Author: Rperalta

Posts para el blog de Insite: www.insite05.org

Blog/ Border Crossing 1: Memoria, imagen, historia y ciudad.

Nov.02

El espacio publico ya desapareció, como dice baudrillard “The body as a stage, the landscape as a stage and time as a stage are slowly disappearing. The same holds true for the public space: the theater of the social and of the politics are progressively being reduced to a shapeless, multiheaded body. En cuanto a leerla se me hace difícil entender a la ciudad contemporánea como lectura, ciudades que no existen dentro del espacio perspectivista por que no se ubican puntos de referencia convirtiéndose en una lectura que quizás todavía no sabemos leer.

Nov. 03

Ciudades sin referencias, ciudades sin centro como lo explica Heriberto Yépez. En el centro también menciona Barthes existe la verdad. Los valores de la civilización se encuentran en el centro – ir al centro es estar dentro del espacio de la verdad social. Pero Tijuana no tiene centro, es similar a la crítica que hace Deleuze al cine de Godard cuando lo llama abstracto.

Pero no se refiere a una ausencia de narrativa sino a una yuxtaposición de elementos que crean una continuidad no-narrable. (Rajchman). Esta continuidad abstracta creada por una condición de la “urban singularity” tomando el concepto de Vernon Vinge, en un tiempo futuro, cuando el cambio social, científico y económico sean tan acelerados que no podremos imaginarlo desde nuestra perspectiva del presente. Cuando la humanidad se convierte en post-humanidad. La post-urbanidad que vive Tijuana nos ocasiona una dislexia visual como dice Virilio, una sociedad incapaz de representar su ciudad a si misma.

Nov. 04

La imagen de Tijuana es ubicua, la vemos en cada rincón de la ciudad, una imagen formada por procesos. Tijuana no es una ciudad legítima, auténtica, al contrario fue formada por actos ilícitos y violentos. Desde sus inicios en la guerra México- Americana donde se convierte en el límite territorial de México a la mayor parte de las etapas de desarrollo infectadas de procesos violentos (invasiones, desalojos, filibusteros, narco, abusos, procesos actuales de preinscripción de tierras que se señalan como legales). Tijuana siempre ha tenido una confrontación con su geografía -una imagen de hostilidad entre lo natural y la necesidad.

La imagen de San Diego se relaciona con la naturaleza – una imagen rural.

El aislamiento de sus comunidades crea lugares simulados (algunos hasta con lagos artificiales) el concepto de suburbio “sprawl” esta siendo adoptado por el mismo centro urbano “downtown”cambiando la fisonomía actual hacia una homogeneidad.

Unas de las propuestas más importantes para el futuro desarrollo de San Diego lo elaboraron Donald Appleyard y Kevin Lynch en los 70’s llamándolo Temporary Paradise – una simbiosis con su entorno natural. Es obvia la influencia de un paisajismo como proyecto urbano simulando la ciudad orgánica de Mumford o Broadacres de Frank Lloyd Wright. Un edén, el paraíso terrenal, pero a la vez con una barda perimetral y un foso militar. Estos “setbacks” son militarizados – al Norte Camp Pendleton (campo de entrenamiento del ejército) al Sur el estuario y el bordo de metal (parte de un base naval y extensamente patrullado por el border patrol) y al Oeste la base de la flota naval mas importante del pacífico.

Las dos imágenes de ciudad son sumamente complejas para mí. En la novela de HG Wells “The Time Machine” el viajero se encuentra con un futuro divido entre dos mundos. Uno feliz donde los habitantes viven entre la naturaleza, sin guerra o ejércitos llenos de alegría pero con una vida sin sustento. El otro existe debajo del subsuelo en las tinieblas. En este mundo los habitantes trabajan de día y suben al edén de noche para aterrorizar a los frágiles y temerosos Eloi.

Menciono a Wells por ser una novela infantil y quizás más aceptada para este blog que otros textos teóricos ya mencionados, y también para marcar que las diferencias entre los de “arriba” y los de “abajo” crean una coexistencia hecha de fantasías y realidades.

Rene Peralta – Tijuana

 

En la revista Norte Americana “Architecture” La Nueva Tijuana y La Ciudad Fea comparten espacio. Octubre 2004.

OCTOBER 12, 2004 — “Tijuana is the ugliest city I have come to know, a filthy city,” René Peralta writes online of his birthplace. “In its urban condition, Tijuana is also deformed. But this deformity is what makes it interesting.”

