Tangier, Mobile City Re-Making Borders in the Straits of Gibraltar

This chapter looks at some of the ways in which the city of Tangier is attempting to reconfigure itself as a ‘Euro-Mediterranean’ border metropolis and a key ‘gate’ to ‘EU’rope. It looks at the ways in which spatial metaphors and in particular metaphors relying on notions of openness, mobility and flow are invoked in order to re-imagine the city’s position and its relations (political, economic, cultural) to the European continent. What is of interest to the theme of this volume is how such evo- and invo-cations couple new ‘mobile’ forms of re-bordering, division and fracture, with new forms and modes of political and economic regionalization and connection. Drawing on ongoing field work in Tangier, Morocco as part of the research project ‘At the Gates of Europe: Re-mapping Tangier’ funded by the National Geographic Society’s Global Exploration Fund, the chapter draws attention to some of the ways in which current projects of constituting a single espace du détroit rely upon a play of selective mobilities and strategies of selective openness and closure in order to reconfigure the Straits of Gibraltar and the greater Tangier region both as a gate(way) to Europe and its wall. The chapter highlights how a variety of actors in this border-space attempt to engage the boundary, transgress and (partially) transcend it, in a series of strategic spaces and interventions, mobilizing the border as an outil spatial, a ‘spatial tool’, to use Piermay’s (2009) characterization, as, to cite the opening chapter (p. 6) of this volume, ‘a device that is permanently adapting to the flows it tries to control’.