Housing in Mexico: A Multi-Year Exploration

hello i'm delighted to have you all here today to hear from jose castillo i am nicole freeman and i work in the development and alumni relations department at the gsd i'm delighted as i mentioned that you all are here today and i'm thrilled to introduce and hear from my colleague and our colleague at the gsd and i would like to say friend jose castillo to talk about his project housing in mexico a multi-year exploration jose is both a gsd alum from the amarc 1995 class and the ddes 2000 class and he has been a visiting professor at the gsd for the last nine years he is based in mexico city and leads alongside syed springhall another gsd alum the firm a911 their architecture and urban planning office the studios and courses he has taught including those with diane davis address both design and social issues through interdisciplinary participation the last studio beyond the mayan train housing and infrastructure looked at how the design disciplines can think through the problems of planning development environmental preservation housing and infrastructure as alternative responses to the idea of large mega projects this is a studio about recognizing the contradictory forces shaping territories and about using plans policies and projects to imagine better futures he will present on housing in mexico a multi-year exploration hello everyone my name is jose castillo and i will be talking today about the studio i taught last year fall of 2019 called beyond the mayan train housing housing and infrastructure in the yucatan peninsula similar to many of you i'm gsd alum i graduated in 1995 from the mr2 program and in 2000 from the dds program the last nine years i've been teaching at the gse on and off and i'd like to share a little bit of uh what we have been doing in some of these studios and most specifically about this particular studio that i taught one year ago this almost decade of studios have addressed some of the interests that came out of my time at the gse the notion that there's a continuum between the design disciplines from landscape to urban design from architecture to planning and though i was a gsd architecture graduate somehow it opened my mind to thinking about the problems of design in a broader way and the studios i have been teaching have tried to address that and many of those through the lens of housing in a way these studios uh and the other courses i've taught have to do with a particular understanding i have about architecture in a way how does the practice and the discipline of architecture engage other forces social economic political forces engagement is about compromise commitment agreement contract meeting fight action and duty but it's also about resistance it's about knowing how we say no to certain clients to certain prospects and it seems to me that housing actually allows architecture to be a lens about these forms of engagement and these forms of resistance as another key part i'm keen on understanding through the design studio is the notion of how we connect the physical with the social at the end of the day we're at design school but it is also about design as allowing us to look and interpret and think and transform many of the other forces and i'm and i'm very much interested about how design comes sometimes after sometimes during and sometimes before the decisions of those many other projects all of these studios have been multidisciplinary in their approach i'm curious about this notion of expanded design how we think through the problems of non-physical issues in physical ways the first studio i taught in 2013 had to do with what i call the wicked problem of housing in understanding how housing is not a linear it's not about a linear solution it's not about only designing typologies or it's not only about understanding the relationship between the house and the city but it's also about understanding the normative processes that produce a particular and specific kind of housing we worked and visited mexico city out of the 12 students we had students from all the disciplines and other programs which has been the norm with many of the studios i taught in 2014 i taught a studio with diane davies called the flexible leviathan in which we were looking at how large scale urban transformations both through landscape through urban but also through questions of housing could begin to transform and look into uh areas in in mexico city that were uh kept outside the loop of investment and in this particular area called esta palapa we were dealing with social forces that tend to be obscured in uh the discussions about architecture and the discussions about iran design we truly believe that somehow conversation and deliberation are also acts of design so in the process of expanding our notions of what architecture can do we were able to actually involve the students in more complex understandings of a site from 2015 on for three years diane and myself worked on a series of sponsored studios sponsored by infonabit which is a national housing investment fund it is the equivalent of anime of freddie mac in the us and there were studios geared to look at um a housing in a brotherless in the first year in the lens of processes of uh industrialization and and the under industrialization what does it mean for housing to become a force of transformation in places where we're losing population but also in places where we can think regionally such as uh the places where we work in the in the bahia region in mexico but also in the area of planet panther the second studio was addressing uh craft politics and the production of housing in oaxaca looking at how the particular way of producing politics fragmented about conflict in an era where the territory is very much organized outside the fringes of our of our traditional understanding of private property how could we use housing to think about these problems sometimes mediating