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Speaker: Ronald Real, Associate Professor of Architecture; Eva Li Memorial Chair in Architecture, UC Berkeley
Moderator: Diane Davis, Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism; Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design , Graduate School of Design, Harvard University
Despite recent attention to wall building as a security measure the building of barriers along the U.S. – Mexico border is not a new phenomenon. The U.S. Secure Fence Act of 2006 funded the single-largest domestic building project in the twenty-first century and financed approximately 700 miles of fortification dividing the U.S. from Mexico at a cost of up to $16 million per mile. Today approximately one third of the 1 954-mile-long border between the U.S. and Mexico has been walled off. Ronald Rael will discuss his book Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S. - Mexico Boundary a timely re-examination of what the physical barrier that divides the United States of America and both a protest against the wall and a projection about its future.