PRODUCTIVE BORDERS: CEUTA AND CRISIS

SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE | NOV 18, 2010 | GABRIEL JEWELL-VITALE | PRIMARY : ANDA FRENCH | SECONDARY: DEAN ROBBINS
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“A boundary is not that at which something stops,
but as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is
that from which something begins its presencing”.
-Martin Heidegger
 The effects of transnational political situations
are radically changing the way we live. The realities
of cross-border conflicts and political disputes of
autonomy have created strife within cities leading
to crises of identity, place, and hate within culture.
I contend that transnational borders are
places where conflict and identity crises have
manifested in the most cogent and attainable form.
By investigating transnational border crises, one
can study its effects at a local and transnational
condition, enabling geophysical forces to manifest
in a productive border for the crises at hand.
A transnational border condition at the edge of
the European Union, in the Spanish exclave of Ceuta,
is the site of the project. The exclave, which was
seized by Portugal in 1415, and Spain in 1560, became
an autonomous city in 1995, as a part of Spain. For
over 600 years, it has been a stronghold of European
presence in the North Africa and the Mediterranean.
In 1985, the same year Spain joined the
EU (then the EEC), the Shenghen Agreement
was signed, creating the abolishment of internal
boundaries inside the EU, emphasizing the
external boundary for movement within. Once
inside, a traveler has unrestricted access to all
countries under the Shenghen Agreement. In
1995, the EU funded a $320 million border fence
in Ceuta under EU’s motto, “Fortress Europe.”
Ceuta’s border has become a siphon for the
emergent Sub-Saharan migratory phenomenon.3
Ceuta is one of three Sub-Saharan migratory
destinations in order to cross into mainland Europe,
the Canary Islands, Ceuta and Melilla, and Malta. As
the Strait of Gibraltar is the one of the closest points
between two continents in the world, it has become
a deathtrap for migrants, as 1,200 people die each
year either crossing the strait or attempting to
jump fences.4 Thus, Ceuta has become the physical
manifestation of the motto, “Fortress Europe.”
Additionally, the condition that exists presents
a crisis of identity. Morocco, which does not recognize
Ceuta’s as an autonomous entity, is rooted in Muslim
North Africa cultural ideologies. This forces Morocco
to play “host” to Spanish-Christian Ceuta creating
conflicting spheres of identities within an existing
sphere of conflicting geopolitics. The binary dialectic
emerges at the moment of difference—the border.
I propose the re-imagining of the Ceuta
border as a space of productive difference.
Border, constructed in this way, will act as filter
for the geophysical forces bridging first world with
developing world sphere’s of influence. The resultant
hybrid amalgamation will be programmed, producing
a prototype for the motto of “Fortress Europe,” re-
conceptualizing what “border” constitutes in an
age of increasing transnational and global flows.
 EU

EU as legally constructed EU as resultant border EU Border?

ON BORDER

Geographically, we are in a space of transition: stand ideas that spreak like contagious viruses; from
between Africa and Europe, the Mediterranean and the here springs Madiaq territory. Here, at the dense crux
Atlantic; a space that separates and connects, and has where seas, lands and multitudes convege, over the
always been permeable to the continuous flows of life. moat they have made deadly, we are building a multiple
Today this place fulfills a strategic function by acting as territory, both geographic and infographic, social and
a barrier, both physical and mental, separating the legal technological, that extens infinitely in four directions:
from illegal, like a folding line that splits our world in two. toward the South and toward the North; towards the depths
But borders are habitable territories that can’t be of carnal bodies and toward the immaterial noosphere
reduced to lines on a map. They are environments that that grows in the ferile land of words without owners.
encourage interchange and hybridity, highly dynamic Maps report existing territories, but they also
territories that generate a gradation of shared spaces, construct them; thus territory lives in the mind and is
where the character of “crossing” prevails over that of constructed as knowledge. (Maghreb Connection, 175)
“barrier.” To cross their thresholds means to physically
move from one place to another, but, even more, it implies
the start of a transformation, to becoming-others.
Spaces for movement and mobile spaces;
capitalist modernity accelerates this quality even as it
expands, bounding over mobile borders. Like the Far
West, destruction and colonization, but also a horizon
for creative exodus. There is a single substance, TERRITORY IS CONSTANTLY CHANGING
that of capitalism and of those who escape from its
chaings to create (and create themselves as) free IN THE MIND OF THOSE WHO CROSS IT.
territory; even if people who want to stake it out and
privatize it follow close behind. Our modernity has its
own mobile borders, which, as always , are in search
of the other: the external other that we call nature,
and the internal other-subjectivity, ourselves, in plural.
Against sterile, immutable linear abstraction
Thus, the project will produce an architecture that does not
attempt to solve the the conflicting conditions that exist at the
Ceuta border: religious conflict, identity crisis, and migratory
deaths.

Rather, the architecture will be a vehicle to spatialize these

forces, bridging the gap between what is an intense reality,
and an “architectural reality” that suspends judgement
in order to juxtapose and highlight conflict producing a
reconceptualization of the current EU border.
CEUTA AS PHYSICAL EMBODIMENT OF FORTRESS EUROPE
MIGRANT DEATHS IN EU 3300

Drowning |shipwreck, river or lake|

Suicide 850

Lack of car |racist act| 550

300
Other|hypothermia, exhaustion, minefield
100

Policing 20

0 200 400 600 800 1000km

Source: UNITED for Intercultural Action, European network against nationalism, racism, fascism and in support of migrants and refugees
MIGRANT EXTERNAL DEATHS VS. INTERNAL 3300

Drowning |shipwreck, river or lake|

Suicide

850

550
300

100
20

0 200 400 600 800 1000km

RESULTANT EU

0 200 400 600 800 1000km

 3300

850

550
300

100
20

CEUTA AS EPICENTER OF EU BORDER?

0 200 400 600 800 1000km

CEUTA AS MOMENT OF CONFLICT
BETWEEN ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY
RELIGION IN AFRICA

0 2 5 10 40 60 75 85 90 95 100 90-100
MIGRATORY PATTERNS WITH RELIGIOUS CONTEXT

2 3
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DISTANCES TRAVELED IN CONTEXT OF CHRISTIANITY

Ceuta

Mogadishu 1,600 Mi

Kampala
Ceuta
What You See
What “others” See
 Border Crossing

*
 Grant of asylum or other permit

Expulsion Illegal Residence Overstay Legal Residence

Pending
Non-Return Regularization

BORDER BORDER
Border rejection Border rejection

Return Unathorized entry Authorized Entry

Cueta Migrant Death Scenario_(Boundary implications)

Ceuta Ceuta Ceuta Ceuta

Migrants reach Ceuta Migrants wait outside border for 1-2 yrs. Migrants breach boundary, filters through Boundary “accepts difference”

Ceuta Ceuta Ceuta Ceuta

Migrants held in Ceuta for minimum 40 days New “border” established at Strait of Gibraltar Migrant passes away in Strait Boundary extends, cycle repeats
4 Zones where urban meets border
URBAN AREAS IN CEUTA

CEUTA RELIGION:

EL BARRIO DE
PRINCIPALRELIGION:

MOROCCO RELIGION: