Europe’s cultural and spatial boundaries, compiled in a book

Marc Silberman, Karen E. Till, and Janet Ward compile in “Walls, Borders, Boundaries: Spatial and Cultural Practices in Europe” cases from the recent past and the present in Europe in which different formats of boundaries have influenced spatial and cultural practices between cities or countries. 

Some of the case studies included in the book are the Berlin Wall, a wall built in the Italian city of Padua to isolate a neighborhood of poor immigrants, the wall built in Ceuta to separate the frontier between Morocco and Spain, and the barriers that separate the Catholic and Protestant communities in Belfast.  

The authors defend that, although walls obviously divide they can also have unexpected consequences and end up promoting closer links between the different communities, as happened with the so-called “Iron Curtain” between Czechoslovakia and Austria.