The Power of Limit

This project analyses the field of current geographic political partitions offering an interdisciplinary evaluation able to describe the space in the borders as ‘narrative beginning’, as ‘contact infrastructure’ that crosses territories where inhabitants are neither citizens nor refugees but only ‘border people’. At the end, cognitive horizons able to breach the Wall, going beyond the political-territorial divisions which have always existed in a world which is a sort of more or less fortified bulwark able to suggest ‘border worlds’ that are ‘city’, ‘border land’. We observe a porous border with a rhizomatic trend that reformulates a synergistic relationship between the individual and the territory in an antinomic game of actions and reactions. Appears an idea of multiplicity in which the ‘rhizome-like’ structure becomes decentralized configurations where each part can be connected to another without go through specific points, as the infrastructure network or even the virtual system of global contacts. So, the space in the borders results in a new map of the delocalized space that increasingly requires of a design thinking that, on the basis of critiques of data, variables and statistics, sometimes becomes ‘hard’ and sometimes ‘elastic’, sometimes ‘insurmountable’ and sometimes ‘flexible’ and that finds an answer in the connivance between opposites and in the territorial synergy.


Introduction
This research suggests a compositional approach to be implemented rejecting the claim of a scientific rigor in favors of a blurred thought or a polyvalent logic, a logic in which each proposition can be attributed a degree of truth. We do not want to propose doing and thinking as a cure but to redesign a concrete spatiality made up of stories and fragments stitched up by the compositional movement that finds an answer in the antithesis. Ultimately, a design approach that interprets architecture as a synthesis of community rhythm and that does not govern processes but it reacts to them in a non-deterministic way but rather oriented towards highlighting the traces it encounters and collected data. Therefore, the chosen precisely as the border between Italy and Northern Europe and which is the voice of wars and agreements, therefore subject to a process of changes both in the political-geographical function and in government membership. but always in itself an obstacle to the passage. In fact, the Alps, from Hannibal's elephants to the Roman legions, always represented a limit to be violated, an interrupted horizon beyond which the Other must be conquered. However, that border is also singular for other reasons as it is a place where belonging, even today, is discovered to be uncertain, jagged, combined with each other despite the fact that the maps speak clearly about the layout of the limit and therefore of the diversity not only of landscape but also language and culture. It is observed that, going beyond, crossing the threshold we find ourselves in another country where the organizational political system is different and where the contamination between narratives gradually fades, giving space to the formation of a middle culture that preserves something of one and the something of other. It could be said that the border, in this case, is a 'non-border', that is a constriction dictated by more or less far-sighted choices and today characterized by contamination, by the encounter and dialogue between cultures that indifferently speak the language of Dante and that of Goethe. On a global scale and in an increasingly significant way, a storm of emerging nationalisms, devoted to isolationism, have been closing and increasingly fortifying their territorial limits, imposing a rift between neighboring countries and envisaging an ambivalent reality in which the antinomy becomes a reason of the place. Therefore, a reality of compromise advances, like uninhabited space when it is interval or also union, as Simmel described: "Its function, which until now was of separation, can also become a conjunction. Meetings between people who would be impracticable in the field of one or the other can take place in neutral territory". (Simmel G., Sociological Theory, 1989, p. 597). And so it was also on the Alpine front at the end of the First World War when the Austro-Hungarian army was shattered in the storm of emerging nationalisms and the Italian army wanted to occupy all the possible, until to arrive in Innsbruck, with the intent to conquer as much as possible and put a large gap between Italy and the ex-enemy. Therefore it was outlined the time for the compromise needed to establish a border corridor between the Kingdom of Italy and the new Federal Republic of Austria, located not along the cultural-linguistic border line but along the Alpine crossroads. The Brenner Pass thus assumed the role of clear separation along the north-south direction of Europe and the territories that gravitated along the border line, such as the autonomous provinces of Bolzano, Trento, the Tyrol, to make intermediate realities attesting "a little of one and a little of the other". In short, spaces where the juxtaposition, the mixture, the right compromise today identify themselves as a prime rule, being places with common histories, interests, infrastructures and development prospects, in spite of national affiliations. It is in this complex field that the present research develops. Research interested in the frontier territorial reality that today is serving the sovereign and xenophobic wind which, in the border areas most influenced by the migratory flow, sees structures erected along the border lines, regardless of the explosive effects that all this provokes spatially and also