peripheral landscapes

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Peripheral Landscapes,El Caracol, Mexico CityIn Mexico City, unplanned illegal development exists cheek by jowl with developer-driven housing. Jose Castillo of arquitectura 911sc explains how the practice’s projectfor New Caracol provides leisure facilities and open space that afford opportunitiesfor social and cultural exchange between the two different communities.



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Historically, the urbanisation that characterises Mexico City’s

periphery is the materialisation of a twofold process. On the one

hand informal urbanisation, the formerly dominant model of city-

making, has been produced outside the legal, regulatory and

professional frameworks through different forms of occupation

such as squatting, illegal sales and subdivisions of underserviced

land. On the other we see a more recent phenomenon,

characterised by the large-scale transformation of greenfield and

brownfield tracts of land into developer-driven housing.

El Caracol is such a site – a palimpsest of histories, geological,

hydrological and industrial, as well as social and political following

the logic of real-estate and informal processes. The El Caracol

plant was built on the site in 1942 to desalinate the water of Lake

Texcoco by moving it through a series of shallow ponds in a spiral

path and extracting the sodium carbonate. In the mid-1990s the

plant shut down, and 10 years later 13,000 new units of low-income

housing were built. Just next to them is the informal settlement of

El Salado, a continuously growing self-built, para-legal community.

arquitectura 911sc’s project for the New Caracol recognises the

site as a space between city and landscape, between the suburb

and the shanty town, between the natural and the post-industrial. It

is also the space of negotiation between conflicting forces, such as

the public need for preservation and the private thrust for

development. El Caracol introduces a new kind of open space that

supports the coexistence of multiple forces. Aside from functioning

as a park for leisure and contemporary art, and a working

hydrological infrastructure, it also acts as a rapport between formal

and informal development.

arquitectura 911sc (Jose Castillo and

Saïdee Springall), New Caracol,

Ecatepec, Mexico City, 2007

Render: View from the southeast. By

densifying through specific punctual

interventions in the northwestern part of

New Caracol and leaving the

southeastern section as a hydrological

infrastructure, the project strives to erase

the distinction between infrastructure

and park, city and landscape.

During the mid-20th century, El Caracol

became a quite productive industrial

landscape, with a spiral jetty moving

water along shallow ponds extracting

the sodium carbonate by evaporating

the water and then processing it to use

it in the factories nearby. An area of

agricultural fields, with no housing, just

infrastructure, would become a

settlement of close to two millionpeople in just five decades.



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Development diagrams. The transition from greenfield/brownfield to (sub)urbanised

land is always an incremental process with complex dynamics over time.

Satellite image showing the different patterns of urbanisation, dis- and sub-urbanisation operating in the northern periphery

of Mexico City. Caracol remains the most visible geographical marker, and the other urban dynamics operate around it.



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In arquitectura 911sc’s proposal, the autonomous 13,000-unitdevelopment and the adjoining informal settlement are

complemented by programmes in the New Caracol that they

currently lack, including workspaces and retail spaces, open space

and infrastructure.

In the context of large megacities, where sprawl is the

dominant mode of growth and where there is always a battle

between nature and urbanisation, the project strives to put

infrastructure on the front burner, achieving improved

performance even within the context of low-density growth. By

preserving the defined geometry of El Caracol, and charging it

with programmes and use, geography and infrastructure become

a more relevant urbanism for the outskirts.4

Text © 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 64-5, 66-7 © arquitectura

911SC; p 65(t) © Aerofoto México

The multiplicity of conditions at El Caracol show the ambiguous nature of the periphery.

Plan: scale 1:10,000. The New Caracol project is a landscape of negotiation:

between the formal and the informal, the natural and the urban, and the

hydrological and the leisure park.

peripheral landscapes

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