Search

In the past 15 years a series of apparently unconnected architectural events and assemblies have appeared in the immediate vicinity of Spain's Southern Border to improve the constructed border's functionality and capacity to respond. This paper addresses the dynamic shift the contemporary border is undergoing according to the detection of three strategies: seal, delay and contain. The critical cartography and forensic reconstruction of a series of events allow us to demonstrate the typological transformation shifting the weight of stable constructions to dynamic and instantaneous assemblies. These can no longer be said to be static solutions, but a territorial mechanism or assembly that configure and define the border. While the border architecture is a clear materialisation of sovereignty, it is necessary to question the territorial model, which is no longer represented by the rule but by the condition of operability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking Spain as a case study, this paper analyses the institutional production of border apparatus within reception countries, which affect very diverse areas of the daily life of migrants. Hence, rather than as a rigid line dividing the population into included and excluded, the border is approached as a flexible governance mechanism that differentially regulates access to rights. Starting by analysing the formal and informal operation of some of the institutions that manage the process (immigration offices, social services and the healthcare system), an attempt is made to give an account of the norms, requirements, administrative procedures and infra-penal mechanisms that especially affect vulnerable groups, stratifying the recognition of rights and condemning subjects to a legal limbo in which their legitimacy is - at best - blurred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]