Spatial boundaries are not merely drawn, they are enacted, contested, and continuously reconfigured through everyday practices. The U.S.–Mexico border, long framed as a site of division and control, is an active space shaped by daily movement, resilience, routine, and performances that produce a layered terrain of social connectivity. This thesis examines how representation and design can expose and intervene in the infrastructures, regulatory mechanisms, and embodied routines that constitute the border as a lived space. Through a process of spatial translation and reinterpretation by design, I propose architectural strategies that engage the border not as a singular object but as an evolving ecology of actions, agencies, and collective gestures, where architecture becomes both witness and agent in the reimagining of geopolitical identities.
Edge Ecologies: Architecture and the Everyday Border