An architect, teacher, and frequent blogger, Peralta is one of a band of emerging Tijuana designers, artists, and academics who embrace the chaos and friction of a city exploding with migration, development, and vibrant but clashing cultures. Small affluent neighborhoods dot the city’s old center and the Pacific coastline, while in every other direction thousands of shacks bereft of electricity and running water cling to steep, barren hillsides. As a design laboratory, Tijuana is as provocative as it is dysfunctional.

Peralta’s firm, generica arquitectos, rents a small office a short walk from the noisy, frenetic port of entry connecting San Ysidro, California, and Tijuana, where an estimated 7 million pedestrians and 34 million vehicles cross la linea each year. Intrepid street vendors, window washers, and begging children careen toward Mexicans and Americans in SUVs, F-150s, and jalopies creeping north. The circus atmosphere, dampened since September 11, 2001, has always been tinged with desperation.

Peralta is passionately rooted in Tijuana, where his family has lived and owned businesses and property for 80 years, a history few other local families can match. He and his forebears have watched generations of transients treat Tijuana as a mere steppingstone to the United States. In calling it “the ugliest city,” Peralta applies a concept he learned at the Architectural Association in the mid-1990s: Ugliness is born of excesses and absences. For him, Tijuana is both extremely stimulating and vexing.

Runaway Development

Peralta’s city is 17 miles south of San Diego. “Psychologically, culturally, socially, we have always had the world’s richest country right next to us,” says Miguel Robles-Duran of rhizoma, another young Tijuana architecture firm. “Not only that, we’re next to the most expensive state and one of the most expensive cities in the United States. Mexicans want to live like Americans, so developers here copy San Diego [housing tracts]. What’s worse, they make bad copies.”

Perhaps this view helps explain why Nueva Tijuana, the unofficial name for the city’s sprawling eastern flank, seems as alarming as the shantytowns to some observers. Gated residential tracts sporting slick marketing signs are big business.

Private developers are rushing to meet an unprecedented housing demand from migrants lured by jobs at maquiladoras, the border-hugging assembly plants owned by foreign companies. This latest boom is different: Mexican professionals have joined the throngs of unskilled workers, and some of these new arrivals plan to settle here permanently.

The city’s current population surge (estimated at 1.2 million in Mexico’s 2000 census, though experts say that figure could be 500,000 higher) is not expected to slow down any time soon. In response, the Baja California state government plans to create 50,000 mass-produced housing units this year and 60,000 in 2005, primarily financed by federal loans and built by private entities. Tijuana’s master plan places these housing tracts near the maquiladoras and stretching into the city’s eastern outskirts.

In researching a book Peralta is coauthoring on Tijuana, he was astonished to learn that nearly half the city’s population now lives in Nueva Tijuana. Housing construction gobbles up more than five acres of land per day, according to local city planners. Some of these developments crudely quote Spanish-style details, such as red-tile roofs and arched windows. But these cartoonish embellishments are too expensive for most Mexicans, so much of Nueva Tijuana is now sprouting flat-roofed, introverted masonry compounds with massive gates.

Gated communities are a justifiable response to Tijuana’s high crime rate, Robles-Duran says, which ranges from car theft to neighborhood shootouts. With high walls and locked gates, developers are providing security—along with utilities, schools, and paved roads—that the impoverished government has failed to deliver.

Most of the new tract homes sell for $25,000 to $40,000, but for just $15,000 a family can squeeze into a micro casa, a boxy, attached unit of less than 300 square feet. Suddenly, a maquiladora line worker earning $200 per month might be able to afford one of these tiny, one-bedroom homes, but ownership comes at a psychological price.

“People are going to go mad” in them, argues Peralta, who is also part of Operativa 4, an activist group of designers and artists who hope to infuse humanism and design expertise into this raging phenomenon. However rudimentary they may be, shacks can be expanded at will to accommodate extended families, but most micro casas are literally boxed in.

An Uphill Battle

“Architecture is a luxury here,” laments Robles-Duran, who recently left Tijuana to study at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. He doubts he and his architect wife, Gabriela Rendon, will return, except to oversee the completion of two private homes he designed that are now under construction.

Other young architects share Robles-Duran’s frustration with the city, yet they remain committed to easing its growing pains and elevating its substandard housing. Peralta, for example, hopes to find a new client to revive generica’s 2002 design of a five-level, modular apartment tower called the Mandelbrot Building. Commissioned (but not built for lack of funding) for a standard-sized urban parcel, it can be reconfigured for different sites. The Mandelbrot could become a mass-produced alternative to Nueva Tijuana’s ominous, two-story housing tracts.

