parallel itself. So the images you see here, in para||e| , record a landscape whose technological mapping was compromised from the beginning.
Displacement, the error built into all reproductions and representations, even highly technological ones, is built into this media landscape.
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This strange splicing of times seems characteristic of contemporary conditions of media.
Anomalies are provoked in particular by the temporal nature of the map. Google Earth is not just a database of current satellite tiles. It is also an archive of historical images of the Earth dating back to the 1990s, and sometimes earlier. Satellite images are not captured simultaneously.They are gathered by a space-based camera moving along a path above the surface of the Earth, and are recorded in sequence before being composed as tiles in a mosaic image of the globe. So the border between two satellite images represents a seam in time, rather than just space. Adjacent satellite images juxtapose separate moments. Different seasons coexist. The contrast between these times, or worlds, is made more apparent by Google’s tendency to marry images from different times at political borders.
Sensitivity to temporality is one of the qualities that makes this amalgam of media and landscape not just an Earth, but a World.
The Dominion Land Survey: a one mile by one mile grid resulting in 640 square acres to which roadways are added
American Homestead Act system: a one mile by one mile grid, resulting in 640 square acres from which roadways are deducted.
The square-mile grid of prairie fields on display here is a result of modern systems of demarcating the world, dividing and owning land, and growing and distributing crops. These were implemented in parallel with the surveying of the border. To the north, that system was Canada’s Dominion Land Survey (1871); south of the border, it was set out by the American Homestead Act (1862). While the two grids are similar, they rarely align.
These nineteenth century systems of land division have a strange resonance with today’s imaging technologies. We might even say that the prairie surface seems ... pixilated. In fact, it is. A pixel is a picture element , a component of a whole image broken down into cells of identical size (generally consistent and organised by a grid within a given image) and with a single defined colour. It makes a complex, rich, and whole image manageable by a digital infrastructure.
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Media resources have their own, complex, relationship to time. They are created in time (almost ‘just in time’ – they do not exist for the user until rendered active by a CPU) and evolve over time (like a wiki); they carry information which is potentially eternal, but which can decay over time with their media substrate, or can be zeroed-out in an instant. Media systems all have clocks, and record their activity over time in logs and archives. As one such archive, Google Earth documents not just changes in the physical environment but also developments in the imaging systems recording that environment.
The juxtaposition of worlds can provoke imagination and speculation. What would happen were you to cross across the boundary between one time and another, one season and the next? A homestead always implies a boundary: a fence or a row of trees marking the line between us and our neighbours. Imagine riding along this road and glancing across the fence at the advance of winter - or its retreat. What will happen if that other time crosses to our side?
What might that change bring? What fence might we build to keep it out?
102º 15’ 05” W, 49°N . Eniskillen No 3, Saskatechewan
Like the image representing it, the prairie is broken down into elements manipulable by a technological system. Native plants are replaced by domesticated (and today genetically modified) crops. These units are laid out in a grid and rendered up to transportation networks which carry them to markets across the globe.
Strange that what we do to the Earth, we do to its image too.
To use a term from Martin Heidegger’s writing on technology, both imaging systems and agricultural systems expedite their object; they unlock it, expose it, direct it toward an end. In these images, para||e| systems from the nineteenth and twenty-first century confront and fold into each other.
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But the prairie landscape resists instrumentalisation. It displays a tangle of loops, oxbows, and sloughs that disrupt the grid. These illustrate the effect of water: undermining the agricultural grid, erasing and breaking it, forcing an accommodation by the machinery of resource extraction and distribution systems. This disruption is not only spatial but also temporal: riparian knots represent a time frame of seasonal (and episodically cataclysmic) cycles.
Every few years thousands of square miles of farmland are inundated by floods. Over time river courses alter dramatically, snaking across the landscape in an ever-changing evolution, leaving traces of past inundations and water courses as rifts in the grid. This process occurs over cycles of time of long and short duration, in contrast to the grid which aspires to act ‘out of time’, trying to preserve one pattern forever.
As it inundates the land, the mediated flood leaves islands here and there where material has not yet been entirely washed away.
Media can overflow just as a river does.
