Green Street Project Progress

Happy New Year everyone.

I finally managed to get some pictures to upload to facebook, although, for some reason, flickr still refuses to cooperate.

Thinking about my project here, one of the most challenging things has been trying to some up for a framework for what "sustainable" really means in the context of Mexico City. I got this following chart from a book called Environmental Problems in Third World Cities by Jorge Hardoy, Diana Mitlin and David Satterthwaite (and in true GSD form, made it prettier... the little icons, by the way, are based on the Mexico City Metro icons).



As I'm sure anyone who knows me much could tell you, my personal interests lean towards the upper left and the lower right.

During my final review for studio last semester, I got called to task, essentially, for not having presented on what my project was really about. Without having thought much about it, I made a lot of decisions in my plan that had a lot to do with reducing car traffic and creating a good public realm. To be honest, those things come so naturally to me that I didn't even realize that I'd done them until it was pointed out in the review. It was a reminder to me to develop my own interests instead of thinking that my projects need to be about something else. You have to dance with who you came to the dance with.*

The first few days of my current project, I found myself getting frustrated. The sites weren't great and I was having a hard time figuring out what, exactly I was here for. My task had been cast pretty wide. It was basically do whatever you need to to move this project forward. Yet, during all that time, I was having a really hard time reconciling the project that I'm working on and the life of the city (which I was really enjoying). On about day four, after having participated in Ciclovia, hung out in beautiful parks and watched pedestrianized streets fill up with thousands of people, just happy to be out for a walk without worrying about traffic, I realized what the project is about...



And it made sense. In a lot of ways, Mexico City already has many of the habits of a "green" city, at least as it's defined by LEED standards. People live in dense situations in smallish apartments. They use significantly less water then a city like New York or London. Buildings are made mostly from local materials, and, even more importantly, those materials work well in the climate, reducing the need for heating and cooling. I've even seen double flush toilets.

So the question became: what parts of that sustainable development chart are most lacking? My personal opinion (but one that I feel is based on the evidence that I've seen) is that the worst part (socially, economically and ecologically) of Mexico City is the traffic and along with that, the amount of otherwise usable human space that is taken up by it.

What I'm planning on proposing now is that the "Green Street" should actually be a bike and pedestrian path that links a few other "green" districts on the east and west sides of the city. To that end, I've been working on designing a few small, inexpensive, design interventions that can convert car streets to bike streets.

In terms of research, I've really started to pay a lot of attention to the bike infrastructure in the city... existing bike lines, bike sharing programs, ect. Today, I went down to UNAM (the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) and took a look at the amazing bike infrastructure (everything from cages to bridges over major roads) that they've invested in. And, unsurprisingly, it's one of the few places in the city where I've seen lots of people actually using bikes, despite the fact that the campus was pretty empty because of the holiday.


bike cage at UNAM (you notice I got the Arquitectura one!). As I understand it, you can park your own bike here, or, if you want, you can borrow one of the university's bikes and drop it off at any other cage within a half an hour




this is a bike and pedestrian bridge over a major road


this is the major bike facility right next to the university metro station

Tomorrow I'm taking a day off to visit the ruins at Teotihuacan. Then it's a few more days of site visits and measuring streets until I'm back to Boston on the 6th, where I'll write up my report and develop a presentation for the foundation.

*if anyone gets that reference I'll be really impressed

Read more...

One Day to Go

Fantasmas en CU, originally uploaded by Eneas.

I'm just finishing up all of my prep for the trip tomorrow. I've gotten to spend a good part of the last few days collecting materials and reading. By coincidence, J got me the book The Endless City for x-mas, which has Mexico as one of the 6 cities that it focuses on (along with Berlin, New York, London, Shanghai and Johannesburg). And it's been pretty interesting reading. In fact, it's really challenged my perceptions of some of how cities in the developing world are shaped.


the mexico city info page from endless city

For a long time, I've been influenced by Manual Castells, who has said that we are moving farther and farther away from actually having developed and developing countries. Rather, throughout the world, we can see a greater tendency towards what might be called "first world" cities surrounded by "third world" peripheries and rural areas. Even in the US, which is often seen as being the "opposite" of the rest of the world in spatial terms (poor cities/rich suburbs rather then rich cities/poor suburbs), I feel that we can see the beginnings of this orientation asserting itself in NY, Boston, and even in LA. I still hold that in general, this is probably true. What I've been realizing, however, is that this has led me to think of peripheral urbanization as the only part of cities in the global south that needs "community development."