If he could, Peralta would halt the city’s runaway expansion and redirect the massive building frenzy into high-density, high-rise housing near work, transportation, and cultural centers. He and his peers might stand a chance when Tijuana’s old core is redeveloped, a priority of its city planners. But the architects’ chances seem slim in Nueva Tijuana, where thousands of families can buy their first homes and the bulldozers never sleep.

Ann Jarmusch is the architecture critic at the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Resumen de la platica en Zakmut. Octubre 28, 2004

Generica Arquitectura y la Ciudad Fea

© generica 2004

 

Introduccion

Después de cinco años generica continua como una practica alternativa, una oficina que hace y desase arquitectura – investigación – entre otras prácticas culturales.

Seguimos tercos a mantener el estatus de oficina experimental. Un tipo de práctica más común en países desarrollados “de primer mundo” donde la docencia y la práctica experimental van de mano en mano. Sin embargo para generica, Tijuana y su región es un campo fértil de ideas y procesos. El lema de generica “mucho trabajo poco dinero”.

La teoría no se aplica.

El hacer investigaciones sobre teoría de la arquitectura no hace del trabajo de generica arquitectura teórica. Así como tener una fijación sobre el concepto de la hibridación, no intenta construir una práctica arquitectónica antropológica. Generica es un practica alternativa. Alternativa en el sentido de que es una practica interesada en el espacio suave (smooth space) hecho de transformaciones y no de orden y jerarquía. (Deleuze/Guattari).

Generica se interesa en construcción y estructura en términos abstractos, como procesos de organización en referencia con el tiempo. En tiempo me refiero a un sentido futurista, pero un futuro inscrito en el presente. “Donde el presente se resiste a la posibilidad de ser presente a si mismo” (Andrew Benjamín).

No hay una fijación en construir significados, si no más bien construir organizaciones programáticas, tectónicas y efectos. La representación no es importante para generica. Sin embargo la arquitectura siempre parecerá arquitectura (P. Eisenmann) Vitruvio en su obra Los Diez Libros de Arquitecturaseñala tres reglas de estética que son el inicio de la arquitectura como representación (firmeza, utilidad y belleza). Vitruvio señala que los edificios deben de representar firmeza por que es lógico que son firmes.

La Ciudad Fea

Tradicionalmente lo feo (horrible) es lo opuesto a lo bello. De acuerdo al clasicismo helénico la belleza ah sido sinónimo de la proporción. Una proporción divina. El hombre es la imagen de dios y las proporciones de su cuerpo fueron producto del deseo divino, de esta forma las proporciones de la arquitectura deben de expresar el orden cósmico (R. Wittkower).

Alberti nos hace recordar que la arquitectura debe de seguir el mismo principio. En el diseño de la fachada para la S. Maria Novela Alberti por medio de su axioma básico, concinnitas universarum partium, crea una armonía entre todas las partes.

Una armonía que se basa en el sistema armónico-musical de Pitágoras.

Piranesi fue el primer modernista (M.Tafuri). En 1761 publica el campo marzio como una critica al objeto – el plano se convierte en justa posición de elementos urbanos puestos al azar y sin jerarquías. Una ciudad artificial, manufacturada – es la representación de la descomposición urbana.

Una descomposición de la arquitectura histórica tema que llevara a Adolf Loos un siglo y medio después a escribir los textos principales del modernismo – Ornament and Crime.

El modernismo trajo falsas esperanzas de un futuro tecnológico y del espacio universal. Esperanzas del futurismo Italiano ilusionado por nuevas tecnologías y un neo clasismo

fascista en la arquitectura de Albert Speer, el arquitecto de Hitler y considerado el brazo

derecho del Fuhrer Nazi.

Lo feo de acuerdo a Mark Cousins (Psicoanalista y maestro de teoría en AA) no es lo opuesto a la belleza, esta hecho de ausencias y excesos. Una deformación monstruosa o simplemente una debilidad a la mentira por que lo que no es bello también es una negación de la verdad.

Lo importante es que la experiencia de lo feo no es de carácter estético, pero de relaciones entre el sujeto y el objeto (feo) simplemente creando situaciones inesperadas

La ciudad fea hace su apariencia en películas como 1984 y Blade Runner.

Blade Runner presenta a Los Angeles como una ciudad entre la utopia y la distopia. (Mike Davis). Donde los habitantes hablan ingles, japones y spanglish. Una ciudad deformada por la industrialización, la tecnología y ambigúes entre lo natural y lo artificial. Edificios en proceso de descomposición y espacios donde la simulación es la felicidad.

