INTRODUCTION
In the mid-1970s, in Mexicali, capital of Baja California, an area was planned to concentrate the headquarters and dependencies of the different levels of government. The project site was previously occupied by agricultural companies.
On a piece of land adjoining the government complex, four blocks were set aside for a commercial area. This was created with an image inspired by New Spain’s cities, comprising pedestrian walkways, orthogonal subdivisions and with architecture that now alternates between neo-colonial historicism, late-modern language, and nondescript buildings.
The passage of time gave rise to new uses. The intermediate voids and the pedestrian walkways were degraded with unusual appropriation practices. The future of this 917,000 ft2 complex remains uncertain, but the tension between a dilapidated state and density opens multiple possibilities; some of them are experienced daily, others only become visible every weekend, but those which incubate imagination and time remain.
This article presents an analysis of the urban landscape on the conditions of abandonment, the modes of appropriation, and the possibilities of integrating the commercial area into the Government Centre of Mexicali. This real estate project took place amid an ambitious modernisation policy. Its urban morphology was arbitrary for the climatic conditions and the sociocultural context. Its architecture imitated – with notes of nostalgia and chauvinism – the old historic centres of the Mexican viceregal cities.
The text begins by reviewing the origin and recent history of the Government Centre, locally known as Centro Cívico (Civic Centre). This urban complex was inspired by the principles of modern urban planning, although during its construction these ideals were already being severely criticised. The commercial complex, the focus of this text, is an area comprised of passages (reminiscent of colonial urbanism alleys). Its initial buildings, resorted to historicist gestures, notably distanced from architectural modernity. This juxtaposition of tradition and avant-garde defined the most eclectic scene of the time in this border city. Could it have been (or is it still) – unwittingly – the most abbreviated synthesis of the Mexicali landscape? Could it have been an involuntary laboratory from which we have not yet learned? What were the implications of projecting a centre on that periphery?
Some aspects are discussed around the notions of space and culture, as well as the qualities of open and closed from the insight of urban thought. This is the state-of-the-art from which the landscape of this area of the city is observed. Finally, each of the components that characterise this complex is analysed throughout time, connecting spatial typology (passages, voids, and architecture), social and cultural condition reflected in the present, and opportunities glimpsed in this open space.
THE ORIGIN: A CENTRE IN THE PERIPHERY
The city of Mexicali, on the border with the state of California, has a record of its foundation in 1903. Originally, there was barely a small adobe village, a natural waterway (the New River) and an enormous promise of agricultural development on the “fertile desert” that included the Mexicali (Mexico) and Imperial (USA) valleys, which benefited from the waters of the Colorado River. Cotton cultivation brought an oscillating economic boom and gradual growth. Prohibition in the United States later reconfigured the urban image and boosted the economy of Mexicali. However, the bonanza from the so-called white gold defined the configuration of the city and its perimeters. The decline in cotton production, the emergence of new binational dynamics and certain global phenomena around the industrial sector gave way to a different operation (Quiroz Rothe 2008).
With the establishment of industries, the population index registered a significant increase that became more acute in the early 1970s (Lucero 2013). This caused the urban infrastructure –originally located in the foundational area – to be insufficient, especially the public administration. The growth demanded a regulatory plan, based on the functionalist principles of modern urban planning, integrating various areas that would accompany the new centre. From that plan, the financial, commercial, hospitality and healthcare areas were specified. “The idea of a civic centre is imported from the American concept of public services, civic centres, which exist in the cities of the United States” (Valenzuela 2010, 35-36). Thus, given the new needs of the capital, the creation of a site that would become the new centre of the city was encouraged: Mexicali’s Civic and Commercial Centre.
The construction of the government headquarters and their complementary zones, together with the delimitation of reserves for later phases, evidenced the mistakes of moving the centre to the periphery. For example, forgetting that relocating an engine of urban activity would generate a void in the foundational neighbourhoods of Mexicali. Trusting that the real estate market would be stable, leading a State project (where 75% was private property, particularly commerce) to a good course. Underestimating the existing car dependency –currently worsening– among the local population, which is evident not by a parking deficit, but rather by an inconsistent mobility system. Finally, imposing an anachronistic layout disconnected from the conditions that the inhabitants of this border city experience daily.
Figure 4.
