This project is an investigation into non-territories and post-territorial inhabitation in the context of open (European) national borders, where territoriality is defined by ambiguity and temporality. This thesis tackles the socio-geographical and political sphere of territorial ownership within architecture and challenges traditional conceptions of ownership by constructing narratives around the inhabitation of non-territories. This culminates in a post-territorial experiment: the ‘EUtopian Visions’.

The ‘EUtopian Visions’ critically engage with the EU’s current territorial cohesion strategy by reimagining the inhabitation of its open inner borderlands. As such, this thesis proposes alternative forms of cohesion in geographical borderlands by re-evaluating their historical territorial secession and making these dynamics an intrinsic part of a speculative design methodology. Set in Luxembourg’s periphery and its borders with Belgium, France and Germany, the project proposes post-territorial borderlands, which, in a time of Brexit and the rise of nationalism, choose neither 'Leave' nor 'Remain'. They exercise a third option independent of inter-country differences, and become a place of many identities and none. In this context, the borderlands are programmatically reinvented and hybridised, creating an eco-commercial, culturally industrial and economically domestic inhabitation network. The Luxembourgish borderlands become the test bed for the first post-territorial community of its kind.