FUSION CITIES - consolidation of movement was an urban design seminar at TU Darmstadt in 2009.

Two cities divided by a border are growing together. The movingparticles of this inter-cultural exchange leave their footprint in thelandscape – the urban landscape. A border is a thin line between them,an area like an enclave or an undefined moving line, sometimes not evenvisible.
In the course we have analyzed the original state of the cities and how it got reformed by the exchange through the years.
What is strongly restricted by the border? (people, goods, …)
What does not care about the border? (internet, climate, geography, culture …)
Switching from border and flows (network/negative space) to city(footprint/positive space) and back again we have drawn maps anddiagrams to compare the several pairs of fusion cities.

During the seminar of the summer term 2009 at PAR, TU Darmstadt, thestudents analyzed four different types of borders: natural, artificial,political, and social. Three analytical steps were taken by thestudents: borders, cities, movements to then finally distill a stillimage ‘consolidation of movement’.

BRAKIN_natural : Brazzaville and Kinshasa by Humberto Sarabia and Marion Bouchard
SAN JUANA_artificial : San Diego and Tijuana by Julio Obregon Zepeda and Anne Touchet
JERUSALEM_political : East and West Jerusalem by Slobodan Subotic and Petko Gogov
FAVEMINIO_social : Favela and Condominio in Rio de Janeiro by Eleni Sougaris

Intro on borders by Kathrin Wieck, organizer of BORDERlining, TU Berlin, Traila
all licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) in 2009.
Seminar by Jula-Kim Sieber.

The language of this book here is mostly visual, which enables theviewer to an intuitive comparison of each of the fusion cities and theanalytical steps.

you can see all the results at our blog fusion-cities.par-darmstadt.de and download the PDF and listen to the audio-files of FAVEMINIO online.
vimeo.com/8171296