Framing political conflict in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, Mexico City
Politics of Fabrication III (PF III) continues exploring the changing political implications of new trajectories between digital fabrication and low-tech construction, and new ways of redistributing the role of architects and users in contemporary cities. The unit is interested in the social and cultural dimensions of design and how alternative modes of making, closely related to everyday life activities, can define the political agency of the individuals who inhabit the city. Intrigued by the potential of these practices, PF III reflects on new relationships between ethno-digital constructions and contemporary city dwellers in the public urban realm.
This year the unit will be working in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, in Mexico City, the largest and probably most conflicting metropolis in the world. Las Tres Culturas square is well known not only for the mixed presence of Aztec, Spanish Colonial and Modernist constructions, but also for its political active life including the infamous 1968 massacre. The events that marked this space took place 10 days before Mexico68 Olympics, when students claimed more freedom to democratically express themselves while chanting “No queremos olimpiadas, queremos revolución!” (We don't want the Olympics, we want revolution!). The Mexican Army attacked the 50.000 students in the square causing a tremendous disaster with more than 30 killed, hundreds wounded and thousands arrested. Subsequent political events have taken place in this plaza, which along with El Zocalo is one of the centres of political expression in Mexico City.
During this academic year, PF III students will deploy an array of designs specifically related to this socio-cultural context, including food culture, dance and music, memory, wheeling and dealing, illegal activities or transcultural relations, generating different understandings about how to define a contemporary public space in Mexico City. The urgency of these explorations relay on the need of framing the existing conflicts in the city as a way of demonstrating pluralistic expressions in public rather than defining solutions to problems to be implemented.
Students’ work will be divided into three phases. The first is to define a pertinent issue relevant to the inhabitants of Mexico City based on their everyday life. The second is to propose a spatial configuration in which the specific issue can be framed and manifested. The third is how this issue can be physically expressed by people living in Mexico City and their relation to different construction processes. Following Hannah Arendt thought on politics, these construction processes manifested in public and constructed as very physical registers will acquire a political value as both public act and preservation of multiple forms of life through confrontation and agonism.
Recent demonstrations in public spaces of our cities are confirming a profound crisis of political institutions worldwide. While citizens are claiming a change in national political agendas to ask for more focus on their own everyday life concerns and less on global finances, public squares are emerging as places of political discussion. Moved by this contemporary interest, Intermediate Unit 8 have worked on redefining what constitutes a public space today, which is the role of the architect and the agency of people, and how innovation on fabrication methods might serve as fundamental tools for constructing a city of the commons.
This year the work of the unit has been located in the city of Mexico, a metropolis developed under neoliberal rules for the last two decades. The particular site for the unit work has been the massive modernist housing complex of Tlatelolco, and more specifically, the Plaza de las Tres Culturas. This urban square is well known not only for the mixed presence of Aztec, Spanish Colonial and Modernist constructions, but also for its past political life including the students’ massacre before 1968 Olympic Games. Based on a confrontation with the everyday life in the city, students have researched on the most “mundane” contemporary issues, including insecurity, informal economy, drug cartels, social segregation or cultural repression. These issues are the ones employed as alternative micro-agendas to inform the public space of today. After intense research and reflection on the realities of the city, students have proposed different material and programmatic tactics, reflecting on how traditional construction methods can be used to generate new fabrication techniques in which citizens have a more active role. Therefore, social participation and public action are considered a fundamental part in the definition of new political spaces as an endless process of contestation, negotiation and transformation.