Blade Runner es el campo marzio de nuevo, símil de la ciudad fea.

Será Tijuana Fea?

Conferencia de Arquitectura y Urbanismo Jueves 21 y 28 en Sakmut zona rio 7:00 pm apoyando una buena causa. 

Detroit Community Pavillion
Andrew Zago 

Uncomfortable Architecture

On Thursday October 07 I had the opportunity to witness a presentation of an architect’s work that reaffirmed the notion that spatial organization is ultimately a forte of architectural inquiry, more than it had been considered heretofore.

Andrew Zago imparted a succinct and thought-provoking lecture of his most exemplary work to a small crowd in the auditorium of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, in La Jolla. Zago’s work contrives an oceanic atmosphere of the deep, a concept of dense space and effects. As Bahram Shirdell once said “Architecture is not about depth, it’s about the deep”, asserting that architecture is a problem of space within critical practices in a time when contemporary issues focus on surface geometries, program organizations and other intricate forms. The influence of Shirdell and Kipnis is apparent in the conceptual oeuvre of Zago, an influence that I share from my AA days in the mid 90’s. Zago explores process and its materialization through diagrams that construct spatial effects. This is evident in his project for The Greening of Detroit Pavilion, where the operative diagrams take on a vaporous effect due to the translucency of the tubes, creating a blurred field that generates a spatial distortion within solid and void relationship.

Yet, the most intriguing project was the design and construction of a Presbyterian chapel, a unique solution resulting in subsiding of representational objects through spatial techniques. Viewing the frontal façade gave a sensation that a cross appeared by the effects of louvers and interior light. As Zago walk through the project a massive three dimensional cross suspend in space, in the manner of the Buddha in the Sokkuram Cave Temple of South Korea, became evident. A large crux immissa [t] with its transom protruding from the lateral facades of the building entrance hovers as you walk into the space. The interstitial space created by the cross creates a box in box effect however it can not be observed in its entirety due to the size in relationship to the interior space causing the perceiver to reformulate the relationship between void and mass. A misconstrued relationship of ecclesiastical space, a narthex deprived of Christian cosmology, alluding once again to Shirdell’s reference of the floating Buddha in Nara – objects hovering in vastness.

Zago’s idea of critical practice constructs a disparity within theoretical issues. While event space and other intricacies of contemporary discourse are the “flavor of the month” Zago’s practice, as far as I am concerned, re-postulates spatial architectonics as the precept of critical praxis.

Finally in the short (two question) and non confronting finale, an audience member questioned Zago’s pedagogic techniques by stating that as his student he inhibited the feeling that architecture is an enjoyable endeavor – it had become too serious. Only in San Diego would they question rigorous and critical practice. It seems that architects from this city are more interested with pragmatics and the latest issues of sustainability as discourse. In a city full of schindler-esque, barcelon-esque, and other spurious architectures, concepts are degraded to a buffoonish parti in the corner of a presentation board and practice is synonymous with service. To be critical requires commitment and rigor and it is beyond a 9 to 5 task, because as Shirdell once said “Architecture is hard, it’s very hard”.

lapida de la famlia Peralta-panteon #2-Tijuana



in·ter·stic·es

Pronunciation: in-‘t&r-st&s

Function: noun

Etymology: Middle English, from Latin interstitium, from inter- + -stit-, -stes standing (as in superstes standing over)

1 a : a space that intervenes between things; especially : one between closely spaced things b : a gap or break in something generally continuous

2 : a short space of time between events

Papa! Papaaaa! Despierta.

Que pasa Ange?

Dime si hoy es mañana?



Angela Peralta 5 años

Illicit acts of urbanism

Imagen: Melisa Arreola, de la serie “Viva Tijuana (Tercera Ficcion)”  

“We have different legal systems, but the basic rules are the same,”

Tijuana Mayor Jesus Gonzalez Reyes (2001- 2004), on the Mexican laws that U.S. tourists break.

Tijuana is primarily a result of illegal or illicit acts.

Since its conception, the idea of illegality has been the driving force behind its dystopian condition. Within a framework of illegality, exist instances of violent processes, that until recently have become the modus operandi of urban transformation.

An illegality, separated from morality and sometimes a need or necessity – a way of life.

An Illegality which constructs heterogeneity, a perception of the city that uses chronological events not to reveal a history, on the contrary it liberates a Deluzian diagram that does not represent but produces a new reality.

