Exopolis reloaded: fragmented landscapes and no man’s lands in a North-Eastern Italian border region

This paper examines a landscape of power' in the marginal northeastern corner of Italy, near the Italian-Slovenian border. The landscape is centred around the small town of Gradisca and its highly contested centres for asylum seekers and marked by the concomitant presence of a giant shopping mall, the largest Italian war memorial, and an aestheticised wine district. The result of participant observation, visual and textual analysis, and selected interviews, this study reflects on the transformation of a former cold war border area into a mix of carceral, hospitality, commercial, residential, rural spatialities that seem to be entirely disconnected with each other and linked instead to broader regional, national and international geographies. This fragmented landscape, dominated by massive fortified' enclosures and with gradually deterritorialised in-between spaces, described here as no man's land, may be provocatively analysed as an Italian exopolis.