but also sometimes being more assertive in terms of its own capacities in that third studio we worked actually in the yucatan peninsula in a studio called the urban and the territorial and we were looking at the region in merida specifically and how could we think problems such as density sprawl but also cultural patterns of development as techniques to think about housing in an innovative fashion diana and myself during these three studios uh because zion comes from the world social sciences uh from the world of sociology actually we think that this connection between the physical and the social can actually be achieved in the format of the studio and most of what it can also achieve be achieved through conversation it is not only in the act of drawing which is the key aspect of any design studio but is also through the act of actually engaging with others outside our disciplines we have been fortunate to have over those four studios we talked together almost split in equal parts people from the architecture from the landscape from the architecture and urban design program and from the master nervous planning and this means that there's an actually a hunger at the school to think through the problems of housing transversally beyond the mayan train is a studio that actually rises from two polemics on the one hand a kind of moment of a new appeal of a personality such as alexander poncumbo whose 200 years anniversary was in 2019 and and humbled has become more and more relevant in the disciplines of architecture planning but also territorial history because humble was able to think through the process of traveling as a means of expanding our knowledge of of the world and actually using some of the techniques that we use as landscape architects architects urban designers and planners to expose new knowledge humboldt spent a lot of time in mexico he did not visit the yucatan peninsula but he produced some of the most beautiful books plans and drawings as well as letters to the visery and a very comprehensive understanding of how the political the economic have a framing and have a grounding in the territory and uh and of course yucatan has been a land very much geared to that notion of travel people like catherwood and stevens in their incidents of travel through yucatan were actually thinking of using the journey as a sense of discovery which then became the key aspect of the renaissance of mayan culture many many centuries later the mayan train was a polemic plan announced almost two years ago by the incoming president andres manuel lopez obrador to be a 1 000 mile long piece of infrastructure that in his words would bring the new development and create a new mode of uh wealth creation to the region part of the polemic has been in in whether the ambitions of uh using infrastructure to uh to the south of the country are the right tools and here's actually i think a disciplinary and a professional question is to what extent do we use our tools and our user techniques to actually bridge those gaps that have to do with space with design with infrastructure with the landscape with the connection of the economic the social and the political for the mexican government the mayan train would be the structuring access for investment and development that would reverse the centuries of marginalization of poverty in a very symbolic act the president asked mother earth whether the train would be approved in a way ignoring other deliberation processes such as consultations referendums which have not been used in the decision to bring in the mayan train and this is one of the reasons why there's certain opposition to the mayan train from uh original communities from the indigenous townships but from many other activists which see this model of development catering only to a very specific elite which is the tourist the tourism arriving to the to the yucatan peninsula so it is for us to beg the question about what model of our infrastructure do we need and how does it relate to economic growth and development how do we want to achieve what do we want to achieve with the train and who benefits from it how does this relate to housing production and how do we address the collateral damage of development and yucatan is actually a particularity in mexico because in many respects has fantastic uh indicators it's one of the safest areas to live in mexico but it's actually disconnected both naturally and within the state it has some of the most amazing natural conditions a large percent of the state is very much uh natural areas to be preserved hence the polemic about the train but it also relates to social some of them historic but some of them more recent 47.9 percent of yucatan's inhabitants live in poverty is there a way to think through housing and development to address these questions of poverty alleviation and also to relate it to the 30 percent of the yucatan population that it that it speaks indigenous language and that's identified as an indigenous community let alone the heritage and culture that we've come to understand and appreciate uh from a place from jupiter and on the other side the role that tourism has represented in the in the whole region both the yucatan state and the state of quintana roo so when we think about infrastructure do we think about airports we think about trains roads or or even artisan well to bring water to a community do we think about this relationship between housing as just a sprawl on the peripheries of the large cities or do we think about the train as a possible structural agent in understanding and transforming the territory so this studio is very much about rethinking the relationship between housing and infrastructure the initial stages of the studio were to look at the regimes of urbanization how does the territory get transformed because we tend to think that architecture is the driving force in the transformation of cities landscapes and territories