There are many kinds of borders to places, but they are not solid and they don't coincide with one another. If you want to make all the different kinds of borders coincide, you are moving toward the dream of the nation state, to make linguistic and ethnic and economic and resource and other kinds of borders all come together in a concentric whole that possesses clear defensible geographical borders framing a solid entity. It didn't work for a nation and it won't work for a city.
People re-dream this on a various scales, wishing, for example, that bio-regions and political regions might coincide. The dream can lead to ethnic and other kinds of cleansing.
Places resist coincidence of borders. Yet they remain oriented expanses of possibility.
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001