Category: City Design, Border Environments
My Role: Research, Fieldwork, Mapping, Interviews, Exhibition
Client: Royal College of Art
Timeline: The project were developed in 2023
Abstract
“Externalising Borders in Calais” delves into the transformations happening in Calais and Grand Synthe, two port cities in Northwestern France. These transformations are a result of the year-long struggle against “illegal” migration, both French and British authorities are fighting using natural environments as a “moral alibi” and also by externalising resources like infrastructure, capital and surveillance technology outside the UK border in the process of “securing” the UK-FR border.
Within this thesis, externalising has therefore a two-fold meaning: on one side it describes the process through which the UK border operates through an assemblage of border-technologies, legal infrastructures, and logistical arrangements, beyond UK’s territory; on the other, it addresses a specific tendency to mobilise and instrumentalise the “natural” environment into border-making practice, in the attempt to externalise the politics of displacement outside the realm of the “political”.
The aim is to investigate the strategies and arrangements used by the UK and French authorities to create hostile environments for people in transit. By mapping “green” spaces that were in the recent past being used as informal camping sites, but now transformed to create visibility; I try to investigate how nature is being weaponized in the process of externalising the British border till Calais since the recent displacement crisis began in Europe.