but when we look at the regimes of transformation and urbanization in a place such as yucatan we will immediately see that from the solar maya which used to be the old the traditional housing and urbanization system to the cloister and convents of the colonial ages to the haciendas of the 18th and 19th century to the traditional system of cities such as merida and its expansions in boulevard or even to the infrastructure of ports of the old townships such as or the new development of affordable housing what does how does the city get transformed and this was a key question for us how do we become agents of change how do we have a sense of social economic political agency but also physical agency not to ignore the other forces that come outside are traditional disciplines such as salt works such as agro industry or even energy produ uh production such as the wind farms in tilim de bravo we started the semester looking at these forms and trying to understand how do how could we either harness them resist them or use housing as a technique of uh of addressing them in a more cohesive way since this is a studio trip we feel that the road trip that the trip is also the first form of research getting to know the territory is a crucial way of opening up our eyes our ears our hearts our guts and our brains to different ways of uh of thinking and sometimes the trip tends to be misunderstood as just a touristic device visiting pyramids or having other or kind of a non-non-research tools but actually this trip was about speaking with the voices from the city planner of uh in media to the activists and the architects resisting the mayan train let me say that we started this project in an agnostic fashion towards towards the mayan train i personally have my positions on on the train uh and and why i think it's problematic but we started and i let and i asked the students to suspend judgment to come in with an agnostic mind and let the evidence talk about what is the train doing how is it doing who is it benefiting and uh and and during our time during almost the 10 days we spent in the yucatan peninsula we were able to talk with architects with the with social activists we were able to look at the places where the the train would impact such as is to look at to talk with people from the u.n habitat and the way that this project is either engaging or going against the grain of some of the transformations required for an area such as jupiter we were able to visit natural reserves and in a similar fashion we did not get on a train but we almost we did planes boats and automobiles so in this almost 1 000 kilometer long road trip we were able to understand the broader sense of the territory and how does housing have an impact and how can we think of housing and infrastructure as ways to have less impact where we need less impact in the territory and more impact where we need more impact which is in terms of social change poverty alleviation and a more orderly territorial transformation and of course it's also about pleasure just a few days in a conversation between sarah whiting and rafael moneo rafael was was laying out this idea that it is important for academic institutions to connect the idea that learning is also a form of pleasure we were able to extend ex and expand that pleasure to swimming in a sinkhole uh one of the most fantastic geological formations in all across the yucatan peninsula but also to relate it to the cultural production of food and having the most wonderful cochinita or the pulled pork traditional of uh of the yucatan peninsula we visited places like valladolid with its former convent we climbed pyramids and we also finished in the caribbean sea in tulum and later on in cancun looking at all the way that these regimes of uh overran transformation and its own forms of production of housing were either a positively or negatively transforming the territory every studio it's about the people and the conversations you engage with and i have to thank every one of those 12 students who put up with me and who had to deal with distance and destruction and uh late planes arriving and early planes departing and trying to do and engage in their best way to make this a very productive semester similar to the other studios i've taught it was a quite diverse group in terms of uh disciplines it was quite balanced in terms of gender and it was very i was very fortunate to have smart critical voices that took out the best in me um the work i'm going to show today and i'm not here to just explain the work we'll have a chance to talk with a couple of the students later on but but i'm curious to see how the work fits or responds to the agenda i laid out and of course as in any studio there's always shortcomings there's disappointments but there's also surprises and this studio without lamia and brett without ximena and uh justin without maura san fran david and rafael without angela and see when and without kayla and syed would have not been the same and i thank every one of them for their effort each of these groups addressed the question of uh of the yucatan infrastructure and housing through a different way and i was actually surprised to see that without with the exception of one of the studios all of the all of the teams resisted the idea that infrastructure such as a train will be positive and the surprises and the responses are quite engaging in a way the group of sam juan david and rafael actually decided to address a territory which is in the middle of nowhere the least developed the least urbanized uh the least uh service in terms of infrastructure in the state of yucatan and so that decision to work there is already in a way an ethical commitment to the land and an ethical commitment to the to the kind of work that architecture planning and urban design do and this area requires a different type of infrastructure it was almost like a like a kind of a claim by the students in this