th e C o m m o n B o rd e r fionn byrne, diana guo, jiahui huang
If you have ventured out for a walk in the past several months and have been determined to remain six feet apart from others, you will have temporarily stepped off a sidewalk to avoid a passerby. This act draws your focus to your feet, as you navigate a suddenly unfamiliar ground. On occasion, you find yourself gauging the height from a sidewalk to the road. Other times, you are caught delicately tip-toeing over grass or walking through a rough terrain of tree roots, long grasses, and puddles. You may easily conclude that the landscape beyond the sidewalk is dangerous and messy, and you will hurry to pass and get back on your way. On other occasions, the ground beyond the sidewalk seems so impassible that you come to a complete halt only a foot from the path to let another pedestrian pass. In every case, however, the moment passes quickly. As carefree as we walk the city along paths of poured concrete, more than anything when we transgress this surface our behaviour indicates a truth we implicitly understand: we do not belong beyond the public sidewalk as this adjacent ground is otherwise spoken for.
14 on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches
In our cities, property lines are contiguous. Where one use of land stops, another starts. In most cases, this also means that where one claim of ownership ends, so too does another begin. The sidewalk, then, is a publicly owned circulation route that enables free movement between independently owned parcels of land. It allows for unbroken movement without crossing through private property. When we step off the sidewalk, we are either on land that is dedicated to some other use, such as for car traffic, or claimed by a private owner. Cities around the world are an amalgamation of land that is owned, either publicly or privately, governed by laws and controlled by force. Yet even in the wilderness, we find signs that oblige us to stay on the trail. Wherever we go, we are constantly following predefined paths. Given this contemporary situation of being unable to pass through any city, suburb or even rural land, without following pre-established circulation routes, it seems worth exploring alternative models of land organisation and ownership.