Location and delimitation of the studied area, 2021. Source: Author’s notes on the image from INEGI.
The project limitations and its execution flaws could be interpreted as irreversible losses. However, new ways of living have been achieved from these mistakes. Although the State has prematurely abandoned the proposal in the face of planning setbacks, the inhabitants have been reconfiguring –through rare appropriation practices– a diverse urban fabric.
SPACE, LANDSCAPE, AND CULTURE: OPEN AND CLOSED
The approach of this work derives from urban cultural studies. It is not enough to address this issue with official rehabilitation, reactivation, or regeneration proposals. Thinking about this problem from a disciplinary perspective (urban-architectural) would imply following the same logic and inertia that conceived this centre four decades ago.
Conforming to the visual components provided by the passages, voids, and buildings would mean forgetting which intentions and imaginaries gave rise to this ensemble. It would mean omitting the social relationships that have transformed the city in forty years and cancelling what has been promoted and gestated until now, based on emerging appropriation practices.
For contemporary cultural geography, space is not something that exists independently of those who live in it. It is not a platform where objects, people, phenomena, and events are located, nor is it an independent dimension of society. We cannot define it as something static that works as a stage for what happens on it, but rather it is the product of social, political, economic, cultural, and environmental relations. […] Space is, thus, the result of social relationships, whether between human beings among themselves, as well as those established with other physical and environmental elements with which they share the planet and its existence. This has its repercussions on the earth’s surface, leaving a mark called landscape. (López Levi 2010, 217)
Under this premise, this case is built as a transdisciplinary study object, considering that “the transformation of the city cannot be left only to urban planners, architects or businessmen, but must be extended to all sciences that are interested in the city” (Careri 2016, 110-111).
Consequently, space would stop being observed as such and start to be understood as landscape. The first would lead us to conceive an enclosed Civic Centre; the latter offers an open scenario. The dichotomy between the smooth and the striated proposed by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) in A Thousand Plateaus, helps to understand that this area has gone from being a striated space to a smooth space; from being a closed case to an open one; from being an urban-architectural issue to a socio-cultural problem. Besides, this view, which allows us to distinguish between the city and the urban (De Cearteau 2000), needs equally open methodological support.
In the context of architectural and urban research, a frequently critical step is to uncover how the spatial and the social intersect and this –by definition– requires interdisciplinary methods. […] Talking to people, interviewing people, observing subjects in their natural (or unnatural) habitat, and simply doing what they do can provide new and insightful layers of information. (Mack 2018, 348-349)
The following sections expose –through participant observation, urban analysis, and the interpretation of visual data– an initial approach to the socio-spatial conditions of the Civic Centre’s commercial area. Pedestrian walkways, urban voids, and architecture are treated separately. Reflective descriptions are noted on each one, leaving guidelines for future more detailed analyses of each component, as well as to motivate the use of other techniques. Participant observation was conducted on different days, including warm days and hot days. It is important to point out that Mexicali has a hot dry climate with maximum temperatures reaching 122°F. The visits were mostly on weekdays (when there is more vehicular traffic), although some were on certain weekends, including Sundays. A field journal and photographic records were the most recurrent means to obtain and capture information.
Urban analysis was carried out at various scales. At the level of the urban fabric, land uses and occupation were identified and the study area was defined (with the support of cartography, satellite images and cadastral information). At the architectural scale, the analysis was achieved through photographic records, identifying typologies, building levels, the state of the properties and formal or stylistic characteristics. At a human scale, the condition of the passages was identified, the urban furniture was catalogued –indicating characteristics and state of conservation– as well as other elements of the landscape, such as vegetation and infrastructure. Additionally, qualities of the environment were recognised through a sensitive reading of place (capturing auditory, olfactory, and tactile conditions, besides the optical ones).
The analysis of visual data was based on both archive material and the records gathered for this research, using a series of categories and codes associated with the theoretical framework. This facilitated data interpretation, which is documented in the following three sections.
This urban complex, originally called Zona Rosa comprises four blocks that add up to 917,289 ft2. These converge at the intersection between Av. de Los Pioneros and Calle Calafia. Each block has a uniform density and vehicular access to its parking areas. The layout of its passages follows perpendicular axes that are orthogonal to the road intersection.