team that how can we discuss the question of a train for tourists where we have communities with no minimum water and sewage infrastructure so the program is about reimagining the role that infrastructure plays and how could we design a system that embedded agricultural production to do waste management at the level of a house a block town in a more sustainable fashion to think of infrastructure from the toilet upwards is actually quite powerful in a studio siwen's an angeles project had to do with the space between three towns along the usmal petro axis to the south of the state and they were interested in looking at how the regime of uh of agricultural production could become simultaneously a way of uh thinking through more uh more embedded forms of housing housing and agriculture working together but also to think through the longer cycles of the land production it was a beautiful diagram where they were analyzing the milpa system the way the traditional agricultural system where change in the crops uh changing the seasons changing the patterns of uh doing agriculture could have a more sustainable attitude so learning from this is a way of we that uh siwen and uh and angela were approaching the production of housing it is somewhere an in between between the farmhouse the market and the traditional township in the yucatan peninsula the team by brett lamia was a was working in a multiplicity of skills thinking of how the impact of the train would have on each of the municipalities it crossed and how could we relate that impact uh that specific impact of the train vis-a-vis the the sense of primacy that each of these cities and townships have with regards to the state as a whole and it is obvious that brett and lamia discover the asymmetries in urban development the large cities are where the budgets are taken and hence there's a replication of a system of a territorial inequity and um their project works transversally through plan through policy but also to through project to look at how the train could be used not as an infrastructure itself but actually as a model of wealth distribution looking at the cities in terms of sizes impacts but also looking at the places where the train could could serve as a reason to to restructure the peripheries of those of those towns and cities the team comprised by ximena and justin was interested in looking similar to other teams in the southeast part of the region the most impoverished part of the state and now and and thinking of how we could use transceiver rear inter development to connect to connected to two very key aspects of uh underdevelopment in the yucatan peninsula one is education and the other one is housing so to look at a region and to think of uh let's call it a regional uh boss trumpet rapid transit system in which rather than a train a set of buses will be connecting these communities and connecting the places where colleges technical colleges universities and higher education could provide access to a region at large but also in the same time to use those uh middle and micro interventions as techniques to restructure the relationship between institutions and the centers so the bus station simultaneously achieves a civic quality but also understanding accessibility not only as a transportation benefit but also one that had can bring education to impoverished communities and finally the team by saying and they were working outside the area where the mayan train is supposed to pass it's an area called las coloradas it's a a set of south works facing the northern part of the state of yucatan a beautiful and uh and a strange artificial landscape and a company town that very much connects to the booming times in the region in the up until the 1930s and what this team was addressing is whether we could think about this this relationship between landscape a industry a company town and the new services such as tourism as a way to think through a more sort of a balanced and equitable relationship between these forces tourism and social development so their their their work is kind of simultaneously imagining the company town but also thinking very closely and looking at typologies that could cater to other social agents not only the workers of the salt works but actually the tourists visiting more and more this part of the state all these students were actually in spite of their specific interests were very much uh having a diagonal conversation it's not about a sort of silo work each student or each team working alone but actually thinking as a studio as a whole and i think there's always shortcomings and one wants to have more of that conversation but uh but to an extent the diversity and plurality of all these approaches is testament to to this kind of a pedagogical method um one cannot forget uh similar to what i was saying earlier is that a studio is only as good as the people it involves and not only the local conversation of uh many agents during our trip and further conversations um that the students kept along with local actors but through all the guest critics that participated in the distinct cleanups midterm and final reviews and i can only be grateful to them i have asked saieb two of the former students to have a conversation with me and between them about the pros and cons of the studio the methodology but to actually think of how this also relates to the questions of practicing uh beyond the gse and i'll invite them to join the conversation and then later we can have a question and answer session uh thank you very much so i took the liberty to invite two of our former students uh ximena david garza and said who took the studio beyond the mayan train and um i'd like ximena's life to share with uh with the audience some of your reflections about the studios what went well what did not work and what are some of the challenges uh in terms of pedagogy but also in terms of practice from studios such as this one well