Border Cities

Border Cities - The Baltic Sea Region

The Bauhaus Kolleg IX will investigate border cities in the Baltic Sea Region as locations at which a new Europe is taking shape. The Baltic Sea Region numbers amongst the most dynamic laboratories in which, since the end of the Cold War period, Europe has again been put under the microscope. The Baltic Sea Region, singular, in fact includes a huge variety of contradictory regions, characterized by disparities, discontinuities and conflict, as well as by intensive exchange and international cooperation and migration. Openness and partition, dynamic economic growth and industrial decline, radical experiments in free trade and state-controlled isolationism, new wealth and poverty, transnational identities and new nationalism are here all part of the mix.The contradictory mechanisms of European integration are demonstrated in a quite particular manner on the northern margins of Europe. The border cities of the Baltic Sea Region insofar constitute a test-run for the project of ‘Europeanization’. How are constant processes of exchange and mass migration affecting the region’s respective cities? To what extent are new models of European urbanism taking shape there? The Bauhaus Kolleg IX will pursue these questions in the light of developments in three border cities in the Baltic Sea Region, which are confronted in different ways with the reality of a border.
Themes and Locations:

* Kaliningrad: an exclave or an EU-land of expectations
* Malmö: an in-between city without borders
* Tallinn: new European passage

http://www.eu-urbanism-bordercities.de