Border Ecologies

Water, species, waste, and human settlements move continuously across boundaries, producing ecologies born of contrast. As these flows persist, fragmentation emerges as the visible structure of interdependence. A defining manifestation of this condition unfolds along the United States–Mexico border. Here, the landscape is an archive of movement, adaptation, and negotiation shaped by survival, economic asymmetries, and political forces. Within this terrain, the Tijuana River Watershed sustains a complex estuarine system despite jurisdictional division and contamination, a unique natural threshold from which this book departs.
Border Ecologies: Aquí/Allá explores landscapes of division—both physical and conceptual—as sites of negotiation and transformation. Grounded in the U.S.–Mexico border and extended through parallel investigations across other divided landscapes, the book advances landscape as method, reading watersheds, estuaries, quarries, districts, and migratory territories as living systems shaped by extraction, cultivation, and repair. Through essays, drawings, and experimental modes of representation, twelve scholars and practitioners in landscape architecture, urbanism, history, and environmental studies—working across contested geographies—propose new ways of seeing, drawing, and inhabiting shared boundaries. Border Ecologies positions the border as a living ecology, where interdependence is sustained by contrast and exchange.