The Borders & Territories graduation studio examines evolving border conditions across geopolitical landscapes, exploring how territorial transformations unfold through the interplay of infrastructure, mobility, and governance. The 2024–25 cycle focuses on the theme of Transient Liquidities along the New Silk Road, dissecting how energy and data infrastructures create new forms of spatial control, economic asymmetries, and exclusion zones within contemporary urban environments.

The research centers on Chongqing, a megacity positioned at the confluence of the Jialing and Yangtze rivers, acting as a pivotal node within the Belt and Road Initiative. As a site of accelerated industrialization and global connectivity, Chongqing’s infrastructural landscape embodies the dual forces of expansion and restriction—where the proliferation of energy production and data storage systems simultaneously enables economic growth and enforces new, often imperceptible, boundaries. The city’s entanglement with the Belt and Road Initiative manifests through a dense network of logistical corridors, power grids, and data centers, forming an infrastructural metabolism that is as extractive as it is integrative.

During the research process, the student collective engaged with the interdependencies between energy and data infrastructures, mapping the physical and digital landscapes that underpin Chongqing’s rapid transformation. The study revealed a paradoxical urban condition: while global trade flows and digital economies promise fluidity and connection, the very infrastructures that sustain them impose rigid spatial and social demarcations. Seclusion zones, data enclaves, and energy corridors carve out insides and outsides, constructing new geographies of accessibility and exclusion.

Through cartographic analysis and speculative design strategies, the research investigates how infrastructural systems operate as invisible forces shaping urban life, revealing latent tensions between development, control, and agency. The work positions mapping not only as a representational tool but as an instrument for unveiling power structures, tracing the edges of the visible and the hidden, and questioning the territorial consequences of data-driven urbanism within an increasingly networked world.

Please see ‘Read more‘ for the collective research booklet.

Participants:

Estere Cvilikovska

Maurane Gabriël

Mateusz Majcherek

Merijn Vonk

Oudail El Omari

Yelizaveta Nevmyvaka

Tutors:

Marc Schoonderbeek

Stefano Milani

Filip Geerts

Oscar Rommens

Negar Sanaan Bensi