thank you joseph for inviting us um i say for starters that this exceptional studio was probably the most stressful uh but also one of the most one of those places where i learned most at the gsc it was just so many things to learn and so many things to do in such a small amount of time that you didn't you just had to learn everything so fast and it was very enriching uh experience also getting to work with people from different disciplines gave me a lot of different perspectives um and by by that time i took this in my second year so i had like my first year to like hone my skills and my abilities and get like some delay of the land and then when i got to the studio i was i felt a little confident and then i i was in front of all these amazing people with very different backgrounds and abilities and it just blew my mind and i learned so much from them and from you ximena you come from the world of uh political science so you're not trained as a designer how do you think the studio format at the gsd works to address let's say the non-design issues of uh of a design studio if uh if we can actually resolve that paradox i have good experiences in that respect but i also understand that a lot of people struggle with that sometimes like you want to do something that's more like you know you want to connect with the community you want to do some um more social work with your design and in some studios i know that some instructors are not as welcoming to that um you know they're more focused on the design aspects and the material aspects of the practice and yeah it's it's a constant struggle to try to find a balance between these two because you don't know you also don't want to leave the design part out of it i mean during the design school that's what you're here that's what you're learning but you don't or at least me i don't want to leave like that part of me outside of the studio um in this one in particular i found spaces to do that spaces to balance it uh sometimes you had to tell me like yeah that's okay but you also have to come to the material a little bit more and that was okay uh that was part of the knowledge experience in the learning experience syed but you probably have a kind of a more of a of a dual format because you you've addressed the questions through design and as a with an architectural training but also interested in the questions of urban design and planning can you share with us a little bit about the that easiness or or in other cases the difficulties that came out of the studio yeah um absolutely and i was i was also coming to the gst with three or four years of practice so what i was looking for was a flexible brief that allowed me to choose my site choose what issue i'm trying to address through design which is a lot harder in practice because you have a pretty much set brief and it's flexible in some ways but not as flexible as um the studio basically allowed us to be and um you know that sort of a brief also attracted a very diverse cohort which i think otherwise would not be possible i mean we have people from the architectural landscape architecture urban design and urban planning programs so that itself uh was was a big asset for the studio i think but of course it came with these challenges because not everyone from all of the disciplines felt equally represented um and um i think um clearly and i also sort of uh ran into that issue when we were working with others because um as designers we we sort of uh like had the skill set to deal with the design aspect but we were also dealing with a very complex political situation and we like we did run into issues with that but i think uh like having um like diverse uh reviewers come in and uh sort of having like a midterm check-in and then a couple of other like descripts with with with someone uh with the planning training like diane i think that that that really helped i think you you touch upon uh something which i had not thought about which is if studios such as these ones work better for students who have been at the gsd already one or two years and and now that you mention it probably for the for the two incoming mr2s taking the studio it was actually a tougher challenge in terms of understanding a much broader matrix of uh of issues and questions and uh and data so i don't know about i mean that that's also kind of the limits of uh super wide broad scope and broad studios but uh um it would be interesting to know how they let's say rebound from an experience like this one to move to a different kind of a more focused studio yeah absolutely and i think even uh with um the way that the deliverables were sort of structured throughout the studio i think it gave us enough flexibility to start to sort of deal with things that uh that the gsc talks about a lot which is like the culture the politics of the place um and because these deliverables were not set like we didn't have to produce a set of drawings for every review like i for example read ethnographic research for one solid month and that gave me so much insight into the place and the people and that eventually they got us to uh i mean it it informed our design in a much richer way i think um and so these i mean i think the structure of the deliverables was also uh something that worked well with the brief of the studio ximena you are you were born and raised in mexico so for you it was a different kind of cultural shock but but i'm curious if you can talk with the alumni a little bit about how studio trips and travel studios which kind of put you in a different situation and in this case we it was halfway between the road trip and uh on a research venture but but but i'm curious for you to see how the other students were reacting with that territory that you were more familiar or whether you also had those those issues of uh wow moments opening up to new knowledge new conversations new territories i'm curious about that ximena yeah i definitely