Fantastic Border

Planned cities and structures that never happened

Part of a 2024 series of presentations in the high desert examining bleeding-edge ideas and techniques across eras. For Fantastic Border, I trace the persistent fascination with borderlands as laboratories for futuristic development.

Futuristic city proposals inevitably live in tension with persistent pasts. Technological experimentation creates potentially novel complexity, while 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. Areas that preserve so-called ghost borders of the past add another layer.

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

Architects and futurists now think in planetary terms. Cities, landscapes, and entire regions are designed using geography, in its broadest meaning, as building material. The boundary between making structures and shaping territory dissolves when the scale becomes large enough. Territory connects directly to power and space. Advances in mapmaking and earth observation techniques allow powerful actors to draw lines across, and by extension control, landscapes they have possibly never seen. Deserts appear especially available for such ambitions.

Today, borders extend this logic. Prototypes of monitoring technologies that eventually reshape how we operate in the systems we inhabit are increasingly deployed in border regions. This tech-enabled evolution may explain why borderlands consistently attract futuristic development schemes.

Much of what is proposed and built in these regions is not visible. Physical infrastructure carries a recursive romantic quality. A highway, a wall, a megastructure invite contracts, images, debates, mourning, and profit. The more consequential construction is harder to articulate. Surveillance systems, biometric networks, and coordination platforms are refined where legal ambiguity and sparse population make experimentation convenient. These systems become the instruments through which ordinary life is monitored, sorted, and made precarious or privileged globally (the spectacle draws the eye while the apparatus takes hold).

One example of the persistence of spatial ambition is explicit in Far West Texas. In the 1930s, a large-scale development including hydroelectric dams, model homes, and resorts, alongside military buildup anticipating conflict with Mexico, is seriously proposed. The US has a very legible design on the future in this region. Building on this is a prediction for what would be one of the world's greatest highways, a Highway Americana extending from Alaska to the Argentine Republic. This is the era of megaproject thinking that produces the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, which reigns as the world's tallest building from 1931 to 1973, and the first freeway in Los Angeles.

The presentation is 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 discuss the futurist showman moment of 1936 where postal mail is fired by missile from McAllen, Texas, to Reynosa, Tamaulipas, setting a cornfield 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 share 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. There is a noticeable tendency to portray these spaces as lawless, draw them as vacant, and mythologize them in the public consciousness.

I open the conversation to explore megaprojects that failed and survey significant futuristic city proposals worldwide.