Opening the frontier closed area: a mutual benefit zone

Abstract

Opening the Frontier Closed Area is an on-going research and speculative project that critically addresses the future development of the Frontier Closed Area – a borderland buffer zone that was established in 1951 to control illegal migration and black-market trade from mainland China. Over time the Closed Area has evolved its own specific ecosystem becoming an anomaly in one of the most densely inhabited and fastest growing urban regions. It is a zone of immense potentials and contradictions: a radical separation between ideologies, economic and political systems, and social and cultural mores. It is a horizon of dreams and desires and a site of intense exchange. The paper will explore the regional context and massive urbanisation processes that have occurred in the Pearl River Delta over the last thirty years and present a proposition for the Closed Area that uses the Zone’s special status to create an urban strategy that is mutually beneficial to both sides of the border.