Frustrated in its attempts to channel meaning, to fit within a pipe, to flow at the bitrate prescribed to resolve an image, media too can exceed its banks. Sometimes it scatters in juddering fragments of image and sound, representing something, though what we cannot tell.
Having spread beyond its bounds, its meaning, media can stand immobile, the stagnant waters of ‘loading’ waiting to dissipate into the Earth.
Do the rifts we observe in these images emerge at that breaking point between means and desire, between our cognitive drive to know, to map, to control, and the failure of the systems we deploy to do so? Are they the debris left behind by the ever- increasing flood of data we demand?
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Portions of this image were taken in the summer of 2005, when the Antler River overflowed its banks in one of the prairies’ periodic floods; other portions date from 2003. They have been composited together by Google Earth’s automated image capture and processing workflow.
The two landscapes represent two distinct but related prairie geographies, one terrestrial, the other aqueous; one controlled by human artifice (engineering works can be identified along the river bank just north of the border) and one escaping that control utterly. This image speaks of the natural cycles of the prairie and our inability to control them. But another phenomenon is also apparent in this image: an inundation of another order encroaches from the north.
What is this flood really about?
The prairie shares a disruptive temporality with that of media.
100º 57’ 29” W, 49°N. Arthur, Manitoba
Imaging infrastructures seem to have built into them the shadow of any technological system: systems whose purpose is to function inevitably imply failure: the condition of not functioning, of breaking, of going off the rails.
Charles Waldheim has used the term representational domestication to describe the satellite image. But these images are not tamed; instead, they have become wild. Andreas Broeckmann has referred to a transgressive disruption of codes as ‘the wild’ in media. For him it is about the excess,and the animation, of our technological culture.
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Finally the border approaches Lake of the Woods, where it will turn away from the parallel and begin its long meander across the Canadian Shield. The landscape and its image present a rich tapestry here, in which the border itself is an ambiguous presence. Where we can identify the line of latitude, it appears as the border vista, or as differences in land use: forest and wetlands have been cut away to create farmland, but only on one side of the border.
In its very last kilometre as border, the parallel crosses the cape of Elm Point. This is the large peninsula jutting out into the lake towards the right side of the image. The cleared path of a border vista cuts east-west across its north edge. This is a practical exclave of the United States. From the American side, it can only be reached by water; to approach it by land, you must come through Canada. Elm Point is attached to one country, but belongs to another.
After this, the border turns sharp north to sever another exclave, the Northwest Angle, a kink that was a result of a mapping error. Just to the west of Elm Point is the even tinier exclave of Buffalo Bay Point. These three remain detached possessions of the United States.
Even on the farmed American side, distinct territories of land ownership and occupation can be identified; like the border, these are created by arbitrary lines of possession.
Another odd result of the juxtaposition of times: a cloud cut as though by a knife, and the sharp edge of a dark and shadowy territory bordering the bright lakeshore, suggests distinct and contradictory realities coinciding in one space. What would happen, we might wonder, if we were to follow that curving road from the bright land into the dark?
As the border approaches the edge of Lake of the Woods, it dissipates; all permutations of land use give way to a shoreline ecosystem that erases almost every human trace.
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This single image presents a complex ecology of image, material, nature, artifice, space and time; an ecology that provokes narrative.
Edges dissolve here. The closer we look, the harder it is to tell just where the border lies.
The image itself becomes granulated, its atoms start to float apart.
95 19’ 25” W, 49°N. Buffalo Point, Manitoba
But some trace of human passage remains. Before it crosses the lake to Elm Point, para||e| has its last index: tire tracks. Surveyors or smugglers?
para||e| was included in the exhibition Coding and Decoding Borders at the Dawn of the 21st Century , 2016, at Espace Architecture Flagey-Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, and at the International Symposium on Electronic Art in Manizales, Colombia, 2017. The seven-hour version of para||e| was screened at Inter/Access Gallery in Toronto, 2016.
Perhaps there is no difference.
