URBANIZING SOVEREIGNTY. STATE BORDERS AND SPACE USES

In this article I am working on the epistemology of relations between state borders on the one hand and valo-rizations of space on the other. In this epistemology borders do not divide space, but make space available. The current regime of state sovereignty implies that this availability works as re-bounding. Thus, growing trans-border contacts and projects do not fundamentally weaken state borders, but complicate state sovereign-ties. Such complication means the acceleration of production of various spatial units - different from nation-states - in the process of communicating sovereignties via state borders. State borders are the meta-process of bounding space, which produces a complete, limited set of sovereign spatial entities. I discuss a project of re-bounding sovereignties performed in the urban milieu of the German-Polish border town Goerlitz-Zgorzelec within its governance's common attempts to valorize this urban milieu in linę with the European Union (EU) scalar regime. In the studied case, the program framework for this scalar regime was the joint application of Goerlitz-Zgorzelec for the status European Capital of Culture 2010 (ECC).