This thesis project aims to analyse a defining aspect of contemporary life: the dramatic increase in barriers and fortifications that divide countries, peoples, and territories.
In an era in which the free movement of people, goods, and capital is presented as a primary objective and a fundamental pillar of modern society, that very same society continues to construct walls between residents and migrants, rich and poor, citizens and foreigners. The industry behind these barriers, together with the technologies developed to keep out those who seek to enter or to escape, is experiencing a golden age. In 2015, the global turnover of this sector exceeded 14 billion dollars, and by 2020 it was expected to reach nearly 21 billion dollars, with an average annual growth of 7 percent.
Zygmunt Bauman describes our condition as that of a liquid society, in which everything is unstable, uncertain, fluid, and fickle. Yet borders and barriers remain profoundly physical and concrete realities. For this reason, they demand equally concrete responses. While it is true that in recent decades some social boundaries have been dismantled, others more internal, more personal, and less visible have risen around our everyday lives. These boundaries are increasingly resistant and often unnoticed, far from the nerve centers of society, yet they generate constant tension between openness and enclosure, connection and separation, public and private space. Such tensions materialize in the paradox of liberalized borders accompanied by a massive investment of energy and technology dedicated to reinforcing them.
What if, instead of fortifying borders with walls and military equipment, we could restore their original meaning as places of exchange and contact? What if these lines could be opened like a zipper, transforming frontier territories into spaces where different lives intersect in everyday practices? In doing so, borders could become sites of dialogue with those on the other side, with the other, with the stranger.
These spaces can be understood in relation to Gilles Clément’s concept of the Third Landscape, undecided and purposeless areas that act as refuges for forms of life that find no place elsewhere. They also resonate with Homi K. Bhabha’s idea of the Third Space, a symbolic and theoretical site in which the antagonism between ruler and ruled dissolves into cultural hybridity. This condition embraces difference and enables constructive encounters between cultures without imposed hierarchies. The Third Zones envisioned by this project embody contact and confrontation, research and hope for a better future, in territories that today too often resemble no man’s land.
Through this project, we seek to redefine border spaces that are currently reduced to mere dividing lines, transforming them into physical and lived places of encounter and exchange between peoples and cultures previously separated by walls, places where turning away was once the only option. The aim is to establish the foundations and spatial structures necessary for the emergence of a border culture where there is now only a culture of conflict.
The project takes as a starting point the case of the Trade Facilitation Centre in Salamabad Uri, in the Kashmir region, along the border between India and Pakistan. Here, a tax free market has emerged between two states whose relationship has been shaped by over sixty years of border conflict. This initiative demonstrates how controlled zones of exchange can function even in highly contested territories.
The proposal is to extend this model to other borders, creating additional Third Zones that enable commercial and cultural exchange between regions currently divided by conflict or separation. The primary site of intervention is the border between Mexico and the United States, arguably the most symbolic border of our time. Despite strong economic interdependence between the two nations, they are separated by more than three thousand kilometers of walls. Paradoxically, this separation has already generated a new hybrid border culture, evolving from Chicano culture.
By building on existing frameworks such as the NAFTA agreement, it becomes possible to envision the creation of a free market area between the two countries. This would take the form of a secured and hinged zone on both sides of the border, where people can trade with those who usually remain on the opposite side of the wall.
Such a transformation cannot occur overnight. It requires a long and gradual process of reconciliation that allows communities to shift their perception of the border. This project identifies four essential steps in this process: Look, Touch, Share, and Live. Each step is fundamental to the dismantling of both physical and psychological barriers. However, this process cannot be imposed by a superior authority. It can only function as an initial trigger, capable of awakening within the affected populations the desire and the necessity for change, and for a renewed approach to the other.
Focus on Thirt Zone method:
