An Example: The Black Line

An Example: The Black Line

The aesthetics of the border on the map of the Euregio Meuse-Rhine, for example, is limited to four line types, representing boundaries between municipalities, regions & communities, countries and the outer border of the border region itself. This does not appear to be much different on maps of other border regions.

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Above: border between municipalities (top left), between regions (top right), between countries (bottom left) and the outer border of the Euregio Meuse-Rhine itself (bottom right)

The simplistic representation of the border does – of course – not represent the rich variety of border experiences and the impact of that border on its physical context. ITEM lists a variety of experiences on their website “(…) national borders, language borders, cultural borders and the nuances within borders that they indicate as hard and obvious, softer or historically grown.¹Link to the website of ITEM, accessed February 8, 2019, https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/item These nuances and differences are thus often reduced to a black line in a few slight variations. 

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Above, from left to right: maps of the Euregio Meuse-Rhine (2019), Euregio Rhine-Meuse-North (2019) and Euregio HELTAL (2020)

If we represent and reduce the border in a border region to one simplistic and stripped-down black line repeatedly, then an unintended consequence appears. Namely that we think too simplistic and one-sided about that physical border region, as the map doesn’t allow for anything but black and white.