Urbanities,
Vol. 3 • No 1 • May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
130
CONFERENCE REPORT
Relocating Borders: a comparative approach
Berlin 11–13 January 2013
Zden
ě
k Uherek
(Institute of Ethnology of the ASCR, v.v.i. Prague)
The conference, organised by EastBordNet, was one of the final outputs of the COST Action
IS0803 Project and became a significant scientific event of the beginning of 2013. Although
the most inspirational stimuli were probably found there by experts from the field of social
anthropology, a whole range of topics for consideration were raised there also for the fields of
sociology, social geography, architecture, urban planning, development studies and other
disciplines. The conference was already the second such large gathering organised by
EastBordNet and the COST project, which was begun in 2009 and entered its closing phase
in 2013. The conference contextualised the project’s central theme, the Eastern Periphery of
Europe, presented its results and demonstrated that within its framework productive new
theoretical concepts and working ties were formed allowing further research projects of the
eastern borders of the European Union, of internal and external migrations in relation to the
European Union and of wider developmental scenarios including urbanisation, globalisation
and the relations of Europe and the Third World.
In the course of the existence of the project, much has changed in the European and
global contexts. Since 2009, when the project was started, the migration situation in Europe
has modified and also the view of Europe in the context of world development is different.
The dichotomy of Europe and the Third World has taken on new meanings; the borders
between the European Union and its neighbours can hardly be simply conceptualised as the
borders of the developed and developing world now.
Contemporary European and global affairs were reflected also in the scenario of the
conference. The organisers of the conference used global events for the evaluation of the
theoretical bases of the topic of borders, for work on its anchoring in overall social-science
discourse and for placement of the individual pieces of knowledge into the widest possible
context of global events. They also strategically selected Berlin as the place of the
conference; not only for the reason that as a city in the centre of Europe it was easily