had a bunch of wow moments during the trip i had been to some of these places before but i was seeing them kind of for the first time you know without a new set of guys um and also being there with people from different disciplines and that were not from there and had never been there you know the things they they pointed out at me were so interesting and i really wanted to go back afterwards and see because like we went there to get like the initial feeling of like the site but we didn't have a project or we hadn't chosen a scale yet and by the time we moved with our projects i was like oh i want to go back because there's so much that i could now see again with even newer eyes and it was such a valuable experience to be able to experience those sites and to you know meet with all the people we met that are working there and are conducting projects uh in different type of things like in mobility or in urban development or sustainability and it was just getting to know these places from within not just as a tourist not just as a citizen of that country but like as a practitioner and that was very valuable um i'm not sure like my my two core studios you had some relationship to the site but not this much and it gives you a lot of new tools and and it engages you with the site in a different way because you sort of when you're doing your project you don't want to fail those towns or those cities like you you get this emotional connection to it as well when you get to visit and know the people there i've been always curious with the question of the design profession and with architectural education vis-a-vis this thing i called engagement how do we engage the world at large but also the the polemical projects and the pro and the problematic of politics and we chose as a as a studio uh problem the idea of a mayan train a polemic piece of infrastructure we approach this in an agnostic way without giving or at least without showing my my full deck of cards about what i thought about the project i'm i'm interested in studios that address these uh professional uh practice challenges i'm curious whether your your thoughts visa visa project changed during the studio or or or they just reinforced positions uh when you started learning and listening and researching about what the project is about and what's the role of architectural planners and urban designers in in working or staying away or voicing a sighting on the voice of a community uh regarding these projects any thoughts on that this is a question that i sort of struggled throughout my mup and i will probably continue to struggle with it my whole life because yes obviously you want to do right by a community you want to give them the space they need the space they want you know a space where they can fully develop and be happy be healthy be safe but from time to time a lot actually you encounter sometimes communities that want things that you think you know are not ideal maybe you don't know but you know sometimes they want big roads or they want development that will devastate um a forest or something like that and it's also sort of respecting their position at the same time as you try to open a dialogue in which you can explain to them why maybe that's not the best idea so like for example with the mayan train there are a lot of communities that are opposite there are also a lot of towns and cities that want it because it can bring development so and because of the train passing a bunch of places in a huge territory they they all should have a voice and even like the communities are not in agreement about what they want to do with that and as a practitioner approaching the site you're sort of like well i have my own opinions but like the people that actually live there also have their own opinions and none of us have found common ground and that's a huge challenge for you because should you give more weight to your own opinions about this and try to like impose your ideas should you listen to one side or to the other should you be sort of a mediator between these two it's a constant um tension between that that doesn't have any easy answers someone is always going to be unhappy with the result i think to build off of what ximena just said i think i felt exactly the same way um we when we first went to last we saw this extraordinary landscape and as an architect urban designer you know we were like we should we should definitely do something here but and when we uh sort of came back and started to really look at the place we saw how much sort of context we have to deal with politically ecologically and and and and that's something that uh the format of the studio really helped with because we had planners that we could speak to these issues about um and uh as a designer uh we were sort of um like we were trying to leverage our skills as as visualizers to sort of bring uh this this this large industry um who controls everything and and people who live there who control nothing to sort of bring them together and find a way to uh sort of find a solution that works for everyone and i think that would not have been possible without bringing in planners and sort of understanding uh that situation to design infrastructure which would be so much richer and so much better for the place than just being objects that look beautiful i think that's a a a great way to wrap up uh syed ximena i'd like to thank you and uh thank everyone here at the gsa gs alumni reunion and uh we look forward to keep on using the studios as a way of expanding the conversation within the school and with all the community outside the school so thank you very much for participating hello everyone thank you so much jose for putting together that wonderful presentation and for including students in your in your studio and engaging them as well it's really fascinating so i have uh one question right now and i hope everyone else will please uh continue to submit questions