It hardly seems to matter to earth or image, the question of who owns what. O
on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches 9
a line made by clearing andrey chernykh
National borders invade our mainstream news cycle – they have become more present in our cultural milieu with globalisation in apparent retreat, and with countries considering isolationist policies and building physical walls to keep others out. The global COVID-19 pandemic made borders ever more apparent as restrictions, preventing free movement between different countries, as we all shelter in place to curb the spread of the deadly virus. Historically and globally, the interface of a political border and the landscape that surrounds it has created unique places often defined by tension, control and militarism. The case of the Canada-USA border is quite unique, in its structure and management, as being the longest undefended border in the world – it therefore warrants a critical discussion of its place- making and the role it plays between the two countries. being there The Oregon Treaty of 1846 established the 49th parallel as the western section of the Canada-USA border, from Buffalo Point in Manitoba to Tsawwassen on the southern mainland of British Columbia. It is a roughly 2,000 km (mostly) straight, deforested line though the landscape. Known unofficially as ‘the slash’, this six metre wide treeless zone crosses everything from isolated islands to mountains. The line is cleared every six years for the sole purpose of making sure it is visible both from satellite and on the ground. It is a most compelling landscape to witness. Photographer Andreas Rutkauskas captured heavily monitored places as well as more wild corners of the western borderlands in his project Borderline . 1 He recounts the incredible porosity of the border — sometimes both swift and lengthy encounters with border patrol, on other occasions walking for hours along the cutline without impediment. While undefended, the border is nonetheless monitored under variety of surveillance technologies. Few have fully experienced the slash. Some of us get a glimpse of the clean cutline through the trees from a moving car, after having one’s documents inspected by the border agent. However, in the more forested areas of west part of the cut, the encounter with the border is one of the starkest. Deep forest changes to a narrow meadow of wild grasses, forbs and shrubs. Not only physically but sonically it is a different experience alltogether. The hollow sound of the forest changes, as if emerging out of an echo chamber into an open space of breezes and buzzing insects. It is less of a transition space but more of an interruption in an otherwise cohesive landscape. In other cases, the border would not present itself at all until explicitly defined by a sign or an obelisk – one of many old markers that denote the border, erected during the first land clearing and mapping of the 49th parallel between 1872 - 1874. The obelisks, a further sculptural component of an already sublime landscape, are scattered, due to imprecise surveying at the time, sometimes as far as 200 feet away from the border. Sometimes the line almost disappears, disguised by a piece of infrastructure like a road, or in some urban areas it can even serve as someone’s property line.
1 https://www.andreasrutkauskas.com/borderline
from the top: Cultus Lake, BC Whiskey Gap, Alberta Abandoned crossing, Big Beaver, Saskatchewan
all images courtesy of Andreas Rutkauskas
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Wide enough to be accessible and free of any continuous constructed barriers such as walls or fences, this political border, at times, is one of the most serene and peaceful places on the planet compared to some of world’s more heavily guarded borders that feature a 15-foot wall (parts of the USA-Mexico border), or a large zone that is subject to a tense military stand- off (Korean Demilitarized Zone). Once one steps into the cutline, a vista opens up that stretches far into the landscape, a dispassionate line that runs along the terrain and eventually disappears over the horizon. Walking and hiking the border reminds us of land artist Richard Long and his 1967 work, A Line Made by Walking , where he walks a straight line in a field and leaves an track of trampled plants in an otherwise undisturbed meadow. This ground-breaking act remains one of his most well-known pieces, launching his career and a fascination with trails and traces. His subsequent projects continued to reference the original, including Walking A Line in Peru in 1972 and other similar projects around the world varying in scale. By leaving a mark, a trace, an unintended vestige of life, he explored one of the most universal human acts there is. In the case of the Canada-USA border, the simple, practical act of clearing an area to reveal a border could be seen as a deliberate and at the same time unintended work of land art. On such a grand scale the act demonstrates trust, camaraderie, transparency and an international symbol of cooperation between two countries. However, its current purpose as a method of perpetual surveillance and border demarcation, does not reveal its layered identity, an ongoing development since the border’s inception. eyes on the line Security around the border has been fairly loose for the most part of each country’s history. However, since September 11th, 2001 border security has increased from having a few hundred border agents to more than 2,000. Canadian and American travellers now need passports, tightening the border. Since 2001, United States has added aircraft with sensor arrays, thermal cameras, video surveillance, embedded sensors in roads and unmanned aircraft to keep a close eye on the remote areas. CCTV cameras triggered by sensors in the road record crossings in-between border stations. Towers supplied by Boeing are equipped with variety of sensors, including cameras, as well as heat and motion detectors. The towers dot the entire border from coast to coast. In addition, there are ‘eyes in the sky’, aerial patrols on both sides of the border. The RCMP uses helicopters and fixed wing aircraft as part of its aerial border patrol duties, while Blackhawk helicopters are used on the US side — their radar can detect moving vehicles and persons, and the sensors can track heat sources – including people – and transmit video imaging in real-time to border patrol agents. If suspicious activity is detected, officers are dispatched to investigate and apprehend intruders. Border officers have also expanded ways they patrol the border by using boats, SUVs, mountain bikes, snowmobiles, as well as foot and mounted patrols. In addition to all the technological gadgets, a $1.4 million budget from IBC (International Boundary Commission) is dedicated to keeping the cut line open. The open space itself is a powerful instrument of surveillance; making one feel exposed and constantly under close watch.
