Heterotopic Ossifications: Scanning the urbanism of the Turkey-Syria borderscape

The research investigates the Turkey-Syria border as a project, reading it through spaces made and remade by its mechanism, the struggles it produces, and the narratives that emerge from it. As an extension of how powers control the terrain, the border is intended to be eternal, thus it is made through bordering continuously. Due to this inherent dynamism, the border becomes thicker than a bidimensional line on maps, and as the circulations it modulates and the bodies it controls design the spaces, it becomes a landscape. Among the different spatial implications of the border as a project is to push back, which turns it into a site of struggle where movements confront the bordering as an act of violence. In the case of the Turkey-Syria border, historically being a “bone of contention” ever since its demarcation on maps following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, it has reached its current status as a security mechanism project promoted by Turkey and the EU. The research is grounded in architectural thinking about the border, spatializing it to understand better what it does, and exploring the tension between architecture and its complicity in forming the border as a project. Different methodologies are used, starting with investigating three borderscapes through specific push-back stories and researching into the design of the weaponized Turkey-Syria borderscape. This involves scanning the territory by re-mapping its spatial conditions, thus revealing a sort of X-ray and reimagining the “bone of contention.” The research was further developed with a visit to the region in May 2023, soon after the earthquakes hit, which enabled an engagement with the territory to observe how people live in the space they inhabit and a photographic investigation. The research unlocks the relation between space and the narratives of the territories that are investigated analytically using the Foucauldian notion of “heterotopic ossifications.” Deriving from the six principles of heterotopia, these are six spatial objects selected from the engagement, which are considered deviations of the “bone of contention.” The proposal is to look beyond the imposed aesthetics of the border as a security mechanism in the mass media narrative and the limited understanding of conventional cartographies, and instead to mobilize architectural intelligence to confront the logic of design and the project of the border. Thinking of the border as a bone, in all its material, symbolic, and organic dimensions, and the X-ray as a method of inquiry under their surface and immediately visible elements, it is possible to reveal the spatial conditions as “species of spaces,” or other spaces and therefore heterotopic ossifications. This allowed the territorial-scale reconstruction of this investigation, making it a provoking reflection in the architectural design discourse of the border.