OFR was invited to contribute to Spatialities of Displacement in Times of Climate Change. The research draws from fieldwork at the border, including interviews and photography across El Paso and Juárez in 2021 and 2022. The result is a reading of the US-Mexico border as an ecological system, tracing how the Rio Grande was engineered into a concrete channel and what a century of that control did to the land, water and people of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. Written with Dr Irit Katz for TU Berlin, it is due to be published in Autumn 2026.

“WE MUST RETHINK OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE  border, NOT AS a wall to be defended but AS a landscape to be tendeD“

Around El Paso, the river now runs dry in its concrete bed for most of the year; upstream agriculture takes over 80% of its water; border walls have cut wildlife crossings by 86%; and summers of 43°C alternate with flash floods the cities' drainage cannot hold. The chapter reads the border as an ecology: a living system of land, water, industry and people, engineered and severed over four centuries.

Reading the border as such lets the chapter hold land, water, industry and migration in a single frame, and showe enables planners, architects and institutional bodies to discern how the same logic of control that severed the river also displaced the Native American and migrant communities who built along it. 

The project platforms migrant placemaking as evidence: in informal settlements on the Juárez edge, tens of thousands of people build incrementally from reclaimed maquiladora materials and adobe from the river's clay, cultivate greywater gardens in the desert, and retrofit abandoned industrial buildings into homes. From these practices it argues that spatial disciplines should move from instruments of order to stewards working against rupture, and sets out a triad already present in the way people build at the border: land care to reconnect severed ecologies, infrastructural repair that reanimates and reuses what is already built, and capacity-building that treats migrant knowledge (from adobe construction to greywater systems) as a blueprint for climate-adaptive futures. It is the second of OFR's border chapters written with Irit Katz, developing the earlier origin-to-destination study into a close reading of one borderscape, and it frames the studio's core terms (ecology, repair and stewardship) as a working method.