Barricade near Gretna, Manitoba Monument No 4, Tsawwassen, BC Surveillance equipment, Coutts, Alberta
all images courtesy of Andreas Rutkauskas
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Border transect on the 49th Parallel: top: crossings, parks that touch and even cross the border section: elevations, and ecoregions that the border crosses and their characteristic wildlife.
a long border park A transect through the border line reveals both US and Canada’s shared geographic identity. Travelling along the border, one witnesses constant change in topography, environment and culture as the line cuts through complex natural systems of rivers, lakes, eco-regions and habitats. Small municipalities on the border act as gateways, reflecting both the national and local identities of their inhabitants. Omnipresent surveillance systems keep a constant watch, while submerged in a beautiful wilderness of cascading mountains or sprawling prairie fields and endless sky. The border’s relentless cut through infrastructure, property lines, fields and forests reveals a strange and sometimes uncomfortable urban and exurban juxtaposition. The cutline reveals such layers and the conflicts between them. Besides its scale, there is an element of the sublime in this linear landscape, derelict yet structured, dangerous yet pleasant, but somehow inviting, nonetheless. Wide enough to be accessible and under a set maintenance regime, the western borderlands suggest a potential program or typology that might unify currently conflicting elements of security, experience, ecology, tourism and mobility. With the multitude of national and provincial parks and First Nations reserves that are adjacent to the border, could the border become a sort of Olmsteadian green necklace that connects them all, becoming a system of bi-national parks? The border’s layered identity of culture, landscape, politics and surveillance, reflects the complexity of our world where public places must inherently negotiate these issues. Parks by their nature and history are intricately designed and shared cultural and ecological public spaces, reflecting and evolving with the times we live in. A landscape free of constructed barriers and virtually free of military tensions could link disconnected communities and various ecologies adjacent to the border, developing a renewed identity built on dialogue, stewardship and international collaboration. Border towns would have a renewed amenity at their door, capitalising on the tourism that would result from the border’s enhanced role. Border crossing stations with a public park attached to them would make them community hubs and meeting points that go beyond transitory, transactional and often uncomfortable border experiences.
all images courtesy of Andreas Rutkauskas
Peace Arch Park, British Columbia/ Washington Douglas Port of Entry, BC
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Andrey Chernykh
How would this work? To start, the program must be a complex of pedestrian trails, picnic areas, conservation zones, lookout features, pavilions, and gardens. The International Peace Garden located on Turtle Mountain straddling the border between Manitoba and North Dakota, and the Peace Arch Park shared between Douglas, British Columbia and Blaine, Washington are precedents that outline how such a border zone is accessed — people from both sides can enter these parks without officially crossing through to the other side. Coordinated visitation and stewardship to make the border landscape ecologically healthier and more accessible, enhances security along the border, reducing expenditure on surveillance technology and staff. A multi-use border trail that runs east-west weaving in an out of the cutline is an uninterrupted parkland used both for pleasure and patrol. Rest nodes, pavilions and gardens: tourist destinations? additional revenue for border municipalities? maintenance centres for the border itself? While the border is under federal jurisdiction, an expanded border zone engages state and provincial interests. Tied by strong branding and a bilateral agreement between the US and Canada, this park would potentially reinforce better cross-border collaboration and cooperation among IBC, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, US State Park Service, Provincial Parks, Parks Canada, and various conservation agencies on both sides. Does it become a UNESCO site — a model for reducing conflict and for the demilitarisation of conflicting territories? A border park is an opportunity to reaffirm the role of the park in the twenty-first century as a powerful mechanism capable of integrating various systems for the benefit of people and the earth. Time for us to walk the border in our minds and dream of how it should be. As said at the beginning, it is a long, undefended border. lnstead of sliding further into increased surveillance and para-militarisation, might we think of cooperation, co- responsibility and our identical geography, environment and ecological potential?