outlining an explicit spatial dualism: on one hand as a land of nothingness or rather of control, surveillance and on the other 'suspended land, of waiting' which can prove to be an opportunity for www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/uspa Urban Studies and Public Administration Vol. 4, No. 4, 2021 33 Published by SCHOLINK INC. territorial development. Land, this last, willing to organize innovative systems paradoxically guided to accommodate everything and the opposite one in a state of multiple coexistence characterized by uncertainty, misunderstanding and in general by imbalance. All this happens in spite of the individual wishes or good intentions that gravitate on the border as demonstrated by the border of the Alps which was once a war front and which today has transcended, at least in part, that 'defensive' reality that recognized, in the curtain of the Alps, the useful divisive structure and which now recognizes (despite the many difficulties it always causes in terms of coexistence, dialogue between different national identities) a being together thanks to a communion of intentions, interests, infrastructures and development prospects. Thus we discover a Region of borders capable to go beyond national affiliations and building particular architectures, characteristics of that disputed reality, such as the declination of dialect linguistic forms, customs and fashions. At this point, if we shift our gaze to the migratory field and therefore to the construction of border barriers, the conformation of place become dynamic in its response to the wall, to the border closure, and it does not matter if this movement is obtained from a state of encounter or of economic hardship, the fact is that peoples are moving and the closure of borders and therefore the construction of real 'infrastructures of fear', designed to keep beyond, affects the territory that is slowly developing in ways always in a state of temporal and spatial suspension. Thus a contemporary world is advancing which on one hand closes and on the other moves and we know that the relationship with space and time is constitutive of the way of being of a society. This definition can be traced back to the Simmel sociology which, in particular, highlights a distinction between social and systemic integration: the first one linked to common practices and interconnections between people who are present together, while the second is related to social links and mechanisms among themselves different.
Having said this, it is necessary to examine the reality of boundary walls not only in their administrative function of territorial closure but also in the consequent territorial repercussions and therefore of the settlement and infrastructural system that goes hand in hand. Just think about commercial exchanges, the spatial perception but also the different use depending on the front in which you are. The areal image that comes from it on one hand the empty land devoted only to the control and the armed forces while on the other the chaos, the multitude of people waiting, suspended in a state of permanent temporariness and starting from the simmelian assumption that allows us to conceive space for the way in which it influences social relations, the reality of the border, in its spatial dimension, proves to be the explanatory material of the present time which can be defined as the age of walls. In this way the border closure conquers the double role of ambivalent scenario subject to the construction of the border within which social relations take shape. In this case, space enters into a relationship with the pre-existing: it generates contacts and exclusions depending on where one is. In short, the institutional nature of the wall allows us to conceive the place in the way in which it is influenced by social relations and therefore organized in two contrasting ways: on the one hand the void and on the other the whole, and this is why the borderland recognizes itself. Ambivalent, able to unite opposing organizational spatiality and formally recognized according to www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/uspa Urban Studies and Public Administration Vol. 4, No. 4, 2021 34 Published by SCHOLINK INC. the role played. At this point the borderland can be seen as a precondition for important political-social transformations and for this reason, the transition from an unlimited liberal organization to a rationally controlled organization requires the spatial dimension as a foundation from which spatiality assumes independent characteristics and expression of State power which manifests itself in the limit of physicality. The wall thus declares to be an infrastructure in itself but also an 'infrastructure of infrastructures', that is: the beginning of an articulated system of actions and reactions, of connections and territorial transformations.
The result is a language of the urban, which, where inhabited temporarily, over time, takes on an increasingly consolidated form so as to reveal itself as a bubble of urbanity by the antinomic organization.
Thus a spatiality appears in which opposites coexist starting from being: barrier, 'limit of limits' but also bridge between subjects and objects oriented to build relationships, and to develop a broader, common infrastructure. On closer inspection, in fact, the border closure of some states proves to be a synergistic action-reaction to a new landscape program that affects a wider spectrum of projects willing to connect between direct and indirect interaction, between staying and going, between the permanent and the temporary and never forgetting the fundamental principles of ambivalence and changeability typical of border reality.