for us we have about 10 minutes for the q a now before we move on so one question is you talk about politics and engaging the world at large and i'm wondering you know through all of that and especially during this time when economic social spatial um injustices and inequalities are really magnified right now and sometimes seem so daunting how do you keep your students and even the young designers at your firm motivated and feeling really optimistic about the power of design to make change for the good i i think that that's a very complex question nicole and i i guess you know one or two words in 10 seconds i would now i i think that many of these challenges um at the core are very much about space and uh how they get materialized in space so i i do think um designers at large have a have a stake in the possible interpretations of these problems in and in the way that we reframe them as solutions i do think that whether it is a social and spatial injustice i think that whether it is about infrastructures that uh segment rather than unite in the way that housing as a policy gets directed to people who are not in uh who are not needing it the most i think that's where we make a kind of a ethical and political and professional reflection and i i do think that in different capacities most of our studios uh have tried to do that i i think that uh it is a challenge to remain optimistic in this times as sarah was saying earlier in a kind of a very uh almost cold uh non-judgmental fashion if you have a chance to vote in november please do um but i do think that we have to imagine that the the impact of architecture in this uh in these discussions it's ongoing it's not about uh going out to vote every three years or it's not about uh saying yes or no to to some of these uh projects is about uh it's about almost taking a reformist attitude through the work we do through the lenses and uh the ways we engage there's already um a change in the making so to give an example i'm happy that to see that raymond mclean is here who was um when i was a teaching fellow for alberto kalach he was a student and uh it was a student a studio on the lake tesco and and just now 20 years almost 20 years after that studio there's uh there's a plan to recover this coco so the time frames we work with uh make an impact and uh and that's where i think there there's a possibility to remain optimistic about the the claims and the disciplinary concerns of our professions well speaking of which raymond mclean has a question for you here regarding i think the time since you were in studio with them so how would you characterize the changes in the past 20 years in the design discussion regarding large urban projects in mexico well i do think and i've always tried um i've always tried to address the studios let me say in a non-chauvinistic way in other words i don't come with uh with my mexican flag in my on my heart but i tried to use the challenges we were facing as a developing economy or a developing country to address uh wider challenges uh from uh from the studio i was a teaching fellow 22 years ago that raymond took it was about this relationship between uh environmental concerns hydrological concerns and the city i think these questions even more so nowadays are at the core of uh what uh makes a professional discussion relevant i think that studio connects to to to sort of the work in uh downtown manhattan after hurricane sandy in in more ways that it relates to other concerns about mexico city um partially and i monica healey who was also a partner an incredible asset during the three studios uh diane and myself caught taught with a information i think she knows what it how hard it is to simultaneously problematize the big decisions the idea of the capital a projects while simultaneously finding new ways to to tap into other concerns which are more bottom-up which are uh at the borders or the margins of the discipline i mean is there are there solutions when i look at the outcomes of some of the studios uh in these past years i always fear whether i'm not kind of a not being enough of an architect enough of a designer let's say compared to other housing studios which are very much about these typologies internal space the morphology of the city these studios connect to economies and politics in in broader ways and and i think that still very much really remains a question 20 years after that studio about tesco raymond so i i think that that whether is a train the refinery or the new airport coming after the old airport the foster and romero airport these are problematics in mexico that have an impact and have a relationship to to some other challenges that many cities are facing both in the in the americas at large but also in europe and in asia another question for you here um going back to the the last studio the mayan train um you were very familiar with the project and you had you know your opinion regarding the train and i'm just wondering throughout the course what was most significance significant to you or a new perspective that you might have taken away from teaching the course and that maybe one of some of the students or student groups kind of brought to your attention that made you see maybe an opportunity for it to be positive or that confirmed you know your original opinion of the project was correct i do still think that the big question which is uh which let's say it remains unanswered as a broader project the project of the mayan train is what does infrastructure do and who does it cater and how does the how do the design disciplines relate to infrastructure and and i think the question of at least that some of the groups were putting forward is that whether we should expand our notion of infrastructure from that idea of physical hard engineered infrastructures to questions of social educational uh even political infrastructures ways of leveraging uh and distributing power in more equitable