We’ve been sharing the border inadvertently for so long, it is time to become deliberate. O
all images courtesy of Andreas Rutkauskas
Chief Mountain port of entry Monument No. 276, Waterton Lakes, Alberta
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the Common Border fionn byrne , diana guo , j iahui huang
In our cities, property lines are contiguous. Where one use of land stops, another starts. In most cases, this also means that where one claim of ownership ends, so too does another begin. The sidewalk, then, is a publicly owned circulation route that enables free movement between independently owned parcels of land. It allows for unbroken movement without crossing through private property. When we step off the sidewalk, we are either on land that is dedicated to some other use, such as for car traffic, or claimed by a private owner. Cities around the world are an amalgamation of land that is owned, either publicly or privately, governed by laws and controlled by force. Yet even in the wilderness, we find signs that oblige us to stay on the trail. Wherever we go, we are constantly following predefined paths. Given this contemporary situation of being unable to pass through any city, suburb or even rural land, without following pre-established circulation routes, it seems worth exploring alternative models of land organisation and ownership.
If you have ventured out for a walk in the past several months and have been determined to remain six feet apart from others, you will have temporarily stepped off a sidewalk to avoid a passerby. This act draws your focus to your feet, as you navigate a suddenly unfamiliar ground. On occasion, you find yourself gauging the height from a sidewalk to the road. Other times, you are caught delicately tip-toeing over grass or walking through a rough terrain of tree roots, long grasses, and puddles. You may easily conclude that the landscape beyond the sidewalk is dangerous and messy, and you will hurry to pass and get back on your way. On other occasions, the ground beyond the sidewalk seems so impassible that you come to a complete halt only a foot from the path to let another pedestrian pass. In every case, however, the moment passes quickly. As carefree as we walk the city along paths of poured concrete, more than anything when we transgress this surface our behaviour indicates a truth we implicitly understand: we do not belong beyond the public sidewalk as this adjacent ground is otherwise spoken for.
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enclosure of the commons A history of land ownership would be incomplete without reference to mid- eighteenth-century England, when a radical transformation of the organisation of land
the common border Our speculative fiction begins in 1764 with the passing of an Act of Enclosure. Let us imagine that this bill approved the measuring, mapping and subsequent division of the lands within a typical township, the White Ladies Aston parish in Worcestershire, for example. A survey team took stock of the open and common fields, common meadows, common grounds, heaths and wastelands surrounding the village. They would also survey the existing buildings, paths and carriageways. The team brought their field books and chain. At sixty-six feet long, the chain subdivided into four rods or one hundred links. It was closely associated with agricultural practice, as ten square chains neatly equals an acre. The chain was the standard unit of measure used not only to survey England but also to map and organise land in the colonies, especially in North America. We will imagine that the survey team made an error. In their work, they used an Irish chain, a variant of the English chain that measured eighty-four feet long. Without realising the discrepancy in dimensions, the surveyors mapped the entire parish. Individuals subsequently claimed title to the newly divided common land, dispossessing many and forcing the landless from where they had lived. The new landowners set about marking their properties by planting perimeter hedgerows, using the enclosure map as a guide to determine the edges of their land. Oddly, the boundaries of their properties never seemed to match what was mapped.
