Designs on Territory: Mental Maps and the Fabrication of a Contested Border

FAIN: FEL-282430-22

Matthew Worsnick
Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN 37203-2416)

Research and writing leading to a book on the role of the built environment in constructing boundaries along historically contested borders using Italy and Yugoslavia (1918-1954) as a case study. 

How do nationalizing states create borders in post-imperial spaces? How do lines on a map give rise to practiced states, nations, and communities? How does built space at a border encourage local actors to accept, resist, disregard or revise it? Deploying tools from art history, urban studies, architectural theory and cultural history, I explore how built environments revise mental maps of contested borders to justify the border’s legitimacy locally and internationally. I integrate research from political archives, museums and preservation offices on the Italo-Yugoslav border from 1918 to 1954. I use marginalia in hand-drawn maps and local arts competitions, police reports and technical publications to uncover the border’s slow creation by architects, artists, preservationists and planners, as well as by shopkeepers, police officers, politicians, priests and tourist agencies. My analysis of material history gives voice to people who are usually invisible in stories of political crisis.

Associated Products

Fleeting Empires and Persistent Infrastructures: De-imperial Reckoning with Border-Region Railroads (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Fleeting Empires and Persistent Infrastructures: De-imperial Reckoning with Border-Region Railroads
Author: Matthew Worsnick
Abstract: When an empire is gone, its material infrastructure persists. However, that infrastructure is differently powered and administered. It serves new interests and often must be integrated into different adjacent infrastructural systems. Yet, these processes are typically overseen and operated by professionals and bureaucrats who had trained and practiced in the empire and continue to propagate familiar practical and professional conventions, as well as profit from or engage with imperial professional networks. Analyzing these dual processes of imperial fracture and continuity side-by-side can provide vivid insights into the blended tensions, transitions, ruptures, continuities, and parallels between empires and their successors. Drawing on architectural and graphic-design sources and methods, as well as anthropological and art historical theory, this paper considers two Habsburg-constructed train lines in the post-World War I Italo-Yugoslav contested territory of Istria to explore how de-imperialism worked on the ground. In analyzing the infrastructural and political choices surrounding these two train lines, this paper illuminates the multiple, overlapping, and conflicted interests of engineers (as professionals, as nationals, as locals, as ideologues, etc.), primarily as evinced in their professional production and debates over the future of the region’s infrastructure. As each side of the border wrestled with the relationship of infrastructure, nation-building, and institutional legacies, individual actors had to reimagine the built environment and its role in the borderland. At work was not so much the legacy of the Habsburg Empire, with regions and infrastructure cleanly cleaved away and left to either continue and reformulate imperial structures. Rather, we find a reckoning, a messy, self-conflicted negotiation among past, present, and future; among old institutions newly positioned; among interests long-established and those tentatively emerging.
Date: 5/15/2024
Conference Name: “Postcolonial, Decolonial, Postimperial, Deimperial” a culmination of the European Research Council Project "Revivals of Empire: Nostalgia, Amnesia, Tribulation"

“Designs on Territory: Mental Maps and the Fabrication of a Contested Border,” (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “Designs on Territory: Mental Maps and the Fabrication of a Contested Border,”
Author: Matthew Worsnick
Abstract: This presentation provided an overview of the context and arguments of my book project on borders and the built environment: the theoretical, historical, and geographical. It then offered a few object studies from different parts of the book.
Date: 7/18/2023
Conference Name: Getty/ACLS workshop at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, CA

“Borderland Bonifica: Racial Politics of Land Redemption,” (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “Borderland Bonifica: Racial Politics of Land Redemption,”
Author: Matthew Worsnick
Abstract: This paper consideres Italian fascist practices and discourses of land reclamation (bonifica), which included swamp drainage, road building, and town building, in light of the design, construction, and publicization of the architecture and urban planning of the border-region Italian new town of Arsia. Bringing together national and local understandings of what it meant to reclaim land from nature in contested territories, this paper exposes the extent to which ostensibly infrastructural policies were rooted in constructions of race and ambitions of imperial expansion and ethnic cleansing.
Date: 1/5/2024
Conference Name: Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, 2024

The Production of Space in Contested Territories (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: The Production of Space in Contested Territories
Author: Karolina Follis
Author: Matthew Worsnick
Author: Marta Verginella
Author: Pamela Ballinger
Author: Milos Jovanović
Abstract: This panel considered the production of space and infrastructures of empire in contested territories in Eastern Europe. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives, including history, urban studies, anthropology, and art and architectural history, the roundtable asks: What are the mechanics of the production of space in inter-imperial and inter-state territorial contests? How do capitalism, nationalization, and memory act on, and how are they changed by, such spatial production? What role do material artifacts, utilized as both documentary evidence and markers of memory, play in such contests? How are spaces contested between empires? And in what ways can analysis of these questions in the region’s past help us to make sense of the production of space in the deconolonizing present?
Date: 12/1/2023
Conference Name: Annual Conference of the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, 2023

Concrete (Article)
Title: Concrete
Author: Matthew Worsnick
Abstract: This peer-reviewed annotated bibliography provides an overview of scholarship in on concrete, its uses, and the architecture and urban fabric in which it is used. In addition to summative and close-focus essays on concrete in architecture and the various veins of scholarship that have addressed it, the bibliography draws together over 100 books and articles on the topic, summarizing and contextualizing each in their respective sub-disciplines and in the broader field of architecture history.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://www-oxfordbibliographies-com.proxy.library.vanderbilt.edu/display/document/obo-9780190922467/obo-9780190922467-0090.xml?p=emailAunU0N6k6x/iM&d=/document/obo-9780190922467/obo-9780190922467-0090.xml
Access Model: subscription
Format: Other
Periodical Title: Oxford Bibliographies in Architecture, Planning, and Preservation
Publisher: Oxford University Press

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