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.
on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches 18
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