Paper short abstract:

This paper offers a preliminary framework for better understanding the knock-on effects of policy interventions in urban borderlands. It argues that paired border towns function in tandem through interdependent imbalances that are hinged around the border line.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the usefulness of a 'hinge' metaphor when thinking about pairs of border towns. It presents a preliminary typology of local cross-border asymmetries, sub-divided into categories which are broadly speaking dynamic: street crime and enforcement, informal border regulation, employment rates and external linkages, and those which tend to be more static: penal codes, formal border regulation, infrastructure, demography, physical geography and natural resources. The central argument is that pairs of border towns function in tandem through a series of interdependent imbalances that are hinged around the border line.

These categories of asymmetry each give rise to a range of tangible qualities that differ between pairs of border towns: variations in rates of street crime, in commodity prices, in building quality and so on. The result is that urban spaces paired across borders exhibit a form of organic solidarity in which each side adapts to changes on the other. Visualising asymmetries as being hinged at the border can be used to pose questions about how imbalances change over time, whether particular asymmetries tend towards different equilibriums, and how particular asymmetries relate to one another: the relationship, for example, between imbalances in market regulation and in violent crime in neighbourhoods on either side of a border. This provides a preliminary framework for better understanding the knock-on effects of policy interventions in urban borderlands. Although a range of examples are drawn upon, Goma (DRC) and Gisenyi (Rwanda) are privileged out of the author's familiarity with them.