Every day borders and boundaries go up in some way between people. They go up physically in cities and they go up figuratively between people. Jane Jacobs, Yusef Komunyakaa, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and Robert Frost all touch upon at least one of these two aspects of having borders and boundaries in their works.
Jacobs' work, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," focuses on the physical aspect of a border. She talks a great deal about the effects of borders in cities on the people living in it. She realizes that creating borders can cause a real problem, especially in safety. Jacobs first focuses on the different kinds of borders in cities. There are the geographical borders, like water and parks. Then there are the man-made borders like college campuses and railroads. All of these things creates space between people, which in turn creates different dynamics on the different sides of the borders. This creates a problem because the less-populated and "not as nice" areas do not get walked through as much because they are considered scary. Jacobs says, "literal and continuous mingling of people is the only device that keeps streets safe." So when an area is considered bad because it's in the wrong side of town then businesses do not succeed over there and real estate is not valued, because it's an unsafe area that will close before dark. The main point of Jacobs' work is to open the readers' eyes to these problems with borders and try and fix them so people will walk through any area which will keep the place safe.
Robert Frost's poem, Mending Wall, is a mixture between the physical and figurative border. In this poem there is a wall between one person and his neighbor, and the person is trying to figure out whether his neighbor is keeping him out or something in. We get the idea when the neighbor says, "Good fences make good neighbors." The neighbor's feeling is that he needs a border up to make sure his personal boundaries are not crossed. In this sense it is protection and safety for himself and his side of the wall.
Cofer's, The Game, and Komunyakaa's, Slam, Dunk, & Hook, both focus on the personal boundaries people put up. Cofer's poem is about a humpbacked girl and her mother. The mother wanted to keep her daughter home to protect her from ridicule and embarrassment. The family would act like nothing was wrong, but the girl knew. It was only in her land of pretend that she was completely protected in her own boundaries; away from her own mother's ashamedness of her. Komunyakaa's poem is about how basketball can create it's own border around itself. When the boy's mother died he kept himself inside this border to feel safe with something he knew he could control.
Between these four works the sense of borders and boundaries is used in several ways. People make one for themselves to feel protected or people live in certain parts of cities to feel protective. What Jacobs is trying to explain is we need to knock these borders down to get the most safety. We have to entrust ourselves to others without the use of a wall to keep us safe.