A Common Framework Reconceptualizing the inherent architecture and spatiality of the cross-border city gives rise to alternative models for urbanization. The developmental brief that drives these architectural and urban propositions is not dictated solely by
the market but instead is informed by the need to manifest the idea of the city as a plural and equitable space for coexistence. The concept of the city as a border and vice versa is not confined to urban development in the borderlands. The contemporary global city is structured with transversal borders that are often more impenetrable than the conventional borders between nation-states. The more global the city, the more intense the conflict between what is generic and specific, global and local, privileged and dispossessed. The more cities are connected through trade, communications technology, and cheap transportation, the more they will behave as cross-border cities. The conflicts and challenges that these cities pose as a contested space should not obscure the potential that they offer in their diversity and promise of equitability. No longer bound by citizenship through nationality, or through any single social or cultural identity, these cities are shaped by difference and multiplicity. For distinction to exist legibly and coexist meaningfully in these circumstances, the city can exist as a city of parts that, despite its clear definition, allows the permeation of one part to another at its borders. The permeable border is structured by the architecture of the city in parts, acting as both a limiting and a permitting framework, a framework for the accommodation of difference, a common framework; in other words, the border as a city.
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Common Frameworks, Part 2
points into the city. In 2049, when the administrative border of the SAR disappears, the remaining architecture will stand as an artifact that not only contains the memory of the border but reinforces the idea of Macau as a cross-border city integrated with the mainland but retaining a sense of cultural and social autonomy. Navajeet KC and Josh Schecter’s “Marked Difference: Inscribing the City of Parts” (pages 128–33) envisions two sinuous walls that trace the border between Macau and Zhuhai and converge to form the border crossings. This proposal recasts the symbolic “city gate” as a permeable wall of housing and work space passed through by the tourist and resided in by the cross-border worker. Utilizing a similar strategy in “A Few Sharp Lines” (pages 118–27), Ashley Takacs and Gabriel Tomasulo offer two walls that act as an elongated immigration checkpoint. Entry and exit points are located at strategic positions along the axis between Gongbei and Ilha Verde. The double wall captures and heightens the qualities of the sites it traverses along its length, framing these locales as public spaces with specific programs and amenities. Fabiana Alvear, Hao Chen, and Jing Guo’s “Spaces of Exception: Housing as a Common Framework for Cotai” (pages 134–43) attempts to return Cotai to its intended purpose—affordable housing for the city. It does so by treating the border as a series of horizontal layers: the enormous gaming floors of the casinos are hidden at basement level, freeing the ground plane for housing. Casino amenities are shared with the city, and programs associated with the gaming industry—pawn shops, jewelry shops, and so on—are clearly separated and constrained. Thus the casinos become spaces of exception, tolerated because they enable the provision of housing for the city. Expansion of the casinos is regulated by a series of alternating bands of housing and landscape. These bands may be seen as Sennett’s permeable border: they define and demarcate, absorb and allow permeation. More important, they regulate and administer an urban plan that allows the close coexistence of housing and casinos.