The Significance of the Insignificant: Borders, Urban Space, Everyday Life

This paper can be read as a film sequence, as each scene is based on the narration of a different everyday encounter in the city. The aim of the paper is to start a discussion on the multiple ways borders proliferate in the urban: not only through laws, institutions or policing practices, but also through deeds, words, and feelings. Rather than analyse migration and borders by focusing only on the borderzones, this paper captures the multiple relations that connect the camp to the city square, the deportation regime to the train carriage, the newspaper headlines to the housing tenements in an attempt to work towards framing a broader theory of borders in geographical terms. Focusing on everyday encounters generates more complicated and nuanced understandings of subjectivity and power, while it brings to the fore the multiple borders that are simultaneously embodied and transcended, performed and challenged, established and subverted.