Where Is the Boundary?
The boundary, as a line that separates States and Nations, is an abstraction of the space in its administrative political meaning and its physical spatial materialization, made manifest in the construction of structures useful for dividing places otherwise recognized as part of the same governmental system. Thinking of the word boundary, be it a line on paper or physical experience, brings with itself a collective eidetic value that cartography summarizes in segments, more or less marked according to the represented value, and which, in fact, conveys a difference, a reality here and there and implicitly of an us and them. As said, the mountain range of the Alps, recognized as the northern border of Italy, today divides a territory that is the voice of a history of binational collaborations, of economic, social and environmental ties establishing a region in between that crosses the border partition imposed by institutional political will and which refers for example to another front, the one between the USA and Mexico, today particularly subject to a strong questioning given the migratory pressure and in concert at the closure of the border which reflects significantly on the territory. In short, from that first stone placed at the crossing between San Diego and Tijuana at the beginning of 1990, the border has been extending towards the east to fortify itself more and more until it declares itself today as: a fracture, a moment of transition, a pause, a declaration of institutional division of one on the other. That social, spatial, formal change... of which the barrier 'becomes a spokesperson' in fact, however, is blurred as one enters the country to reposition itself a little further, thus recognizing oneself no longer a line but a surface or better: an intertwining of points and segments who become 'memories' of one part or the other and who, in the psycho-spatial limit, discover compromise or rather coexistence, mutual acceptance as well as the experience of an unprecedented territorial belonging. In short, we recognize a region of www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/uspa Urban Studies and Public Administration Vol. 4, No. 4, 2021 35 Published by SCHOLINK INC. borders that becomes porous, with a rhizomatic trend and in which the idea of boundary, commonly understood as an interruption, conquers another image, not only cartographic but also spatial, which breaks that border infrastructure, erected only to hinder an indivisible reality and to identify an interconnected system made up of grafts and cross-references, cross-border mixes and environmental and social continuities, evidence of a future urban architectural idea and also territorial management. At this point, without nothing detracting from the contemporary conceptions of borders rooted in historical cartography, developed for navigation and to recognize the institutional limits of a country, there is an alternative history of maps that affects the experience, atmosphere and perception of the place. By visualizing the importance of cross-border networks in the construction of lived reality, it is possible to alter the eidetic memory of boundary and redesign the way in which we live and organize the territory.
Given the objectivity of the maps that draw places in their cognitive synthesis, it is agreed that the way in which they are drawn implies particular cognitive experiences which, although they go beyond the scientific value of the cartographic discipline, suggests another that affects the experience, atmosphere, perception and territorial belonging. For example, think of Alexander von Humboldt's maps that highlight the different ecologies by marking their plot or using hatching and shading so as to tell and outline mystical atmospheres that go beyond the exclusively scientific value to conquer more. In this sense we can only remember psycho-geography, which was born with Friedrich Ratzel in the midnineteenth century, according to which the relations between environment and nature are considered and analyzed in a univocal way, i.e., from nature to man and not vice versa. From here it is interesting to note that a bitterly critical subversion of the use and development of urban environments has been taking shape, considered as an imposition tool of the ruling class against citizens who want cities made of different, temporary, alterable and flexible pieces. Little wonder if the barricaded border advance envisaged today, almost everywhere, outlines a boundary system as an oppositional political machine corresponding to a game of actions and reaction, of inequalities and contrasts that at the same time refers to an idea of passage between different environments. On the contrary, interpretive cartography demonstrates relationships between places and space that go beyond merely scientific information such as: distance and measured, and communicate information related to reality, to perceive and experience a place in its history and settlement-territorial structure. Having said that, it is agreed that the territorial analysis based on GIS or Nolli is still necessary and basic in the objective survey of the spatial structure, however it is possible to go further and cartography, which can also be a tool to develop a social, cultural and experiential context, expands the usual spatial image of the state of affairs and foreshadows another potential. Therefore, the interpretative maps suggest that the place, in its experience, shows the actual social, environmental, formal-structural value and identity.