fashion i mean the group that uh at the end of the day was doing uh toilets and let me put it kind of emphasize that idea that the outcome of the this group of four students was producing a sustainable toilets for a region in yucatan that had had a deficit in water and switch infrastructure this kind of studio proposition would have been sort of a strange 30 years ago when i when i was finishing my mr2 and but it just goes on to show of how sensible the design students have become to to these questions uh it was probably more we were thinking 30 years ago about questions of hyper density and we were thinking about the large scale in a kind of a more enabling and empowering way for our discipline and i think when one is thinking about the toilet when one is thinking about uh doing a transport oriented development to bring education in a more equitable fashion along a region it's uh it's redefining infrastructure so i think that's a that's a very powerful um an actually optimistic uh outcome from the studio at least from my perspective thank you well that leads nicely into another question and after this question we'll have time for maybe one more so if any other participants would like to add an additional question please do so now um you were talking about the disciplines in your practice and how you really see the interdisciplinary method i guess if you will about um you know landscape planning and architecture kind of coming together as one and just wondering if you see that as moving forward where kind of all practices will have to take into account all the design disciplines maybe even beyond our three pillars at the gsd um when they're opening or considering growth well yeah i don't know how to answer that i mean uh i have um i have to say i i feel sometimes i'm i'm uh i'm a kind of a doctor jekyll and mr hyde i have to answer uh through the questions and challenges that uh we have a as a professional firm sometimes i won't say straying away but at least having to be more pragmatic about some of the challenges and the questions we we work with and at the same time the kind of the the the the possibilities of the academic studios to bring back certain discussions which i think remain relevant i mean as a kind of an anecdote ximena david after her return and graduation from the gse she's now working at her office and uh she's a she's uh well we've had during the summer a few gse interns but uh she's now a kind of uh i would say she's uh the first uh mop that we're hiring at the office the first person to come from the world of political science and i think i i think that she has opened not only to our wider team but also to say and myself new ways to to bring back uh these other disciplines into the into what we do which is kind of very much geared to to design in an old-fashioned way so to look at old-fashioned problems through new new fashion perspectives i think that's what uh i think that's what peggy and uh and sarah were talking earlier i mean i i was almost taking notes thank you and thank you for for of course for for your internships for dsc students and it's a pleasure and we really do hope uh we're fortunate to be i mean in spite of the circumstances uh to have a steady flow of work so i i look forward to having a kind of a community and not only i mean not only the recent graduates but also alumni to to think about collaborations at uh at large uh because we're always looking for for those kind of uh expanding conversations well we have another question uh from david hamilton it is have you had students who could bring financial analysis into these studios we've had because of uh the fortune of having multi-disciplinary studios i'm actually surprised by the depth that many of the planning students are bringing into the discussion so where we when we were doing the the studio about uh the bahia region industrialization and and industrialization some of the mup students were actually thinking about how do we finance and do the cross subsidies to produce affordable housing which is let me say the big question of housing whether berlin london new york city or mexico city we are very much at the at the heart of uh discussing how do we finance affordable housing um and i was happy to see that in in those studios uh about uh really getting to the nitty gritty of the numbers almost as if it was a real estate uh development course some of the students were were thinking financially um in this in this studio about um about the mayan train uh actually lamias and brett's uh studio a project was actually quite compelling because they were looking at impact on the train on the territory and then understanding how the budgets of those municipalities were being allocated and we're creating also certain asymmetries of investment so kind of a replication of inequity in a territory so by looking at uh at budgets which in the gse studio would seem almost like far off i mean why would everyone look at musical budgets because through municipal budgets we replicate inequity we reproduce patterns of development which are sometimes toxic and sometimes positive so they looked at this the finance and they look at the impact on the train and then they looked at how to reorganize uh the monies the public monies and the impacts of the train in a more equitable fashion so and and i think there's a lot of work to do in this and i appreciate the ques the question and i want to say thank you again jose for your time today and for sharing this mini course and for just all that you do for our students and the help you do in mexico city to raise awareness about the gsd with our alums and friends down there we have an excellent community and it's in a large part thanks to you so really thank you from the bottom of my heart

Channel: Harvard GSD

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Id: xyXVKdYB6w8

Length: 59min 0sec (3540 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 08 2020