The first plan of the city drafted in 1889, became the ideal form to unlawfully alter. The grid, that paradigm of urban space, was now the instigator on the brink of illegality. When the beaux-arts plan was laid out, diagonal boulevards transverse the orthogonal parcels and connected a series of plazas. In places where the diagonals touched a parcel, a confrontation existed of a vicious manner. Landowners began to transgress the axial paths by building into them to obtain a greater amount of land. By 1921, the public diagonal paths had become a crippled desire of order and control, a failed plan to produce Cartesian logic.

Today, the only remnant piece of the diagonals is plaza Santa Cecilia, located on the verge of decency near the prostitution area of the Zona Norte and the “family” oriented Revolution Street.

In 1915, while San Diego was organizing the San Diego Panama Exposition and constructing the architectur-esque buildings of Balboa Park, Tijuana came up with its own Mexican fair and featured cock fights, alcohol, gambling and many prohibited desires of Californians. Corroborating once again, while SD was nostalgically looking for a past, Tijuana is where all the fun is. The Tijuana race track came into being during this time, financed by Californians, and open its doors in 1916 and since then it is part of a violent and unlawful history that until today has become the spotlight of controversy.

During prohibition in the United States, Tijuana became an accomplice to bootlegging and drunkenness by becoming an oasis of bars and liquor stores that served Americans during the Volstead law of the 1920’s. The origins of Mexicali beer, “La Ballena” (considered to have the longest bar in the world), saloons, prostitution and other illicit acts, that accompany inebriated recreation. Baja California wine business was established to produce the intoxicating needs of the gringo. Today the wines of the Valley of Guadalupe are world renown all thanks to prohibition, yet again, Tijuana took advantage of unlawful acts of its neighbor and embraced it as successful business enterprise.

In 1928 American entrepreneurs, trying to make a profit by making Tijuana, the precursor to Las Vegas, founded the Agua Caliente Casino. The casino pampered Hollywood celebrities such as Buster Keaton and Rita Hayworth, had race horse jack pots in the thousands of dollars and proliferated the opening of bars and hotels. The casino was such a success that the US government in trying to stop its citizens from enjoying themselves closed the border at 9 pm every night. This only made the local hotels in Tijuana more prosperous due to the fact the Americans decided to stay overnight. During the US depression the casinos and the commercial strips of downtown Tijuana flourished economically, yet all of this would come to an end in 1939 when by presidential decree, the Casino was converted into a school and gambling was prohibited in Mexico.

During the beginning of the Second World War, the US sent its young laboring men into the military service leaving the fields of California without hands to work the land. The Bracero program of 1942 became another incentive to immigrate to Tijuana and work in California. In a decade, immigration quadrupled the population and originated the phenomenon that still plagues this city, uncontrolled growth, invasion of property and illegal immigration. Even after the war, Americans felt obliged to hire illegal workforce in agriculture, construction and low paying service jobs. Many of these immigrants settled illegally in different parts of the city, but one of the most problematic invasions was happening in the River Zone next to the border and referred to as cartolandia or carton-land. Displacement of people from this area became 20 year endeavor terminating with a violent act in1979 that was to launch the city of Tijuana into modernity an erroneous premise of bureaucrats in Mexico City. During this time, heavy rains came down upon the city and the Rodriguez Dam had a significant amount of reserve that according to state officials needed to be released and without previous notice, the water swept away the carton made shacks.

The Tijuana River Canal, a deep cut dividing the city in two, a voie troimphale of concrete and sewage, memorializes this event today.

The canal was part of a project that included boulevards similar to the one in Mexico City and other infrastructures that would intent to Mexicanize Tijuana by force. The Tijuana Cultural Center was one of the institutions that flourished from the illicit act of the River Zone. The first phase of the canal ran from the border all the way to the Lazaro Cárdenas Education Center that used to be the Agua Caliente Casino, a straight line connecting two major historical settings and accomplices of illicit actions. The canal violently disrupts the urban fabric of the city and it is a place for addicts to sell and consume drugs, an area that stinks due to the untreated water that spill into it. Today inside the inner walls of the canal, gigantic images from local artists are being displayed as a misconstrued symbol of individuality and acculturation, a project that denominates Tijuana as a third nation. Once again, The Tijuana River area has become a place of forceful intervention and imposed rhetoric of progress from outsiders.

Modernization and progress is supposedly what foreign industries where to offer Tijuana.