At this point, the cognitive experience of the territory finds an illustrative expression to explain the frontier line as a more complex issue and bearer of values, reasons and formal spatial relationships, as well as, it is implicit, only the dimensional spatial science. Thus a more open border than one might think is recognized, a more articulated and dynamic territory than the border barrier does not want to impose, despite the fact that the border continues to exist, to fortify itself, to close and as such to establish an interior and an exterior, a native and a foreigner, a rich and a poor person ... In short, an inevitable difference, inherent precisely in the disjunctive act and which is opposed by the fluctuation of peoples and cultures which, like air, water, flora, fauna ... it goes beyond everything, it goes beyond, it does not stop, it moves a little further if the road is closed. No matter how much a government closes the administrative spatial limits, there is always a way to transgress them and give rise to compromise, to integration, from which porosity advances and the urban architectural morphological variety reveals an identifying quality.

Antinomy at the Barricaded Border
The border is the area of maximum interactivity and organic development. It is permeable space, if only one thinks in ecological terms in which different species thrive, mix and exchange. It follows that the border, understood as an infrastructural machine intended to divide adjacent spatial realities, declares itself in stark contrast to the nature of the places that cross it. Made a paradox in itself, the border therefore turns out to be more porous than one would like to believe. Space that contains the possibility of integration, in which the contact between the difference is inevitable and the cultural confrontation obligatory. Then, the border is a place where new ideas and new identities can emerge, where the intimacy of difference allows for a new form of cosmopolitanism and recognizing oneself as a place where interaction can serve as a source of renewal and revitalization.
In this scenario of territorial limits and fortifications, imposed between States and Nations, this research takes its steps in particular: starting from a wide-ranging cartographic survey of all the walls that divide the world which denounce a movement global political space division increasingly oriented towards closure and 'isolation'. That said, through an interdisciplinary assessment, the border space is interpreted as a 'narrative beginning', as a 'contact infrastructure' that crosses territories whose inhabitants are neither citizens nor refugees but only 'border people'.
Then mapping begins as an operating research tool, not only for communication, but also for analysis and architectural design. For this, the architectural project cannot proceed except through the critical, conscious study of the political, cultural, environmental divisive plan that identifies it and determines the design reason oriented towards a conceptualization that goes beyond the issues strictly related to making www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/uspa construction of the defensive structure of the barricaded border and it suggests an articulated study capable of explaining the elements, processes and relationships between areas and their boundaries that constantly change and 'reformulate'. Therefore, cognitive horizons are envisaged capable of violating the wall and revealing the boundary as an amplified spatial reality: more porous than isolated, through a reformulation of the synergistic relationship between individual and territory in an antinomic game of actions and reactions in which the basic structure assumes rhizomatic trend. The contradictory is accepted as an authentic force through which to interpret this singular urbanity, poised between structural and natural, which is taking shape not as an addition product but rather an element of it that is structured in the coexistence of opposites and resolves itself in the understanding of the place. It therefore appears a complex reality, in continuous metamorphosis, an urban reality made up of multitudes of hybrid and inclusive spaces from which we can renegotiate spatial, social and economic relationships and then an urban architectural development born 'from below'.
Then the research outlines new ways of modelling the knowledge and interpretation of 'places at the limit' as common good oriented to design a 'border city' with multiple form and identity. An opportunity to be able to critically trace conscious future scenarios of the urban and territorial metamorphosis underway, remaining in any case, within a frame of meaning capable of fueling change starting from public and private actions.

Buildings of Fear
The Transnational Institute of Amsterdam defined, in the 2019 "Building Walls" report, "Buildings of fear" the Walls that divide the world and which prove to be the first answer both in the past and in the present, of Nations in crisis, or rather of democracies concerned only with claiming territorial independence. They, in the name of fear, evoke a need for isolation to protect the national identity that induce to fortify their territories borders with more or less high walls. So, after the initial race for freedom, for the much acclaimed globalization, many countries started to worry about excessive opening, dictated by the process of overcoming even planetary limits, and started to claim a return of borders. New border lines have been outlined, almost 30.000 km, in Europe and Central Asia and other ones have been reinforced with defensive walls. Suffice to say that, according to the Transnational Institute of Amsterdam, from the nineties to today also the member states of the European Union have built almost 1.000 km of border walls to contrast migratory flows.
