Post-Border Futures: Unconstructing Detention Architectures

Building on both the knowledges of communities engaged in anti-detention activism and of the spatial practices and disciplines of architecture, this paper proposes that critical spatial practices can be utilised to resist and deconstruct carceral border policies, while also being a key tool to produce new forms of engagement with sites of detention.For the last 30 years Australia has adopted policies of indefinite and mandatory detention of undocumented migrants, which have resulted in a broad range of carceral spaces of immigration detention. Examining a key case study to reveal how spaces of border detention are constructed and maintained, this research uses the practice of architectural drawing and analysis to propose key spatial tools to further reveal the spatial effects of legal, spatial and political systems used to incarcerate racialized bodies at the border. The Park Hotel, which is located in Melbourne and was used as an adhoc immigration detention centre from 2020 to 2022, forms the central focus of this research. By documenting a series of spatial transformations applied to the windows of the hotel, this research examines a series of architectural modifications which were made to shift the function of the building, from a space of hospitality, to a space of detention. Through doing so, this research questions the potential for spatial analysis to provide new insights into legal and political understandings of the architecture of immigration detention, and provide tools to construct new equitable futures beyond border carcerality.