Walls Around the World
“Two decades since the Berlin Wall came down, BBC Mundo looks at walls and barriers around the world which are still standing – or have been put up – since 1989.”
Update: My friend Victor sent a link to this graphic from the amazing TD Architects site. I should really get your website ready, John J!
Update 7 Nov 2009: If you are in or near Berlin on Monday, 9th November 2009, join the Mauer Mob:
“The Berlin Wall project is about creating a “temporary monument of reflection”. When it was created, the wall was one of the clearest man-made divisions of people with different ideologies. For the 20th anniversary of its deconstruction we will rebuild the Berlin Wall, not from steel and concrete, but from people. To remember when Berlin became one again after decades of separations – physically as well as in the minds…
With the “Mauer Mob. 09 Project”, we want to say that such divisions are no longer acceptable in today’s society.”
Update 11 Nov 2009: Mike Johnston – Borders (be sure to read ‘mcananeya’s’ featured comment, too):
“I’ve always thought borders were strange places because it’s a strange idea—an arbitrary line through the landscape where one “place” supposedly ends and another supposedly begins. They makes sense on maps and in our heads, but maybe not so much at the actual location where they’re said to exist. The exception, of course, is when people take them very seriously, like the DMZ between North and South Korea. At those places, our conceptual world exercises its literal hold over our freedom to move about.”
Brian Rose: The Lost Border – Photographs of the Iron Curtain.