So a world not so much globalized and hyper-connected, 'is advancing,' but rather divided by borders and barriers that isolate and protect from 'all those who knock on doors'. States continue to want to control, to monitor their own space and provoke that 'obsession with borders' as Michel Foucher defined in "L'obsession des frontiers" (M. Foucher, 2007) and which led to the resurrection of physical limits, in effect, multiplied, on a global level, between the end of the 'secolo breve' (from the essay The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 to the main events of the 20th century from the First World War to the collapse of the Soviet Union) and the launch of the 'War www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/uspa Urban Studies and Public Administration Vol. 4, No. 4, 2021 38 Published by SCHOLINK INC. on terror', or that war that feeds on continuous upsurge from autumn 2001 until now and that has sent the world to pieces, divided by a thousand and more walls, intended not as 'backdrops, but agents', as Wendy Brown defined them, in the 2016 re-edition of the "Walled States. Waning Sovereignty". They can be defined living and active structures that organize the lives of millions of people on the move and, more than the State, validate themselves as: institutional identities, security warranty, 'supreme entities' called to establish a hierarchy, or rather the position of an individual in the social space. Not wonder, the limit is self-validating: a machine useful to organize relationships between subjects, as Georg Simmel explained: "it is not a spatial fact with sociological effects but a sociological fact that is spatially formed" (Simmel G., 1989, p. 531).
Therefore a world is envisaged in which the barrier is recognized as the general rule, the rhythm of an organizational system articulated on several scales: from the 'broadminded' one that divides States and Nations, to the 'narrow' one that organizes the space of the ordinary 'urban' interested at distinguishing public and private. The numbers speak clearly: in recent years, in particular since the fall of the Berlin wall, more than seventy walls have been built or are under construction and since the Covid-19 health crisis the division has declared itself the first convention that governs everything and that closes in an intricate network of 'isolated paths', ordinated to protect, governing both the spatial and the social dimension. This, in particular following the epidemic spread, saw many phases: first the Chinese then the Italians and then all world, confining, closing themselves in their administrative territorial limits.
Limits that, in some way, have mocked of us and of our fears, proving to be so narrow that they engulf us in a short circuit that proclaims the victory of the limit and that, paradoxically (the epidemic is everywhere and spreads everywhere), prevailed so as to reduce our daily life to a small fragments of fragile hyper-connected space, more virtual than real. It is not known what the future will be, if the desire for revenge on the lack of freedom will lead to the collapse of the wall system, or rather it will inexorably spread taking on small and large forms, known or unexpected. Based on the current state and the movements in progress, we could hypothesize a monumentalization of the limit: both on a large and small scale, so as to observe it also moving with us, redefining and renewing itself every time. Limit that, as said, could mock of us and engulf us in a dimensional short circuit revealing to us a new map of the world in which social relations, spatial contacts, activities and disciplines of knowledge are reshaped and renegotiated in response to this new 'measure of the world'. At this point, it is appropriate to ask what will be the 'measure' of the real world, what and many will be the walls that divide the world? In response it could be said that a world from which we start and never arrive arises. This is a boundless world, a global world that involves sometimes the destruction of all barriers and sometimes pushes the closure of Fear (of which warned Bauman) or for defense. In the contemporary world we observed two parallel movement: the affirmation of a topography of globalization, theorized as the overcoming of a border topography and one opposite of the 'globalized fractionalism'. So it progress a world without borders, agreeing with the boundless immaterial, with the virtual movement advertised everywhere but that in any case clashes with the border materialism. In effect, we reveal a www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/uspa Urban Studies and Public Administration Vol. 4, No. 4, 2021 39 Published by SCHOLINK INC.
short circuit, a contradictory movement that on the one hand tells of a global reality made up of real or virtual connections and on the one hand a reality divided into states and nations. The impression is that the systemic and orderly plane imposed by Countries is inappropriate, discordant to emigration movement which recounts, everywhere, in the current world, about millions of people traveling in search of a land to stay and that clash at the gates of countries that are increasingly closed and barricaded. The global list of walls is very long. Indeed much divisions have been made in last decades, in particular we can count more than seventy of them, built or under construction. Therefore, we cannot consider the walls a matter over gone. Borders and fences are needed, in the world, they are needed as geography and maps are useful to guide us, to tell the political changes, environmental and to represent the changes in the distribution and organization of power on the basis territorial.
