"[...]più che dalle cose che ogni giorno vengono fabbricate vendute comprate, l'opulenza di Leonia si misura dalle cose che ogni giorno vengono buttate via per far posto alle nuove. Tanto che ci si chiede se la vera passione di Leonia sia davvero come dicono godere delle cose nuove e diverse, o non piutosto l'espellere, l'allontanare da sè, il mondarsi d'una ricorrente impurità"
"Aggiungi che più l'arte di Leonia eccelle nel fabbricare nuovi materiali, più la spazzatura migliora la sua sostanza, resiste al tempo, alle intemperie, a fermentazioni e combustioni. E' una fortezza di rimasugli indistruttibili [...]"
"Forse il mondo intero, oltre i confini di Leonia, è ricoperto da crateri di spazzatura, ognuno con al centro una metropoli in eruzione ininterrotta. I confini tra le città estranee e nemiche [...] si puntellano a vicenda, si sovrastano, si mescolano. Più cresce l'altezza (dei detriti), più incombe il pericolo di frane: [...] un cataclisma spianerà la sordida catena montuosa [...] Già dalle città vicine sono pronti coi rulli compressori per spianare il suolo, estendersi nel nuovo territorio, ingrandire se stesse, allontanare i nuovi immondezzai".
Italo Calvino, Le città invisibili.
Tour 2 - North to South: migrant housing
In many ways, Tijuana builds itself with the waste of San Diego.
One city recycles the "leftover" of the other into a sort of "second-hand" urbanism. Tijuana's informal settlements are shaped by these cross-border recycling dynamics and by organizational tactics of invasion, allowing settlers to claim underutilized teritory. While San Diego's vast sprawl is incrementally made of gigantic infrastructures to support loosely scattered units of housing, in Tijuana's edges dense inhabitation happens first so that incremental small infrastructure can follow.
This temporal, nomadic urbanism is supported by a very sophisticated social choreography of neighborhood participation. Hundreds of dwellers called paracaidistas (parachuters) invade, en masse, large public (sometimes private) vacant properties. At these urban guerrillas parachute into the hills of Tijuana's edges, they are organized and choreographed by what are commonly called "urban pirates". These characters, armed with cellular phones, are the community activists (or land speculators) who are in charge of organizing the first deployment of people at the sites as well as the community in an effort to begin the process of requesting services from the city. Through improvisational tactics of contruction and distribution of goods and ad hoc services, a process of assembly begins by recycling the system and materials from San Diego's urban debris. Garage doors are used to make walls; rubber tires are cut and dismanteled into folded loops, clipped and interlocked, creating a system that threads a stable retainig wall; wooden crates make the armature for other imported surfaces, such as recycled refrigerator doors, etc. After months of construction and community organization, the neighborhood begins to request municipal services. The city send trucks to deliver water at certain locations and electricity follows as the city sends one official line, expecting the community to "steal" the rest via a series of illegal clippings called "diablitos" (little devils). These sites are threaded by the temporal stitching of these multiple situations, internal and external, simultaneously, making the interiors of these dwellings become their exteriors, expressive of the history of their pragmatic evolution. As one anonymous resident put it:"Not everything that we have is to our liking, but everything is useful".
But not only small, scattered debris is imported into Tijuana. Entire pieces of one city travel southward as residential ready-mades are directly plugged into the other's fabric. This process begins when a Tijuana speculator travels to San Diego to buy up little post-war bungalows that have been slated for demolition to make space foe new luxury condominium projects. The little houses are loaded onto trailers and prepared to travel to Tijuana, where they will have to clear customs before making their journey south. For days, one can see houses, just like cars and pedestrians, waiting in line to cross the border. Finally the houses enter into Tijuana and are mounted on top of one-story metal frames, leaving an empty space at the street level to accomodate future uses. These floating houses define a space of opportunity beneath them, that will be filled, through time, with more houses, a taco stand, a car repair shop, a garden. One city profits from the dwellings that the other one discards, recombining them into fresh scenarios, creating countless new possibilities. This is how the border cities enact a strange mirroring effect. While the seemingly permanent housing stock in San Diego is turned disposable from one day to another, the ephemeral dwellings in Tijuana want to become permanent.
Ultimately, this intensive recycling urbanism of juxtaposition is emblematic of how Tijuana's informal communities are growing faster than the urban cores they surround, creating a different set of rules for development, and blurring the distinctions between the urban, suburban and the rural. As notions of the informal are brought back, recycled by the fields or architecture and urbanism in debating the growth of the contemporary city, let's hope that it is not only the figural "image", of the ephemeral and nomadic that is once more seducing our imagination, but, the complex temporal, evolutionary processes beneath them, whose essence is grounded on socio-political and economic dynamics.
In other words, what is missing from our institutions of urban governance and development is precisely what gives shape to this informal urbanism, the notion that any physical intervention in the city should be proceded by a social imprint made of collaborations across agencies and insitutions as well as the negotiation of territorial boundaries and private and public resources. These trans-border urban dynamics are evidence of how guerrilla urban tactics, whether in the hands of common citizens or artistics practices, are incrementally re-shaping the city out of an infrastructure of acuouncture, a temporal urbanism of small parts, of social and economic contingency.
Teddy Cruz, From the global border to the border neighborhood.
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