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• BORDER SPACE
Borders, like bridges, may bear more metaphorical than physical power—they loom in the minds of citizens as symbols of limits and control. "The border between two lands is more than a line; it reinforces the hopes and fears of the nations that share it," writes Wired's Jeff Howe. He highlights six of the world's contested borders, with an eye toward technology's role in smoothing or stopping flow among them. They include:
-The Strait of Gibraltar, the rather ambiguous line between Spain and Morocco. The EU helped fund Spain's construction of fences and surveillance systems around its two cities that lie in recently independent Morocco: Ceuta and Melilla. (See also this map of the region from Africa-Map.net and these pictures of Melilla by Internet journalist Tore Kjeilen.)
-The desolate but mine-filled (and ill-named) Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea, which Bill Clinton once called "the scariest place in the world."
-The Ferghana Valley in Central Asia, a fertile plain fought over by Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Howe calls it "The Pointless Border." If the three nations could stop lining their borders with land mines long enough to cooperate and open lines of trade across the valley, they could coax life from their dormant economies.
-Kashmir, which India and Pakistan have wrestled over for more than 50 years, despite its lack of strategic and agricultural importance (and its altitude, which has killed thousands of soldiers in falls and avalanches). But being both inconvenient and irrelevant didn't stop Kashmir from nearly hosting a nuclear war in 1999. Full story
(see also the New York Times on tourism in Kashmir*)
• REFUGEE SPACE
This is what you don't see on traditional maps: land with no ownership, citizens without a country. The temporary holding space of the world's more than 35 million refugees—"Limbo" land, as Wired calls it—is getting tighter. "Even as the need for relief grows, humanitarian space is shrinking—in the physical realm of camps as well as the conceptual arena of neutral conditions," writes Thomas Keenan of the Human Rights Project. Full story
• GOLF SPACE
More than 2,500 courses were built in the United States during the 1990s, a threefold increase from the decade before (Orange County alone now has 60 courses). Especially in the American Southwest, these courses are not places to get away from it all—they're actually in the middle of it all; in a break from traditional grid patterns for housing tracts, the courses anchor housing developments that surround them. Full story (see also the last item below on the future of lawns)
-Unanswered Questions: What does urban planner R.E. Somol mean when he writes in Wired that golf "grants people the power to venture ever inward—manifest destiny in reverse"? Does he mean that golf—either the courses or the game—physically and civically isolates people? How does this contrast with Turner's Frontier Thesis about American society?
• OUTER SPACE
In cylindrical pods perched among rust-colored rocks in a Martian landscape, scientists do experiments and adjust to space station life. Sound like the set of a new sci-fi movie? The scene is reality in the Utah desert, where NASA operates its Mars Desert Research Station (in addition to a similar settlement in the Arctic) to prepare scientists for an eventual journey to the Red Planet. Wired interviews a NASA chief in Utah. Full story
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