Transportation: Tacubaya and Places of Transition
Tacubaya is not a place of destination. The expansion of highways in this region divided the area into pieces and thus, reminds us Jose Joaquin Blanco, “[Tacubaya] became a place to get through, then a mess to get away from.. those who resign themselves to remain [in Tacubaya] is because they have no choice (199)”. Correa explains how mobility networks deeply influenced new forms of housing typologies, “partnership between developers and public lending institutions paid little acknowledgment to transportation infrastructure, nor travel times between dormitory cities and major sources of employment (Correa, 209).”
How does the accommodation for private transportation, affect the livelihoods of those who have no choice but to stay in the dismantled places they once called their community? How and when does urban growth account for the commute of the working class, the informal sector and those who transcend through the zones outside of the bypasses, the freeways, the turnpikes that insulates the “indigent parts of the city”?
Housing: High-Rises and Linkages
“Housing as a typology is one of the richest representation of a city’s history and evolution of culture" and Mexico City is no exception (Correa, 2009). With growth both through expanding industry and migration, housing becomes a major part of any city plan and renewal efforts. Creating affordable housing is often the hardest as it is not only difficult to secure capital to build the structures, but it will generate little return on investment when compared to higher-end housing or commercial buildings. This results in the marginalizing of these projects to the city's outskirts where land is cheaper or less valuable, which become problematic in linking these development to the city center through transportation and other services. This is particularly evident in the case of Santa Fe. Initially intended as an industrial site, this former landfill has struggled to provide adequate housing for its residents despite of the investment and collected revenue from sales and property taxes. Luxury condos and high-rise apartment buildings dominate the skyline as well as the housing stock. In his book, Correa examines different housing typologies including high-rise condominium which has been the choice of affluent residences since the high performance of Torre Lomas during the 1985 earthquake and with the increasing security concerns. While these high-rises present the image of affluence, these luxury units discharge waste into ravines or the groundwater system as they are not connected to the city's sewage system. How can affordable housing be physically and visually integrated into high-end development and into the city's plan? Ibarguengoitia argues that "neighborhoods with mixed populations are troublesome... It’s far more profitable to transform Mexico City into a lake of stricken ghettos over which the islands of affluence float lightly joined by high, efficient, fast bridges."
Sewage Water and Garbage: The Calcutta/Houston Complex
The Santa Fe Megaproject hits a reality check. As Maria Moreno-Carranco reminds us “The implementation of transnational urban projects is restricted by local circumstances (Moreno-Carranco, 7)”. Without appropriate expansion of services, with a lacking infrastructure capable of accommodating sewage water and garbage, how do you distinguished the ground water from the sewage water? And when the temperature reaches a certain point and the wind blows in the right direction, the corporate executive in the tallest luxury building of Santa Fe can still smell the fetid smell of garbage. In a city that capriciously wants to modernizarse, “inside the buildings you are in Houston but when you go out you are in Calcutta.” (Moreno-Carranco, 6)
Competing Globalization: Street Vending in Tepito
While street vending is an integral part of the city's commercial history, urban renewal projects have tested the resilience and value of this service. Most urban renewal efforts attempt to eradicate this informal commerce in favor of formal shopping centers, which are often enclosed and separated from the city street. However, the demand and opportunity in street vending make it resilient to political and larger economic ambitions. For example , in Santa Fe, informal vendors sell to the low-income employees during business hours despite efforts to squander these activities. This importance of street vendors was particularly evident in Tepito's influence on the Alameda project. Tepito is a neighborhood located on prime development property near the city center that depends on the commerce generated by street vending. The Alameda project would displace its residents while threatening the vending culture of Tepito. Davis describes this conflict as competing globalization where " opposing sets of social forces draw their strength from entirely different networks of global actors and investors, yet who coexist uneasily in a delimited physical space." (Davis, 157) While the Alameda project in that incarnation did not did pass, the central location, increasing security concerns, and demand from residents kept Tepito vulnerable to redevelopment. It was clear that any development had to retain the economic character of Tepito. After years of political and resident resistance, the Alameda project was implemented as a combination of upscale formal development separate from addressing the security concerns in Tepito. However, one interesting tension remains in that street vendors have been kicked out of the Alameda because "public space makes us citizens and no one has the right to appropriate it, no one, for any reason." (Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, 2012).
Safety: Cleaning the Streets
One of the major ideas of urban renewal is the notion of making the city safer, which is often tied up in the idea of "cleaning the streets." When safety in Tepito needed to be addressed, the solution was to provide new housing, widen streets, and building "modern" markets to "restore some order to the streets" (Davis, 162). Davis goes on to question the relationship between the efforts of controlling urban violence and the urban projects addressing it--"high levels of violence helped create a “political space” for public authorities to re-instigate plans for downtown development, ultimately tipping the balance towards urban change" (Davis, 158). Urban renewal packages the new, the clean, the formal, and the safe into one project of urban development, creating a perception of safety.
