Re-imagining the urban experience in the global era

Exploring the relationship between the urban spaces and the construction of borders, the text intends to investigate the complex strategy of bordering taking placewithin the contemporary city. Urban life and urban spaces are involved in a ceaseless process of bordering: material and immaterial, physical and symbolic borders are multiplying, shifting and differentiating on thecity’s surface as well as in its imagery. According to a criticalborder studies approach, the text aims to conceptualize the importance of borders and bordering practices for re-imagining the social and the political in the era of globalization within the urban spaces. The transformation of urban borders consists of a gradual multiplying processinvolving forms, functions, representations and practices, dislocations and consequent relocations, determined by political, economic, historical, socio-cultural changes. In their spatial, empirical and theoretical complexity, urban borders and bordering are becoming mobile, fluid and relational spaces, crossed by bodies, practices, discourses, narratives, images. Such crossings and transpositions are continually redefining identity and otherness, dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. The material or symbolic borders reproduced, multiplied and displaced within contemporary urban spaces are the emblematic places in which creative different practices, activities and experiences are shaped, producing at the same time a new image of the city. These border experiences can be considered as new possibilities of articulating narrations and interpretations on differences, cultures, citizenship, individual and collective identities and forms of communities. They can be seen as potential elements of social and political innovation.