However, it is not the goal of this essay to recount the history of enclosure and the disappearance of the commons. For this, one could turn to Raymond Williams’s 1973 The Country and the City , Ann Bermingham’s 1986 Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740 – 1860 , or more recently to Jeanette M. Neeson’s 1993 Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 . Rather, this design essay presents a work of speculative fiction. Whereas design fields commonly use a method of working where a critical position on the past is used to conceive of possible futures, the images here establish an alternative history, where contemporary critiques of the past are contextualised within that past. In contrast to proposing how to improve our future, designing an alternative history prompts an imagining of our present had we acted differently in the past. Thus, design can be a tool to help us understand the failings of the present.
had a significant social and economic impact. This time was marked by the
enclosure of common land, where land that had previously been open for communal uses, such as grazing, gathering provisions, or cultivation, was physically enclosed by fences or hedges. Powerful landholders took ownership of these newly divided lands, which drove independent cultivators and part-time labourers to growing industrial towns where they sought employment and eventually comprised a new working class. Thus, enclosure, being a form of legalised seizure of land, formed the foundation of a developing agrarian capitalism. To this day, our contemporary capitalist economy remains bound to the premise that land can be possessed, and that ownership of land is an indicator of social status. The enclosure of the commons signalled the elimination of land with indeterminate use, and any remaining public lands were assigned specific purposes. Even parks today are rule-bound and dedicated to leisure and recreation. One cannot, for example, pasture a goat in a public park, nor grow vegetables without prior approval in a sanctioned ‘community garden’. So, when we step off a sidewalk, we step onto land that is likely owned by a separate entity and certainly with some other use, even if just dedicated to being unused, as in the case of the residential lawn.
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private but shared The eighteen-foot Common Border is essentially invisible. Quick growing vegetation like hawthorn or blackthorn were typically planted in hedgerows, their density blocking livestock from crossing between fields. Of course, a line of hawthorn would also conceal lower activity within the border zone. Above these shrubs, trees like ash, elm, and oak were planted for firewood, and lines of these trees would screen the borders’ upper reaches. The planted border, because it is hidden, is distinct from the surrounding fields. Importantly, visual openness was not only a feature of agrarian landscapes but also a design goal for landscape architects of the time. Raymond Williams, for example, argues that the control of views was integral to the physical structure of the new agrarian capitalist economy: ‘The clearing of parks as ‘Arcadian’ prospects depended on the completed system of exploitation of the agricultural and genuinely pastoral lands beyond the park boundaries. There, too, an order was being imposed: social and economic but also physical. The mathematical grids of the enclosure awards, with their straight hedges and straight roads, are contemporary with the natural curves and scatterings of the park scenery. And yet they are related parts of the same process – superficially opposed in taste but only because in the one case the land is being organised for production, where tenants and labourers will work, while in the other case it is being organised for consumption – the view, the ordered proprietary repose, the prospect.’
While we are pushing the plausibility of this fiction, let us imagine that the error in measurement leaves eighteen feet between each property in the parish, the difference between one Irish chain and the English. The former boundary line between properties becomes an occupiable area bordered by two parallel hedgerows. Thus, while the traditional commons were enclosed, a new linear territory was formed, the Common Border. This border zone is unique in two ways – it is private and it is interconnected. This combination enables us to imagine a common private space – private, not in the sense of being individualised, but in the sense that decisions and actions are taken beyond the reach of the public sphere and the influence of the market, and communal meaning that resources are shared beyond the typical familial unit.
