Fantastic Border

Planned cities and structures that never happened

I produced a series of four art talks in the high desert looking at bleeding-edge ideas and techniques across eras.

For Fantastic Border, I examined the persistent fascination with borderlands as laboratories for futuristic development.

Many concepts begin as satire or critique, then get embraced by developers and entrepreneurs with earnest enthusiasm. This transformation from social commentary to actual proposal reveals a curious blindness to irony. The Line, a futuristic development in Saudi Arabia's NEOM city project, is a close replica of Superstudio's Il Monumento Continuo, the architecture collective's 1960s critique of urban development. Artists intend their work as criticism, only to watch their visions stripped of context and repurposed as utopian blueprints.

Architects and futurists now think in planetary terms. Cities, landscapes, and entire regions are designed using geography, in the broadest meaning of the term, as building material. The boundary between making structures and shaping territory dissolves when the scale becomes large enough.

The concept of territory itself connects directly to power and space. Advances in mapmaking and earth observation techniques allowed powerful actors to draw lines across, and by extension control, landscapes they had possibly never seen.

Today, borders extend and emphasise this logic. Prototypes of monitoring technologies that eventually reshape how we operate in the systems we find ourselves in are increasingly deployed in border regions. This tech-enabled evolution might explain why borderlands consistently attract futuristic development schemes. Many historic and present-day concepts are veiled in utopian ideas: a distortion of the same impulse to control and engineer social life.

Technological experimentation creates potentially novel complexity. The same location can be seen simultaneously as a site of political technology, economic opportunity, humanitarian crisis, cultural confluence, natural system, or even "unbordered" depending on who holds the lens. Adding to the mix are areas that preserve so-called ghost borders of the past. Futuristic city proposals inevitably live in tension with persistent pasts.

One example of the persistence of spatial ambition appears in Far West Texas. In the 1930s, a large scale development including hydroelectric dams, model homes, resorts, as well as military build-up anticipating conflict with Mexico was seriously proposed. The US had a very legible design on the future in this region.

Building on this was a prediction for what would be one of the world's greatest highways, a Highway Americana extending from Alaska to the Argentine Republic. This was the era of megaproject thinking that produced the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, which reigned as the world's tallest building from 1931 to 1973, and the first freeway in Los Angeles.

The presentation was a journey in scale jumping, moving from grand planetary thinking such as space travel hubs and tech-enabled tunnels floating above the Rio Grande, to legible strategic megaprojects, to small-scale but no less ambitious experiments. I discussed the futurist "showman" moment of 1936 where postal mail was fired by missile from McAllen, Texas, to Reynosa, Tamaulipas, setting a corn field on fire and injuring bystanders with rocket shrapnel. This offers a chance to interpret the rocket launch spectacles of today as echoes of earlier public expositions.

Following this thread, I shared proposals from architects, billionaires, railroad magnates, artists, and governments spanning decades. Each scheme carries the same underlying motivation to claim some degree of ownership of the future by defining territory and movement. These regions attract aspirants across the political spectrum and there's a noticeable tendency to portray these spaces as lawless, draw them as vacant, and mythologise them in the public consciousness.

I opened the conversation to explore megaprojects that failed and briefly surveyed significant futuristic city proposals worldwide.

This salon-style presentation took place in person at Murray Hall during summer 2025.