Hybrid Urban Borderlands – Redevelopment Efforts and Shifting Boundaries In and Around Downtown San Diego

In recent years, far-reaching urbanization and gentrification processes have been taking place in and around downtown San Diego. These have been accompanied not just by structural upheavals, but by social changes that still await in-depth analysis. In the context of San Diego’s inner-city redevelopment, urban research can profit from a border-theoretical approach, initiating a geography of urban boundaries focused on change processes and the redrawing, shifting, and dissolution of boundaries. Although urban neighborhoods are particularly characterized by differentiation, ambiguity, and fragmentation, border-theoretical findings have rarely been applied on this level. Against this background, the article traces processes of social “ordering” and “othering,” and the shifting of individual-subjective demarcations in the inner-ring suburbs of San Diego—the former warehouse district East Village and the adjacent Mexican-American community neighborhood Barrio Logan. A methodological triangulation of interviews, participatory observations, and cartographic and photographic visualizations illustrates the outward thrust and adaption of multi-dimensional boundaries between the downtown area and the urbanizing first ring—phenomena of what we have called “hybrid urban borderlands.” Aimed primarily at creating a wider understanding of urbanization processes in San Diego’s inner-ring, our project opens up further differentiations in the field of border studies across its disciplinary boundary to urban research.