Growth and Modernity: Imposed Urbanisms and its Bureaucrats
Does Mexico City sit in a place with “no good reason for its continued presence of this spot (Ibarguengoitia, 196)”? Is the location of the capital nothing but a bureaucratic intervention, one that can be traced to the Spanish conquest and its capriciousness of imposing itself on top of the Aztec empire? How do we understand the legacy of the paternalistic, centralized system that has categorized the urban projects that are carried out on the city? Moreno-Carranco reminds us about the legacy of this self-centeredness is evident in the Santa Fe Megaproject. She concludes that the “Santa Fe must be viewed as part of a longer history of the deep involvement of bureaucrats in urban development and landmark projects in Mexico City (Moreno-Carranco, 6)” Can the bureaucratic corruption in the Santa Fe project be hidden away to justify the possibility of modernization and progress from these imposed urbanisms?When you have places like Tepito, where colliding globalization ideologies have different social and economic futures in mind, you are likely to hit a reality check--imposed urbanisms will be resisted because as Diane Davis reminds us “any built environmental transformation intended to turn it into a global city—will depend in large part on what happens with the low-income, unskilled service, informal sector living in this area (Davis, 157)”.
Questions raised concerning "integration" and "mixed use" neighborhoods have me considering whether the Blade Runner model of "a lake of ghettos" with affluence suspended above might not have advantages for both parties. As raised, concerns about resources, sewage, and garbage will always complicate this. Disconnect from the end point of ones waste creates conditions for recklessness and entitlement to foster, and prolonged exposure to the waste of others creates a serious threat to human health, safety, and happiness. Likewise, how infrastructure responds to the demands of waste management, and how civic society applies itself to these problems will determine the health of a city. Waste aside, stratification creates certain opportunities for each fragment to become culturally at home, and this is not necessarily bad. The "ghetto" has it's own logic, strategies, cultural hierarchies, etc. While integration would seem to hold a potential for elevation, it also holds the potientail for displacement, homogenization, disruption of capitol and labor flows, and the dubious integration of individuals into the same systems of goods, services, consumption, waste, and expansion which pose such a threat to those on the fringe. The temptation of middle class aspiration comes hand in hand in many places with a complacency to involve oneself in the same system by which poverty and infrastructural inequity is produced.
ReplyDeleteQuestions raised concerning "integration" and "mixed use" neighborhoods have me considering whether the Blade Runner model of "a lake of ghettos" with affluence suspended above might not have advantages for both parties. As raised, concerns about resources, sewage, and garbage will always complicate this. Disconnect from the end point of ones waste creates conditions for recklessness and entitlement to foster, and prolonged exposure to the waste of others creates a serious threat to human health, safety, and happiness. Likewise, how infrastructure responds to the demands of waste management, and how civic society applies itself to these problems will determine the health of a city. Waste aside, stratification creates certain opportunities for each fragment to become culturally at home, and this is not necessarily bad. The "ghetto" has it's own logic, strategies, cultural hierarchies, etc. While integration would seem to hold a potential for elevation, it also holds the potientail for displacement, homogenization, disruption of capitol and labor flows, and the dubious integration of individuals into the same systems of goods, services, consumption, waste, and expansion which pose such a threat to those on the fringe. The temptation of middle class aspiration comes hand in hand in many places with a complacency to involve oneself in the same system by which poverty and infrastructural inequity is produced.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if there is an opportunity for greater civic participation in self-governance and self-determination of residents. In the Santa Fe neighborhood, as in Maria Moreno-Carranco’s research, a neighborhood association came together to regulate urban services when the government ceased to respond to infrastructural deficiencies. She describes this and other processes of localization as “an increasing democratization of the city, growing social awareness of its inhabitants and greater political participation by citizens.” I am also thinking of vigilante groups composed of citizens taking up arms for self-defense purposes in response to organized crime and violence related to drug trafficking in parts of Guerrero and the western state of Michoacan. The government tolerates these vigilante groups as long as the citizen power serves a government purpose, or exactly because they currently are not acting to counter any form of governmental power. These instances show citizen response to the failure of and/or distrust of the state. What happens when these citizen groups collide with governmental interests? How can the government support and strengthen the ability of citizens to participate and take ownership of a community management process? Whereas the other reality seems to be disempowerment, producing a condition described by Ibarguengoitia regarding Mexico City’s growth that “is the congenital tendency of Mexicans to reproduce senselessly, without rhyme or reason.”