However, the current disorientation, denounced by this global stretching, at times boundless and at times forced in its own territorial context, testifies the decline and, in some cases, the total negation of the landmarks, the identity values, the history and social culture. While the world becomes increasingly large and increasingly closer, the territory has ended up dividing and closing. so, we observe a global stretching a territorial system that develops in two directions: vertically in an integrated way with the potential connectivity, and horizontally interdependent and therefore divided into, more or less large, more or less 'dominant' countries. Then maps that tell of an indistinct nebula of virtual and also non virtual, connections and maps on a divided world, a world lined with thousand and more walls but also map about all those places that, on limit, become transit spaces and even stopping are necessary. Maps, these last, which reveal a 'borderland' that, as a road, at the same time unites and divides worlds more or less similar, worlds more or less in agreement, worlds that along the border tell different stories. A borderland than is not neither city nor country, like a river that divides territories; a borderland that continuously changes, beyond which 'multiply signs of ancient and daily floods', whose inhabitants are condemned to movement or standing still, poised between memory and hope. Border places become like 'impossible towns', overflowing of a responsibility to remember identity left and not yet forgotten, they became mirage cities full of provocations and conflicts, internal and external at the same time. In this way places emerge as mysterious reality, as 'space among things', space that unites and at the same time divides and in the present scenario escapes from any definition although their existence is certain as well as the political identification and their social, cultural and, obviously, territorial identity. On the other hand, crossing the border does not imply elimination of it but rather its momentary transformation in open space, used, organized and then abandoned. Living the 'space in the middle' means living and building a third place whose center is within, where everything is confused, mixed, where it is difficult to distinguish what belongs to one side and what belongs to the other. The result is its, how much more strategic, redefinition, abandoning the common idea of barrier and supporting a flexible and absolutely changing and dynamic system outlining a borderland that becomes an active and reactive membrane, flexible, not continuous but fragmented, varied and resilient. A space that becomes a magnet capable of www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/uspa Urban Studies and Public Administration Vol. 4, No. 4, 2021 40 Published by SCHOLINK INC. reformulating, in an antinomic game of actions and reactions, a synergistic relationship between the individual and the territory.
Appears an idea of multiplicity in which the 'rhizome-like' structure becomes decentralized configurations where each part can be connected to another without go through specific points, as the infrastructure network or even the virtual system of global contacts. An urban dimension, is outlined an urban dimension structured on the basis of a rhizomatic system, i.e., a reticular organization such as the one that is the basis of nomadic thought: open, proceeding by intersections and juxtapositions, not line but project and which is, among other things, the one from which it comes. So a new map of the delocalized space is being outlined and requires more and more an attentive planning thinking that sometimes becomes 'hard ' and sometimes 'elastic', sometimes 'insurmountable' and sometimes 'flexible' and that finds an answer in the connivance between opposites and in the territorial synergy. That said the research does not concern only the border closure in progress today but rather the migratory pressure which, suspended in a permanent temporariness, inhabits the 'exploded border', in fact colonized by the nomad thought accorded to the stable one that become the engine of urbanization of the city of future.
