The City-Port Threshold. An Atlas of Maps between Verisimilar and Liminality

Countless types of borders – administrative, political, cultural, to name a few – inhabit the contemporary city: spatial divisions that can be explored along natural or artificial fractures in which a change of status occurs. We can see them as borders but even better as thresholds, liminal figures that allow transition and are originated by the clash of two or more territories and/or entities. The act of mapping a threshold is a process of knowledge that requires a new narrative – between verisimilar and liminality – able to take into account the different geometries in which these elements are shaped. However, the representation of thresholds is controversial since it poses the problem of the relationship between power and space and of depicting of a paradoxical situation: it is a matter of drawing something that is there but not seen, which establishes an institutional regime but which is often invisible. With the purpose of developing an Atlas of Maps of the Urban-Port Threshold, the objective is to transmit the dynamism of the coastal landscape, its variations, and the inseparable bond between the topography and the project. Specifically, the urban-port threshold – the physical, legal and symbolic boundary between city and port – describes a blocked situation in which the physical limit coincides with the administrative separation. So, the threshold is a spatial sequence, a physical chronology of different sedimentations, in which various characteristics are recognized using a symbolic language rich in abstraction and conventional signs. Through this Atlas, the main intention is to construct a set of tools able to investigate and conceptualize dissimilar sites and to categorized recurrent schemes, whose presence is decisive in identifying a common ground made up of future scenarios for the project.