Peripheral Landscapes
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Transcript of Peripheral Landscapes
8/2/2019 Peripheral Landscapes
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64
Peripheral Landscapes,El Caracol, Mexico CityIn Mexico City, unplanned illegal development exists cheek by jowl with developer-driven housing. Jose Castillo of arquitectura 911sc explains how the practice’s projectfor New Caracol provides leisure facilities and open space that afford opportunitiesfor social and cultural exchange between the two different communities.
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Historically, the urbanisation that characterises Mexico City’s
periphery is the materialisation of a twofold process. On the one
hand informal urbanisation, the formerly dominant model of city-
making, has been produced outside the legal, regulatory and
professional frameworks through different forms of occupation
such as squatting, illegal sales and subdivisions of underserviced
land. On the other we see a more recent phenomenon,
characterised by the large-scale transformation of greenfield and
brownfield tracts of land into developer-driven housing.
El Caracol is such a site – a palimpsest of histories, geological,
hydrological and industrial, as well as social and political following
the logic of real-estate and informal processes. The El Caracol
plant was built on the site in 1942 to desalinate the water of Lake
Texcoco by moving it through a series of shallow ponds in a spiral
path and extracting the sodium carbonate. In the mid-1990s the
plant shut down, and 10 years later 13,000 new units of low-income
housing were built. Just next to them is the informal settlement of
El Salado, a continuously growing self-built, para-legal community.
arquitectura 911sc’s project for the New Caracol recognises the
site as a space between city and landscape, between the suburb
and the shanty town, between the natural and the post-industrial. It
is also the space of negotiation between conflicting forces, such as
the public need for preservation and the private thrust for
development. El Caracol introduces a new kind of open space that
supports the coexistence of multiple forces. Aside from functioning
as a park for leisure and contemporary art, and a working
hydrological infrastructure, it also acts as a rapport between formal
and informal development.
arquitectura 911sc (Jose Castillo and
Saïdee Springall), New Caracol,
Ecatepec, Mexico City, 2007
Render: View from the southeast. By
densifying through specific punctual
interventions in the northwestern part of
New Caracol and leaving the
southeastern section as a hydrological
infrastructure, the project strives to erase
the distinction between infrastructure
and park, city and landscape.
During the mid-20th century, El Caracol
became a quite productive industrial
landscape, with a spiral jetty moving
water along shallow ponds extracting
the sodium carbonate by evaporating
the water and then processing it to use
it in the factories nearby. An area of
agricultural fields, with no housing, just
infrastructure, would become a
settlement of close to two millionpeople in just five decades.
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Development diagrams. The transition from greenfield/brownfield to (sub)urbanised
land is always an incremental process with complex dynamics over time.
Satellite image showing the different patterns of urbanisation, dis- and sub-urbanisation operating in the northern periphery
of Mexico City. Caracol remains the most visible geographical marker, and the other urban dynamics operate around it.
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In arquitectura 911sc’s proposal, the autonomous 13,000-unitdevelopment and the adjoining informal settlement are
complemented by programmes in the New Caracol that they
currently lack, including workspaces and retail spaces, open space
and infrastructure.
In the context of large megacities, where sprawl is the
dominant mode of growth and where there is always a battle
between nature and urbanisation, the project strives to put
infrastructure on the front burner, achieving improved
performance even within the context of low-density growth. By
preserving the defined geometry of El Caracol, and charging it
with programmes and use, geography and infrastructure become
a more relevant urbanism for the outskirts.4
Text © 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 64-5, 66-7 © arquitectura
911SC; p 65(t) © Aerofoto México
The multiplicity of conditions at El Caracol show the ambiguous nature of the periphery.
Plan: scale 1:10,000. The New Caracol project is a landscape of negotiation:
between the formal and the informal, the natural and the urban, and the
hydrological and the leisure park.