Description
Book SynopsisHow do towns and cities divided by the harsh reality of an international border manage to get on with each other when their closest neighbour lives just next door, but in another country? Are they thriving or surviving? Utterly dependent on each other or with backs turned, socially and economically? We visit towns and cities that you may not have heard of or know little about. Places like distant Blagoveshchensk and Heihe, Narva and Ivangorod and Gorlitz and Zgorzelec. But also the better known Nicosia, Europe’s only divided capital, Detroit with its Canadian neighbour Windsor, Geneva and its French suburb Annemasse and the cities of Sarajevo and Mostar, divided not by international borders but ethnic divisions baked into everyday life. This is a fascinating and well-researched study of thirty-_six towns and cities from across the world that are separated by borders. Paul Doe delves into the way in which these divisions came about and how the separated towns and cities manage to get along, or not, buffeted as they are by geopolitics, ethnic differences and historical animosities.
Table of ContentsChapter One It all stops at the border 5 Chapter Two A borderless world 33 Chapter Three Life along the hardest of borders 65 Chapter Four Doing business on the far frontier 97 Chapter Five Rivalry over the border 130 Chapter Six Torn into two 164 Chapter Seven Living apart together 194 Chapter Eight The towns ‘doomed to each other’ 225 Chapter Nine Invisible borders 257 Bibliography 290 Acknowledgements 304
