Border Ontologies: Law, Design and Speculative Cartography

Join us at 41 Rue des Grands Moulins for a thought-provoking collaboration between researchers at ENS-PSL and the University of Chicago. This colloquium invites a range of speakers across the fields of environmental studies, philosophy, law, design, landscape architecture and anthropology to interrogate borders as multi-layered entanglements of humans, nonhumans, ideology, geopolitical economics, nation-state politics and legal jurisdictions.

Borders and thresholds may be tangible and detectable on maps through isotopes, contour lines, political boundaries and topographical markings, yet they have a different reality on the ground and in the air. Instead, they are often a seamless transition; a gradient of changing conditions of weather and climate, livelihood and habitat (Weizmann 2015). Whether one speaks of the shifting aridity line of the Negev desert, the disputed Line of Control (LoC) along the Siachen glacier, the ownership of the Caspian sea’s rapidly depleting sea floor, or the moving Italian-Austrian alpine drainage divide, juridical borders need constant adaptation to changing ecological conditions. Nature’s unresolved processes and their constant state of flux thus forces us to question the referent of a border, even as a threshold of a phenomenon that is still unresolved and ever changing. There have been many solutions proposed in recent decades that attempt to adapt to this problematic: legal innovations for the world’s first “moving” border and bestowing legal personhood to rivers and glaciers, allowing borders to refer to an ecological process, and to belong to the phenomenon that entangles it with human and nonhuman lives.

However, how should we think of borders and the way in which such natural processes impact and push back against legal, political and economic frameworks they they do not always align or perfectly map onto?

PANEL 1: Ontology (10h30 - 12h00)

Snow and the Failure of Legal Surface: Towards an Atmospheric Jurisdiction

10h30 - 11h00:

Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde

Institut Jean Nicod, École Normale Supérieure, Paris

Legal geography presumes, in general, that territory is stable, mappable, and permanently available for jurisdictional allocation. But in snow-dependent regimes — such as Sámi winter pastoralism — territorial rights are exercised only when snow is present and structurally usable. In Handölsdalen Sámi Village v. Sweden (ECtHR, 2010), the court’s refusal to recognize pasture rights followed not from the weakness of the claim, but from the absence of any juridical category capable of treating snow as part of the entitlement’s physical foundation. I will argue that snow reveals the material preconditions the law silently assumes: that land is always accessible, that borders are always operative, and that jurisdiction is spatial rather than functional. None of these assumptions hold when the enabling condition of law is not the surface but the atmosphere — its thermal regimes, its capacity to generate or remove the very ground on which legal relations depend. From this diagnosis follows a doctrinal proposition: jurisdiction must be indexed not to location but to environmental activation. The presence of snow does not merely affect the use of rights; it determines whether those rights can exist in practice. What is required is a legal framework that recognizes atmospheric conditions as prior to the territorial applicability of law, and that treats certain environmental formations as structurally relevant to the production of legal space.

Porous Terrain: Mountains and Bordering in the Karakoram

11h00 - 11h30

Hasan H. Karrar

Lahore University of Managements Sciences, Lahore

Borders are popularly imagined as a line drawn through the sand, the flatness of the land facilitating division. But how does one draw a line through a mountain? Mountains have historically defied attempts at division. Mountains have also been porous terrain. Prior to the modern nation-state, mountain valleys and ridgelines facilitated mobility: of people, animals, merchandise, as well as religious ideas. By the mid-twentieth century, centralizing Asian states—China, India, Pakistan, the Soviet Union—variously restricted cross-mountain mobility, for example by prohibiting movement between countries, or regulated it through the construction of arterial roads. Situating myself in the Karakoram mountains of north Pakistan, where the country shares boundaries with Afghanistan, China and India, I argue that for inhabitants of the region, the mountains remain a porous terrain in two ways. The first is through a continued “ground-level” connectivity, whereby pastoralists will cross international boundaries to pastures which have been used for generations. The porous nature of the land is also evidenced in affect and memory, that is, in how communities in north Pakistan think about associations with people in Afghanistan, China, India or Tajikistan—people whom they have never met. In conclusion, I ask whether instead of approaching mountains as towering, impassable and inhospitable, have not mountains enabled connectivity across Asia through much of recorded history?

What is the Matter with Boundaries?

Roberto Casati

11h30 - 12h00

Institut Jean Nicod, École des hautes études en sciences sociales

What is the matter with boundaries? They do seem to matter a lot to us, a lot of mental and physical energy is devoted to finding them, or drawing them on a map and then maintaining them, or even to classifying them (e.g. Smith's ontological distinction between bona fide and fiat boundaries). Conséquences are not always optimal, as boundar-ization has various shortfalls (e.g. the incongruous 'solidification' of marine regions.) I'll explore two cognitive routes to the boundary advantage. The first route points to a little discussed 'cartographic bias' (Casati 2024) that enhances some convenient properties of the representational vehicle (the map). The second route goes to the root of the issue, examining the ecological reasons for the immense perceptual investment in boundary extraction. The reasons why perception is obsessed with boundaries may then (or not) carry over to reasons for cognition at large to give them center stage in our conceptualizing and reasoning about spaces of all sorts.

Discussion: 12h00 - 12h30

Borders are intentionally drawn, and scratching their surface excavates political and environmental histories and practices of functionality, desire, power and aesthetics. From a design perspective, borders are multi-scalar entities that perform and enact the purposes, ideas and intentions behind their creation from micro to macro scales. To redesign a border is not only to restructure our conception of the world’s constitution and introduce new ideas and imaginations; but also to alter the material conditions under which it operates and mediates between humans and nonhuman worlds, urban and rural divides, and land, sea and atmosphere.

