The Non-gated Gated Community of Stapleton

Hybrid Urban Borderlands – Redevelopment Efforts and Shifting Boundaries In and Around Downtown San Diego

“…For the development of this conceptual approach, the scope of border-theoretical considerations is rescaled from the level of the nation-state to that of the neighborhood, in order to investigate the extent to which aspects of spatial and social (dis)connection and (dis)continuity shape everyday life in the innerring, and how the different borders and boundaries change in the ongoing process of inner-city development. Drawing on the increasing research work on urban bordering processes (in addition to the papers mentioned above see Gibson and Canfield 2016;Iossifova 2015Iossifova , 2019Sohn and Scott 2020) as well as borderland conceptualizations (Anzaldúa 2012(Anzaldúa [1987; Banerjee and Chen 2012; Boesen and Schnuer 2017; Pavlakovich-Kochi, Morehouse, and Wastl-Walter 2004), the analytical concept of hybrid urban borderlands is developed-a term which embraces physical, urban policy, functional, and sociospatial, as well as "perceived boundaries" (Newman 2003a, 129), as applied in the first instance to San Diego's inner-city area. The concept of hybrid urban borderlands is a reference point for research questions about spatial participation and the perception of belonging, exclusion, and displacement in transforming neighborhoods.…”

“…This is the starting point for the idea of "urban borderlands" which takes into account the drawing of borders in the urban context on all levels of scale and in all forms-"material and immaterial, physical and symbolic" (Lazzarini 2015, 182). Radically different in their delimitations, examples of such urban border(land)s range from the gated communities of Los Angeles to urban enclaves in China (Bagaeen and Uduku 2015;Gibson and Canfield 2016;Iossifova 2015Iossifova , 2019Liao, Breitung, and Wehrhahn 2018), from ethnic ghettos in US cities to the banlieues of France (Soja 2014;Wacquant 2008), from the gentrifying urban cores and their adjacent inner-ring neighborhoods in Paris and San Diego (Kühne and Weber 2019;Roßmeier 2019Roßmeier , 2020bWeber 2019) to the the sprawling suburbs of the periphery (Herzog 2015). Conceptually, borderlands are understood as the "spaces where the everyday realities of boundaries are played out.…”

“…On the other hand, new structural borders and socio-economic-cultural boundaries are being drawn and a rebordering is taking place in which spatial participation is regulated and processes of exclusion begin (cf. Gibson and Canfield 2016;Liao, Breitung, and Wehrhahn 2018;Scott and Sohn 2018). Not just through measures like the privatization of public spaces and their (guarded) access control, but especially through wider processes of gentrification, rent increases, and a lack of new affordable housing in East Village and Barrio Logan, certain groups are being gradually but ineluctably excluded from the center and its surroundings in a way that resembles national "security-led rebordering" (Herzog and Sohn 2019, 19).…”