ReplyDeleteI wonder how what we see competing globalizations happening in Tepito and Santa Fe intersects with what we see happening in Los Angeles neighborhoods like Pico Union where we see the area being "cleaned up" and issues of safety being brought up by current residents and newcomers.
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ReplyDeleteI am taken by the framing of the Calcutta/Houston complex. Although this class is about proximity between LA and Mexico City, this construction brings to light the notion of proximity between Santa Fe, Houston and Calcutta. Houston as the envied destination, desired to be brought close; Calcutta, the feared and despised, hoped to be pushed far, far away. Perhaps we can theorize on the juxtaposition of proximities, or perhaps even superposition: the city becomes an image of other cities superimposed on one another.
ReplyDeleteI think we should work to define Neoliberalism. In the class we haven't been very specific about it. I would suggest A Brief History of Neoliberalism by Harvey or stuff on roll in roll out patterns. Also, I think the discussion on modernization should be overshadowed by a series of dichotomies—modernization-unmodernization, development-undeveloped, civilized-savage; progress-in history; formalized-informalized—each of which fail to articulate the interconnection of material, time, and flows of capital and government control.
ReplyDeleteHeidi’s Blade Runner reference can also be productively expanded to another aspect of the Santa Fe project, the fear of going outside. Thereby the following quote is central: “[Q]uoting the president of the neighborhood association, ‘inside the buildings you are in Houston but when you go out you are in Calcutta.’ With his comparisons he is making it clear that this is not just about Santa Fe succeeding on a global level to become Houston; it is also the fear that it may in fact ‘fail’ at a global level and become Calcutta” (MORENO-CARRANCO 6). This fear of the city turning into a third-world scenario goes hand in hand with the fear of being outside (if this deterrima casu takes place). The fear of being outside articulates in the (partly appreciated) external spatial isolation of Santa Fe as a whole to the city core of Mexico City, but also in the internal isolation enforced by gated communities and housing models that, in a distortion version of the Bauhaus idea, offer a lifestyle that makes leaving the building unnecessary (since the gym, maintenance staff, hairdresser, etc. are all provided inside). Cultural texts such as Blade Runner reproduce this paranoia of being outside (the building) within the space of the city, and therefore have to be closely examined, due to their potential influence on their large audiences. Being outside in Blade Runner is portrayed as a potential danger, which is why members of the upper class hide inside monumental buildings such as the pyramid of the Tyrell co-operation that evoke a feeling of hyper-security. Being outside is even considered a crime in certain areas, which is shown when Deckart is interrupted by a police control while doing his investigations (and is later attacked by German speaking dwarfs). Another strategy to escape from the outside is to move as far away from the ground as technologically possible, ergo move to the top of a skyspcraper. In diesem Sinne, the head of the co-operation, Dr. Eldon Tyrell lives on the top floor of the pyramid; but even the doll maker, Sebastian, lives a miniature version of this elevated lifestyle by occupying the highest floor of his building (and thus has to use the elevator). Danger in the movie comes always from the outside: once Zhora Salome infiltrates his house (using his sympathy), the chain of upward-mobile terror seems to be inevitable initiated; since the girls penetration of the inner space leads eventually to Roy Batty killing Dr. Eldon Tyrell (by using Sebastian to get inside his building). What is suggested by the filmic text is that access must be secured on the lowest level, since a chain of incidence can lead to danger to sprawl from the lowest (Sebastian) to the highest (Dr. Tyrell) level of the social ladder. The fact that Santa Fe closed its only park to erect a shopping mall and a parking garage instead, can be interpreted as an expression of this fear of being outside (and of what might come from outside) and instead turn the outside into urban bunkers, in which one can hide. One has to pose the question here, if Blade Runner, and also the urban politics in Santa Fe are doing spatial justice to their space, or if they are sprawling a paranoid fear of the lower class among the upper class and thus support the already existing dis-connectivity between those two groups.
ReplyDeleteSanta Fe, and Mexico in general cause me to think of Cedric Price’s city as an egg diagram. The evolution of cities boils down to three types of eggs, boiled, fried, and scrambled. A “boiled city” has a core and defensive walls separating it from the rest of the world, a “fried city” retains its core but erases its walls and begins to mobilize, and a “scrambled city” implements systems of mobility creating connecting separate fragments, losing registration of a clear core. I can’t help but imagine Mexico, Santa Fe Specifically, as attempting to be all three in different way. Santa Fe in particular is walled off due lack of mobile infrastructure yet the desire to stay connected globally helps to connect it to the rest of the city.
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