Critical zone geolocation: mapping cycles

13h30 - 14h00

Alexandra Arènes

Shāa architecture/urbanism

The critical zone is the thin film on the Earth's surface where water, rocks and living organisms interact to create habitable conditions. This zone is critical because it is threatened by destructive anthropic forces. In the critical zone, we are not located within geographical limits, but are re-situated in the maelstrom of biogeochemical processes: cycles activated by the sun, living organisms and the energy of the deep earth. These processes carry elements across continents, erode soils, move sediments and alter the earth's contours. Everything moves, but above all, a cycle is not closed on a local scale, it leaks, and joins - constitutes - a planetary cycle. The concept of the frontier explodes under this understanding of the planetary as connectivity rather than contiguity. Cycles are times, from microseconds for some processes to millennia for others, and so the limit - the extension of a cycle - is more temporal than spatial. Vertically, the critical zone extends downwards, into the rocks of the underground environment, and upwards, into the lower atmosphere where life unfolds. This zone may be limited - like a closed cosmogram that makes us feel the planetary limits more strongly - but the cycles that run through it tirelessly reconfigure it from within. The “gaïagraphy” proposal aims to map this zone, to propose a cosmogram and a practical tool for tracking cycles, from an observable locality to the Earth.

Lines in the Data: Thresholds at the City’s Edge

14h00 - 14h30

Grga Basic

University of Chicago

Where, exactly, does a city end? And what assumptions hide inside the thresholds we use — population counts, built-up area ratios, light emissions — to decide? These deceptively simple questions open onto urgent debates about climate policy, remote-sensing science, and design practices. The talk raises critical questions about how urban classifications have been built into global datasets — from early demographic cut-offs to recent Global Human Settlement Layer and Night-time Lights products — and shows how those classifications, once translated into regulations and urban policies, re-shape the ground they claim merely to describe. Drawing on the Planetary Urbanization thesis, I argue that treating “urban” and “non-urban” as mutually exclusive containers obscures the metabolic exchanges that bind resource frontiers, logistics corridors, and waste sinks to metropolitan cores. A sequence of animated “Data-Spheres” visualizes these exchanges at global scale: concentration spheres reveal spiky clusters of population and capital; circulation spheres trace the carved channels of roads, rail, aviation and shipping; production spheres extrude the croplands, forests, fisheries and mines that sustain urban life; and waste spheres expose the carbon plumes that saturate the atmosphere. These visualizations are paired with vignettes from land-use policy debates and remote-sensing classification manuals, illustrating how numeric thresholds from codebooks are translated into zoning rules, infrastructure budgets, and ecological harm. By juxtaposing experimental cartography with policy case studies, the talk invites scholars in law, policy, design, and environmental sciences to re-imagine urban ontologies — not as fixed territorial containers but as shifting, contested thresholds whose politics can, and must, be redesigned.

PANEL 3: SPECULATIVE CARTOGRAPHY (15h30 - 17h00)

What might a world of mobile borders that respond to deglaciation look like? What might responsive borders look like–i.e., borders that adapt to the moments when “nature pushes back” against human desire? What kinds of alternative pasts and futures are unearthed by taking a closer and more attentive look at the ontological divisions between land, sky and ocean floor?

Speculative Cryography: Mapping the Political Life of the Ice Edge

15h30 - 16h00

Alexander Arroyo

University of Chicago

Sea ice looms large in Arctic-amplified discourse on climate change. In the Barents Sea, for instance, new oil, gas, and mineral leasing blocks depend on proximity to the Marginal Ice Zone (MIZ), spurred fierce political and legal debates in Norway over how the MIZ is scientifically defined, and thereby geographically addressed. In the Bering Sea, the extents and dynamics of the MIZ offer contradictory evidence for different accountings of the ongoing billion-dollar crab fishery collapse. Maritime insurance companies contract with satellite-based earth observation services and in-house scientists to develop insurance models for financing risk-laden transpolar shipping. In each case, the ice edge incubates a kind of speculative cryography in which political economic value is drawn out through the spatial demarcation of a geophysical threshold. But where— and when— does seawater turn into sea ice? How does that elemental distinction become a line on a map, and what kinds of geopolitical work does that line do? This paper explores the “political life” of the Arctic ice edge from the late-19th century through near future-scenarios. I focus on the contemporary revaluation of historic sea ice observation from ships’ logs in the “Western” Arctic (the Bering and Chukchi Seas) for use in climate modeling, an increasingly important way to study the climatological past, evaluate the present, and calibrate predictions for the future. The delineation of sea ice from open water, in this sense, is a diagnostic imperial frontier-making practice in space and time. Mapping the long political life of the ice edge thus traces a geopolitical imaginary attuned less to stable ground and fixed borders than to geophysical dynamism and uncertainty— an imaginary at the heart of our current socio-climatic conjuncture.

Vulnerable Topographies of the Siachen Glacier

16h00 - 16h30

Saadia Mirza

University of Chicago

The deglaciating Siachen glacier, amid the Karakoram mountain range between India, Pakistan and China, is the world’s highest-altitude military battleground. From colonial-era imaginings and Russian-British rivalry, to contemporary geopolitical tensions, the project’s speculative cartography reimagines the different components of glacial topography through the lens of climate-induced changes and watershed flow, rather than the military-cartographic eye that has objectified it as a security apparatus. Through mappings and speculative cartography using contemporary remote sensing data, colonial-era maps, and historical photographs, I attempt to imagine a future of the region. In doing so, I open up a language for how climate modeling and cartography can encourage new vocabularies, norms and concepts of the environment that can decouple cartography and militarism in sensitive zones and territories so as to transform political and environmental consciousness of their significance with attention to its geophysical ontology.

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