In the case of Mexico City, there seems to be two different population trends that are both putting a lot of pressure on the city. The first, as I've commented, is the poorer (and largely informal) development at the edges of the metro area. The second (and one that I'll be coming into more direct contact with on this trip) is the loss of population at the center, in what would still be considered upper middle class areas of the city. So instead of this two tiered system of rich at the center, poor on the outside, Mexico is become more of a three tiered city: poor on the outside, rich in the middle and a hollow center.

From a community development standpoint, I think this leads to a lot of interesting questions. Is an empty center part of the solution for the pressures of urbanization at the outside? is it recolonization by the rich who have been leaving? worker housing? and, of course, what is a politically palatable solution in a city that is simultaneously the eighth richest in the world, but still has more then 30% of it's residents living well below the poverty line?

Anyway, that's some of what I've been thinking about over the last few days. I will be getting into MX late tomorrow night, and on Sunday, my friend from the foundation gave me a bunch of walks that he said would be good to get a feel for the city. I'll probably try to blog again on Sunday night.

Finally, here's a little of the most interesting reading I've seen so far:

First, check out Alex's comment on the last post.

After that, the most directly related book has been Keith Pezzoli's
Human Settlements and Planning for Ecological Sustainability. Keith happens to be a Planners Network guy as well has having been my friend's-girlfriend Melissa's advisor at USC. I've also found a bunch of his articles in Progressive Planning magazine that i'd be willing to spread around.

Some other ones I've liked on Latin American urbanism are:
Mike Davis' Magical Urbanism and Joseph Scarpaci's Plazas and Barrios.

If you are into Anthro, Claudio Lomnitz' Death and the Idea of Mexico is really good.

I'll probably add some links to more articles as time goes on. The next post will be from Mexico City.

Read more...

What I Did Will Be Doing For My Winter Vacation

Sábado Distrito Federal, originally uploaded by Sonia Carolina εïз.

For those who haven’t heard, I was lucky enough to receive a GSD International Community Service Fellowship Grant to do research / work on a project in Mexico over the holiday break. The grant has a couple of stipulations that go along with it. Most significantly, I’ll be giving a talk in the GSD’s student lecture series next semester (which I’ll expect you all to be at), but along with that, I have to blog about the project while it’s going on.

For the project itself I’m working with a community development foundation (the Fundación Horizonte) in Mexico City to develop a “green street” project. I know the founder of FH from my time at BU. He used to work with the Fundación Centrohistórico, which is the CDC that has been working to revitalize the Centro Histórico, the oldest part of the city.

The idea behind the project is essentially to use the concept of a green street to stimulate sustainable development in Mexico and test out the idea of green development as a community development strategy. The street will be a showcase of sustainable technologies, but beyond that, the foundation will work towards getting organizations, community groups, businesses and artists that work on environmental issues to move into the space as well so that it becomes an incubator district for green thinking in the DF.



My place in the project is to evaluate a couple of sites for their suitability. I’ve been asked to generally ignore the technical aspects of “greening” the streets and to think about the project more from a social, community development, perspective. I’ll be looking at traffic, social structures, the physical form of the areas, possibilities for urban agriculture, ect.

I leave on Dec 27th and I’ll be in MX for 10 days. My goal is to blog every day if possible while I’m there. Between then and now, I’m going to be doing research on the city and developing a better framework for evaluating the areas, so I’ll probably be posting a few times between then and now as well.

I look forward to hearing your comments (on the project, restaurant and museum suggestions, whatever else).

Read more...