Looking at the divided cities across the world, we can see that the borders are set as a temporary caution to a historical, social or political problem. Especially after the WWII era, the political tension creates borders for the new countries. The problems which cannot be solved makes us ask a question: What would happen if the cost of building new walls, managing and controlling them be spent for the development of a new society?
human as a social being, spends its lifetime among the space-time interval. Whatever the scale be, border itself initiates formation of a temporal society and defines identity of it. The identities of people get lost in this example, creating a new universal one, leading way to change the area’s political attitude. The unowned case of border makes the absolute into vague; the space into opportunity. In spatial experience, time transforms into space and space transforms into time where the borders become passageways, the space re-creates itself over and over again.
What happens if the “Buffer Zone” that separates the north and south of Cyprus becomes the free circulation and settlement zone that gives collective ownership to its inhabitants? Buffer Zone would now be called as the Mutual Zone, and the potential facilities that belong to nobody, since almost 40 years, come into the picture and become everybody’s. All together, the inhabitants create the new universal and sustainable habitat.
* ITU Graduation Studio 2013
