Hidden in plain sight: uncovering migrant geographies in the external borderlands of Europe

Abstract

This thesis seeks to understand how spatial - built and natural - environments operate in Europe’s external borderlands to facilitate and condition human migration. It aims to find new ways in which architects can engage with authoritarian instruments of power that spatially manifest themselves in and around increasingly militarized border regions. As concepts and spatial instruments, the borders will be viewed through the lenses of human mobility, irregular migration, and the creation of territory. As the Schengen agreement guarantees free movement across all internal borders between member states, the EU sees the need to increase security and control over who and what gets to cross the external borders. Meanwhile, public interest in nationalism and anti-immigration rhetoric continues to grow, rendering displaced populations increasingly vulnerable as they attempt to navigate the European borderlands in search of safe ground. Current European migration policy leaves large populations of migrants trapped in transit countries on Europe’s fringes, in a state of permanent temporality, in-between both humanitarian facilities and legal frameworks. With the support of field investigations and inquiry in the crisis-ridden border regions of North Macedonia, this work tries to understand and visualize the border’s inherently spatial nature and the borderlands as a territory for shaping multiple narratives and geographies of migration. It centers around the connections and socio-spatial relations between the actors and processes that contribute to this production of the migrant narrative. The thesis seeks to uncover converging paths, chains of relations, and hidden dimensions of the realities that migrant populations suffer when crossing borders. Through an uncovering of such intersections and divergencies, the outcomes of this work explore speculative interventions for a more inclusive and socially sustainable narrative of the European borderlands.