1. Border Urbanism—A Critical Discourse

This opening chapter overviews the purpose of the book. It introduced a global initiative on border urbanism research and interdisciplinary collaboration in 2016, bringing over 28 researchers representing 28 countries to discuss various border-related issues in an international conference “Urbanism at Borders” held in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 2018. The book is undoubtedly not the first attempt to discuss border issues. However, it is instead the new interest that one might view this book as an opportunity for a “less-explored” subject of border discourse from architecture, urbanism, and other allied disciplines. The chapters in this book collated and demonstrated a renewed interest in the border issue within the built environment discourse. The overview sets the ambition of examining this critical discourse that has already been examined traditionally in various sociopolitical and related disciplines, which are much more advanced and critical. Nevertheless, the claim that architecture and urbanism do not necessarily intermingle with the border issue originated from the notion that the border subject belongs to a distinct, well-defined political science and allied discipline. Indeed, today we are positioned in a globalised world with more physically and digitally interconnected. However, we are in more unstable conditions than many centuries ago. We are subject to the fragility of conflicting ideologies, religion, economy, and the power–politics didactic relationship manifested in the fragility of our habitat and new challenges in restoring social and environmental sustainability. This book is a snapshot of the vast border issues yet to be researched from architecture and urbanism discourses.