Seminar WiSe 2025/26
Leander Nowack

Mapping Governmental Architecture
Border Hinterlands 

Europe has recently experienced an unprecedented process of re-bordering and fortification. Not only has the Schengen Area reinforced its outer borders, even within Schengen, national states have started to prioritize control over freedom of movement. These political shifts have had a direct effect on space itself and have produced a number of spatial measures: border check-points, fences, detention camps and other architectures of the executive. Aside from these, secondary and tertiary spaces are fundamental to the functioning of the border regime. These include police stations and bases, data-centers, production sites, deportation centers, state buildings, and many more, that contribute to the complex entanglement of border practices with our built environment. Together, these spaces form a rhizomatic network that controls not only the flow of people, information and matter, but also the logics of their interaction. 

This seminar seeks to critically engage with this network. We will first establish a shared knowledge base in relation to recent border practices. We will then relate these practices to the spaces they produce, but also spaces where they are organized and codified. Together we will identify and track typologies, types and relations of spaces and work jointly on the combination of individual findings into shared cartographies, that make visible entry and exit points, nodes and bifurcations, orders and entropy of the border rhizome. The goal of the seminar is to overcome linear narrative structures and map out the constant territorialization and deterritorialization of the border regime. Individual or biographical experiences of border encounters are welcome to be explored.

This is an X-Student research group funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the State of Berlin as part of the Excellence Strategy of the Federal and State Governments by the Berlin University Alliance.

Photo: © Leander Nowack

Contact
Leander Nowack
nowack@campus.tu-berlin.de

Download poster here.