Visibility meant control, and landholders were determined to actively observe their property from their estates. To be provided privacy, therefore, was to be granted freedom. Of course, the now well-known inverse condition was being formulated around the same time by Jeremy Bentham. His model of the Panopticon, described in the 1791 publication, Panopticon; Or, the Inspection House , imagined an architecture that policed individuals’ actions by forcing them into a space of constant observation. Thus, to grant privacy means both to be hidden from view and to be beyond the reach of systems of social and economic control. Today, more and more of our interactions are mediated and observed by corporations and the state. In a coffee shop or across social media platforms, we make visible our actions and interactions. Popular films like Jeff Orlowski’s (2020) The Social Dilemma shock us by demonstrating our lack of privacy, especially when it comes to our technology use. We modify our digital behaviour after watching such films to regain privacy, but where do we go to find physical spaces where our behaviour avoids observation? Traditionally, it has been the bedroom, yet our communications technologies are highlighting what authors like Ulrich Beck have previously warned: ‘The private sphere is not what it appears to be: a sphere separated from the environment… Anyone who does not see this misunderstands an essential and basic characteristic of social ways of living in the phase of advanced modernity,
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independent but integrated
Not, indeed, the feudal castle, not the baronial hall, but the home of the individual man — the home of that family of equal rights, which continually separates and continually reforms itself in the new world — the republican home, built by no robbery of the property of another class, maintained by no infringement of a brother’s rights; the beautiful, rural, unostentatious, moderate home of the country gentleman, large enough to minister to all the wants, necessities, and luxuries of a republican, and not too large or too luxurious to warp the life or manners of his children.’ Downing’s publication includes plans for multiple homes, the first of which is ‘A Small Cottage for a Working-man’, simply built of wood and with the largest room measuring eighteen feet wide. Accepting Downing’s critique, our imaginary Common Border scheme describes an ideal cottage with the same overall floor area but scales the widest room to just eight feet across. The result is a long, narrow house that fits comfortably within the eighteen-foot border zone, built of timber harvested from the adjacent hedgerows. In addition to providing opportunity for housing, residents would also need access to the resources and sustenance that land provides. A strategy for the amount of land
The second condition of the Common Border is that it is interconnected. Many networked spaces, either circulatory or infrastructural, are typically publicly owned, but in most cases, the land these spaces occupy is dedicated to moving products or consumers to market. As an alternative, this border zone is a public space that prioritises production and rest. It is difficult to list similar examples, contemporaneous or contemporary. Again, the community garden, but they are more decorative than functional. We would never expect to live off the products of a community garden plot. Similarly, those who live on public land are more often than not considered homeless, not because they are lacking a home but because they are lacking ownership of property and, therefore, land. A theme of many utopian visions since the disappearance of the commons has been to grant the family unit sufficient land to independently provide the necessities of life – housing, food, and access to necessary resources. Writing at the time when most of England had been enclosed, Andrew Jackson Downing argued that it was still possible to build a fair and equal agrarian society in America by avoiding the same manner of organising land as in England. In his 1851 book The Architecture of Country Houses , Downing wrote optimistically: ‘But the true home still remains to us.
the overlapping and networking of the emerging individualized privacy with the seemingly separate areas and production sectors of education, consumption, transportation, production, the labor market, and so on.’ Accentuated by the ongoing pandemic, video communications software emphasise the collapse of social and economic spheres into our private spaces. We are being made more acutely aware that few spaces beyond observation and control exist. The Common Border is an eighteenth- century linear territory of resistance to the totalising expansion of surveillance. It is not visible on maps or on the ground, yet it is a space where the dispossessed and all others who were unable or unwilling to conform to the demands of the new economy are welcomed and can move freely and unobserved. By appropriating the contemporaneous technologies of control, both mapping and its physical manifestation in the hedgerow, the Common Border succeeds in opening our imagination to a private way of living and engaging with space. From the map and the hedgerow to satellites and smart phones, a contemporary proposal which sought to increase freedom by granting privacy would necessarily have to design the boundaries of this space to actively limit their transparency.
