Border urbanism: a critical discourse.

This opening chapter overviews the purpose of the book. A global initiative on border urbanism research and interdisciplinary collaboration began in 2016, bringing researchers from 28 countries together to discuss various border-related issues at an international conference, which was titled "Urbanism at Borders" and held in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 2018. This book is undoubtedly not the first attempt to discuss border issues. However, what it brings to the literature is an opportunity for a "less-explored" subject treatment of border discourse - from architecture, urbanism and other allied disciplines. The chapters in this book collated and demonstrated a renewed interest in borders as a conceptual issue within studies of the built environment. In this chapter, the overview explains the editors' ambition of examining this critical problem - which traditionally has been examined to an advanced degree within various sociopolitical and related disciplines - from a new perspective. The conventional claim that architecture and urbanism do not necessarily cover the issue of "borders" originated from the notion that this issue belongs to the distinct and well-defined realms of political science and its allied disciplines. The editors argue that humanity today finds itself positioned in a globalised world, which is increasingly interconnected both physically and digitally. Yet we are also in more unstable conditions than was the case many centuries ago; we are subject to the fragility of conflicting ideologies, religions and economies, and the didactic relationship of power and politics that manifests in the perceived fragility of our habitat - and in the new challenges of restoring social and environmental sustainability. This book is a snapshot of the vast border issues yet to be researched from architecture and urbanism perspectives