Just think to the particular case of Western Sahara divided by wall built by Morocco to occupy the Sahara and remove the Saharawi who live, exiled for over forty years, in Algeria in a fragment of land to the south, near the border with the Sahara and Mauritania. Settlement reality that is discovered in unstable equilibrium: suspended in a state of precariousness, with a taste of memory and a desire to return, and one of stability, dictated by the long stay and the necessity of everyday. we could say from camps to city or rather to a 'proto-city' that, starting from a first group of tents, takes on an increasingly defined articulated and multiple, varying between structures in adobe, in concrete and other in canvas… We observe a compositional approach to be implemented through the logic of present time and also rejecting the claim of a scientific rigor in favors of a fuzzy way of thinking, a blurred thought or a polyvalent logic, a logic in which to each proposition can be attributed a degree of truth. We do not want to propose doing and thinking as a cure, palingenesis, but to understand and redesign a concrete spatiality made up of stories and fragments stitched up by the compositional movement that finds an answer in the antithesis. A design approach that interprets architecture as a synthesis of community rhythm and that does not govern processes but it reacts to them in a non-deterministic way but rather oriented towards highlighting the traces it encounters. The contradiction is accepted as an authentic force through which to interpret this singular urbanity, poised between permanent and temporary, and which is emerging not as a simple product in addition but rather an element of it that is structured in the coexistence of opposites and resolves itself in the understanding of place. A complex reality appears, in continuous metamorphosis: a 'urban dimension' made up of multitudes of hybrid, inclusive spaces from which to renegotiate spatial, social and economic relationships and to initiate an urban architectural development born 'of the lower', multiple, contradictory at times and identifying a state of border area. In other words: the growing territorial tension, put in place by the rigid and controversial infrastructure imposed along the state border, are characterized, in that antinomic process of actions and reactions, by flexible forms and structures www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/uspa disposed to inclusion, mutability and to a settlement reformulation adjusting to the variables given by the frontier nature. In general the impression is of being in a reality in which the systemic and orderly plan imposed in the background proves to be totally inappropriate, discordant from the slum life of those who live waiting.
One thinks of the many reception camps set up on the outskirts of walled states intended, in this study, as global laboratories to address today's urban architectural challenges: namely, to deepen social and economic inequality, dramatic migratory changes, urban informality and so on. Therefore, first reception spaces that prove themselves as their first contact with something akin to an urban environment. Refugee camps can be seen as motors of urbanization for the city of tomorrow. Spaces composed of different parts, each of which with a particular expressive form that becomes intelligible and recognizable, a fixed scene of the same show. Thus it is traced a montage of different stories, completed in themselves and which are structuring the spaces to the limit which, given their nature as places of contact, stopping and crossing realities, are colored by many scenes and stories that seek a common organizational register, a shared recognition. So, how the architectural project can establish a relationship with this marginal reality, contested by multiple identity forces and also by different temporal meanings, remains to be seen. Then, an elastic, flexible territorial image comes from this which, in the compositional process in opposition to the disjunctive act of border closure, recognizes the project, participatory and spatial social sharing, born from practices of 'daily ingenuity', as the engine of a territorial urban regeneration, democratic and inclusive of a social cultural multitude peculiar to inhabiting the border. So the first problem is to establish how to distinguish what is essence and what is mere appearance, what is constant and what is variable and fleeting in an increasingly unstable and confused present time, contested by policies of isolationism and globalization at the same time. A time in which alternative realities emerge that build forms capable of moving away from reality to push into a kind of virtual world, a world of the stereotyped image that is, paradoxically, nothing more than a commercially shared system. Well, what will the future spatial dimension be, what will the 'Earth of tomorrow' be? Paraphrasing Aldo Van Eyck himself, it could be said that when a generation of architects capable of extending 'the narrow borderline', to guide, to accept this in-between realm by the means of construction, that is to provide, from house to city scale, a bunch of real places for real people and real things (places that sustain instead of counteract the identity of their specific meaning), then and only then, a new architecture will be born in which everyone will be able to recognize valid knowledge and a 'boundless' perspective.
"Take off your shoes and walk along the beach through the ocean's last thin sheet of water gliding landwards and seawards. You feel reconciled in a way you would note feel if there were a forced dialogue between you and either one or the other of these great phenomena. For here, in between land and ocean -in this in-between realm, something happens to you that is quite different from the seaman's alternating nostalgia. No landward yearning from the sea, no seaward yearning from the land. No yearning for the alternative-no escape from one into the other. Architecture must extend 'the narrow borderline', persuade it to loop into a realm -an articulated in-between realm. Its job is to provide this in-between realm by the