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speculative fiction of the Common Border considers an expanded notion of common land, envisioning space that is private but shared as well as independent but integrated. The fiction also foregrounds two premises that utopian visions have typically accepted without question or critique: both Downing and Wright premised their utopias on a normative patriarchal family and the necessity of land ownership. Downing and Wright determined the family to be the nucleus of a new society and economy. Downing’s vision positioned a pioneering man protecting his family against a wild environment, while Wright, in contrast, pitted the family, led by a “manly man,” against the corruptive forces of the city, or symbolically, the failures of other men. Their utopias are antagonistic at their core, setting man against nature and other men and expressing skepticism of social structures outside the family, explicitly rejecting spaces of communal living. However, neither their definition of family nor their support for individualism are useful today, as past definitions of what constitutes a family no longer reflect the social organisation of our society and global challenges, such as pandemics, climate change, and economic inequality, require collective action. A contemporary utopian vision, therefore, would prioritise mutualism over competition. This, furthermore, suggests that our modification of Downing’s cottage is a failure, as the architecture remains a physical manifestation of the self-sufficient normative family. The design of the cottage demands greater investment in finding new spatial modes of co-habitation and resource exchange that will facilitate “… breaking up the false alternative between family conservation and market conformity.” The new configurations must not work to preserve the traditional family but to imagine architectures that will allow “Men and women themselves… to invent and test out new forms of living together beyond feudally ascribed roles.” If we are being optimistic, we can hope that the erosion of privacy in the bedroom, as a consequence of our technology use, will correspond to an extension of obligations to a social group beyond the family and the corresponding confines of the house. However, this is also an architectural problem. How do we extend the responsibility and privacy historically afforded to the family beyond the boundaries of the home and into a landscape of mutual care? It is worth remembering that the commons of the eighteenth century was neither private nor public space, despite expressing characteristics of both. Resources of the commons were shared between families, as in the public sphere, however, the space was also beyond the control of the nascent capitalist economy, as in the private sphere.
Finally, returning to where we started, we might wonder what would happen if we had land that was neither claimed by the public nor by private entities. Downing and Wright believed that each citizen should own land. However, imagining the existence of an alternative commons that avoided land parcellation leads us to ponder the outcome if Downing or Wright had taken a theoretical step further and rejected land ownership outright and instead envisioned a model of free access and fair use. If we are to address global challenges that are products of our social and economic structures, such as climate change, then our present utopias will have to move past Downing and Wright. Beyond a commitment to individual land ownership exists design speculations that envision ways of living on unowned and un-zoned land with indeterminate usage. These speculations would lead us to ponder the land on which we tread when we step off the sidewalk today. Would this land serve a function? What new relationships would we have with this unclaimed land? Our imaginary mid-eighteenth-century proposal is a model of land organisation that projects a shared private space on a newly emerging capitalist economy. Private here does not mean individualised but instead indicates a space that remains independent from the outside economy, and land in this context is not zoned to extract use value but is shared and mutually improved. Set in the past, this design speculation renders an instance of ‘what if?’ Pondering the answer leads to the follow-up, ‘so, what now?’ O
to which every home should have access was at the core of a later American utopian vision. Almost one hundred years after Downing, Frank Lloyd Wright described the ‘Broadacre City’ in his 1932 book The Disappearing City : ‘On the basis of an acre to the family, architecture would come again into the service, not of the landlord, but of the man himself as an organic feature of his own ground. Architecture would no longer be merely adapted, commercialized space to be sold and resold… Ground space is the essential basis of the new city of a new life.’ Wright assessed one acre as the minimum amount of land to sustain a family. He envisioned landholders occupied in intensive farming, living off of what they produced and sharing any excess at market. In this society, Wright characterised families as independent but integrated. Wright imagines a new agrarian economy and, as if trying to recreate the lost commons of England, he says of the farmer, “He does not need many fences except those that are a part of his buildings.” If one acre of land sufficed for Wright, we will not ask for more in the Common Border. Just as we stretched Downing’s utopian cottage, so too can we scale Wright’s ideal parcel of land. At eighteen feet across, one parcel in the Common Border would extend close to 2,500 feet in length, which is less than twice around a running track. With commoners circulating between the crops, each home would work enough land to produce the necessities and achieve the independence that Wright sought. At the same time, each home would be a comfortable eight-minute walk apart from one another through the border’s path, which facilitates local exchange of necessities and regional specialties without relying on a separate infrastructure of commerce that results in the accumulation of wealth central to Downing and Wright’s critiques. This speculative fiction thus preempts the utopian schemes subsequent to the eighteenth century that responded to the radical reorganisation of land prompted by the enclosure of the commons in England. The Common Border pushes the essence of Downing and Wright’s critiques back in time and spatialises an alternative past. new forms of living and new relations to land Today, a century after Wright’s Broadacre City, our critique of land organisation advances. As Downing and Wright made clear, the organisation of land is foundational to our society and economy. Understanding and addressing longstanding structural inequalities, thus, requires experimenting in alternative modes of organising land. The
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