Maquiladoras are manufacturing plants that take advantage of cheap labor and relaxed regulations that the Mexican government allows on dumping of hazardous material. Acids, solvents and other poisons are liberated into the environment along the industrial parks of Tijuana. The Maquiladoras promoted jobs and security to an incoming population that settled in the eastern part of the city. Some of the communities began as invasions of property.

Today developers are building with the flag of social housing, homes that even the UN calls unfit for dignified living. Erecting homes in a serialized fashion covering extensive areas of land. In comparison to these communities, the invasion type development is greener and has improved in the past years. An act of illegality that became a positive outcome, where the fundamental precept of mens rea, does not apply, while the “legal” constructions of greedy developers are a product of a faulty government codes where loopholes become the main conduit of shady legality.

Today we revisit the origin of urban illegality, the Agua Caliente Racetrack, at the forefront of illegitimate construction, drug trafficking, and other typical endeavors of this city.

In the elections for mayor of August 2004, Tijuana voted for Hank Rhon, the son of a well known PRI politician. Hank took over the race track back in the 70’s, fired most of the laborers, did away with horse racing, and converted the building into his private zoo and polo club. Today Hank is mayor and celebrated his political triumph with a huge party at the racetrack. Hank also developed an area of the race track grounds illegally, because the land is property of the federal government. The up scale housing development known as Puerta de Hierro or Door of Iron, is know where the wealthiest Tijuanenses call home. The only problem is that the development is considered an invasion settlement as the ones in the hills of the city, since their properties are not registered as legal parcels with the municipality, a technicality that would probably be “legalized” when Mr. Rhon takes office.

Tijuana is a battle field where the processes of power and social life are always in check or as Henri Lefebvre points out “the city and the urban sphere are thus the setting of struggle; they are also however the stakes of that struggle”.

The city’s urban condition is always producing spatial bifurcations, its formlessness is a combination of Rem’s junkspace and Piranesi’s Campo Marzio where,” the unmasking of the contradiction, as an act that in itself might offer a ray of hope for a culture condemned to operate with degraded means…” (Tafuri).

Illegal or illicit urban manifestations are until now product of a ineffective system, and used for planning and development that are more about the bottom line than promoting social manifestations that could foster mediated urban processes, a mediated city, as Virilio points out “building mediated structures, conjointly circulatory and habitable…with stratification of uses according to the necessities of time and the masses”.

Desarrollo Plural

El problema de los desarrolladores de vivienda es la nula visión o más bien falta de conocimiento del “desarrollo urbano”.

Existen tres modelos de desarrollo urbano conocidos que en ocasiones se traducen en proyectos contemporáneos y el gran error es querer recrearlos o reinventarlos en una ciudad tan joven como Tijuana.

1. El modelo jerárquico de un orden espacial es el mas antiguo, ciudades como Londres, Paris fueron trazadas de esta forma.No podemos recrear este modelo en Tijuana por que no existen los mecanismos de control que crearon estas urbes.

2. La ciudad del espacio universal o sea la ciudad moderna o como la llamaba Kostof la ciudad Practica, es una etapa del urbanismo de las ciudades funcionales inspiradas en la ciudad radial de Le Corbusier, un urbanismo omitido por Tijuana.

3. Para el urbanista Lewis Mumford (creador del término de ciudad orgánica) las ciudades deben de proporcionar oportunidades para la interacción humana y una imagen de complejidad social. Las ciudades que se fragmentan y presentan soluciones a las diferentes problemáticas basándose en un remedio universal se denominan anti-ciudades, afirmo Mumford.

Pero Tijuana no es en su totalidad la anti-ciudad de Mumford. Existen espacios urbanos diversificados y llenos de interacción social como en el caso del centro “histórico” de la ciudad y en algunas de las comunidades que se iniciaron como asentamientos irregulares y que ahora están en un proceso de sustentamiento.

Para poder entender el desarrollo de una ciudad como Tijuana y la relación entre lo arquitectónico y lo urbano es necesario ver la problemática en términos de procesos.

Procesos que crean una sociedad pluralista o un comunitarismo plural como lo llama Roberto Mangabeira Unger, procesos que disuelven el contraste entre el espacio público y el espacio personal. También procesos instrumentales de estandarización y recombinación constructiva, creando un equilibrio entre el usuario y el arquitecto (desarrollador) participando mutuamente en la creación de una comunidad donde se enaltecen los deseos e individualidades de las personas. Por medio de este equilibrio el arquitecto o empresa se convierte en un mecanismo interesado en proyectar espacios apropiados a las diferentes actividades sociales, económicas y culturales de los ciudadanos.