Estudio Teddy Cruz: Manufactured Sites

While the border condition of San Diego/Tijuana is central to all of ETC's projects, the majority have been focused on gleaning from the informal settlements tactics of invasion and organisational strategies by which catalytic projects can be inserted into San Diego's suburban homogeneity, variously challenging notions of public space (InfoSite 05) and pairing with grassroots organisations to 'contaminate the planning code' (Houses on the Border, Senior Gardens, Hudson 2+4).

Manufactured Sites is ETC's first major proposal for intervening in Tijuana's informal settlements. Cruz describes the proposal as follows:

MANUFACTURED SITES:

The most trafficked border in the world is mainly characterized by a series of illegal 'off the radar' two-way border crossings.  While 'human-flow' mobilizes Northbound in search of dollars, 'infrastructural waste' moves in the opposite direction to construct an insurgent, cross-border urbanism of emergency. 





















Taking advantage of NAFTA generated free economic zones, large maquiladora (assembly) factories position themselves in close proximity with the emerging slums in Tijuana in order to easily extract cheap labor from these informal settlements.  Can the maquiladora industry contribute with its own logics and processes of prefabrication to produce surplus, micro-infrastructural support systems that can reinforce the transitional, informal housing environments that dot the periphery of Tijuana?




a maquiladora produced frame : micro-infrastructure for housing in the informal urbanism of tijuana

How Mecalux can use their exisitng processes to produce a 'surplus piece'

The Manufactured Sites proposal consists of a maquiladora produced prefabricated frame that acts as a hinge mechanism to mediate across the multiplicity of recycled materials and systems brought from San Diego and re-assembled in Tijuana.  By giving primacy to the layered complexities of these informal sites over the singularity of the object, this small piece is also the first step in the construction of a larger, interwoven and open-ended scaffold that helps strengthen an otherwise precarious terrain, without compromising the temporal dynamics of these self-made environments.  By bridging between the planned and the unplanned, the legal and the illegal, the object and the ground, as well as man-made and factory processes of construction, this frame questions the meaning of manufacturing and of housing in the context of the building community.

Materials can be delivered to the site

The frames can be set up by community members themselves

And added to, using commonly available material and typical building processes

The design is a scaffold system comprised of metal frames manufactured by Mecalux, a maquiladora of heavy-duty industrial pallets.  The components are produced by lightly altering existing factory methods and systems of production in order to create, in a sense, a ‘surplus piece’ that is given to the informal communities that are the industries’ surrounding support infrastructure.  The scaffold is built, in turn, on top of an artificial pad bulwarked by recycled rubber tires that are interwoven to create a highly functional retaining system.  Overall, Manufactured Sites is a transitional architectural system made of PARTS – not an architectural object – that can support and better the unavoidable recycling and improvisational realities of low-income environments.  The notion of prefabrication here depends on a triangulation of human and material resources, agencies and institutions.  The relationship produced by community based activists in charge of distributing the frame, the community’s participation in building their own housing stock, the architect’s collaboration in designing and facilitating the process, the municipality’s efforts in mediating between the maquiladora industry and the informal sector, and the factory’s support in providing the infrastructure, all suggest an expanding concept of mass-production methodologies.

A vision of how the 'surplus piece' could become a stabilised site for further development by the community

The proposal has been in circulation for some time now, being exhibited from Istanbul to New York. ETC now sees its task as making it work on the ground. An upcoming exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Art is an opportunity to build a firm coalition: community, NGO, maquiladora, municipal government, media, art agencies and philanthropic foundations needed to take the project from the Utopian to the Real.

This project represents a 'perfect' example of how, with only minimal effort, a maquiladora can positively contribute to the communities on which it depends. How can this story create a momentum, encouraging other maquiladoras to sponsor micro-infrastructure projects for their own workers? What part can the municipality play to encourage this 'scaling up'? To what extent can the media be used to offer positive PR incentives to those maquiladoras who participate?

The strength of ETC's approach is its grounding in the real situation, based in a thorough understanding of the economic forces at play (from those encouraging factories to set up in Tijuana to those encouraging small enterprises to import used materials from San Diego). It is an example of 'urban acupuncture', seeking maximum effect from minimal change. It is a nimble and light form of activism: engaging with the maquiladoras rather than opposing their presence, reimagining their exploitative relationship with their workers from the inside out.