The conditions of abandonment of this complex could be found, among other things, through an essential issue: its toponymy. It highlights no appropriation of the Zona Rosa title. Within the Civic Centre, there are places with a consolidated designation, although they differ in their use and function, such as Plaza Calafia, Plaza Fiesta, and Plaza de Los Tres Poderes. However, the studied site is not recognised with an official name; although it has morphological components which distinguish it within the environment.
The site is identified by its passages, receiving colloquial names such as pasajes del Centro Cívico (passages of the Civic Centre). The State’s disdain towards this zone, its inconclusiveness and the accentuated deterioration could show that its ambiguous and anonymous demarcation is part of this contempt. This area departs from the insubstantial and undifferentiated character (García Vázquez 2011) present in many sectors of a border city. At least in this case, the absence of toponymy opens multiple possibilities. For example, it can be labelled in any way, and, at the same time, it makes it easy to focus attention on the part which has a name and turns out to be its most attractive component: the passages.
PASSAGES, LABYRINTHS AND SPONTANEOUS CROSSINGS
The names of the twenty passages have been taken from different locations in the centre and south of the country. This gives meaning to the design intent, by including Novohispanic references: orthogonal line, visual finishes, cobbled walkways, lights, benches, fountains, and quarry flowerbeds. Users leave their cars to start a journey that demands a map in hand. A woman looking for a legal office on passage San Miguel says “They told me it was somewhere around the passages, but they didn’t tell me which one”. “It’s this way… Look!”, someone says to his companion at the intersection of the Acapulco and Cozumel passages. A few metres away, a driver carefully manoeuvres his car, to park it in some makeshift parking lot on vacant land. At noon on a Wednesday, an office worker smokes a cigarette under a mesquite tree in a 107ºF summer. Fortunately, there are gardens –the best-cared ones can be distinguished from those that arise spontaneously along the banks– fragments of Third Landscape (Clément 2018) that correspond to the ruined buildings.
On certain routes, the passages widen and spawn resting spaces, some more scenic than others. The parking areas that precede the passages, the heterogeneous commercial canopies, and the improvised and invasive infrastructure form a kind of local folklore. These walkways are transit spaces and meeting points; also, they define distinctive features in the middle of an almost labyrinthic layout.
The amalgam between nomenclature, urban morphology, and landscape feeds on that persistent nostalgia that exists in a border city like Mexicali, a melting pot of migrants. Being geographically so close to the United States and so far from the centre of Mexico also defines a distance that is maintained with history, culture, and terroir. The Third Nation in which this city locates is illustrated in this postcard: cultural hybridisation and transit from south to north, a synthesis that explains the great omission of the project.
URBAN VOIDS AND BLANK WALLS: AESTHETICS OF RESISTANCE?
The abandonment of the real estate project in this area is evident through the never-occupied lots. Of the 379 properties, 25.06% are empty. Block “C” has the highest number and index of unoccupied spaces, with 36 (29.75%) out of 121 properties vacant.
This abandonment is characterised by three aspects. First, most of the vacant lots are concentrated, defining considerable unoccupied areas, which influence the perception when walking through the passages. The buildings are perceived as archipelagos on an ocean of cobblestones, saltpetre, and concrete slabs. Second, many vacant lots are used for parking, transgressing their designated areas and transforming the passages into vehicular paths, which disturbs order and pedestrian safety. Third, the voids serve as the manifestations of urban art, social protest, and a subtle uncompromising appropriation.
In the summer of 2011, 15 murals were made by the same number of artists with the Yo apoyo el arte (I Support Art) initiative, which had government support, corporate sponsorship, and curatorial consultancy. Besides the mural art on some blank walls, guerrilla art is also present in a quite pronounced way, as stencil or paste can be seen on walls and urban equipment. Although these youth practices of symbolic appropriation are usually ephemeral (Fernández 2013), in this abandoned area both small-format graphic expressions and large murals have formed an indelible patina. Street art and vacant lots seem to merge, becoming an advocate and a symbol of abandonment and resistance. In the end, the silent, calm, and contained protest also exists (Rogger 2018).
In October 2016, the mural Memoria que resiste was created, by the Esperanza Association against the Forced Disappearance of People and the Reco Collective, demanding an end to impunity in the face of more than three thousand cases documented until then. In May 2021, the same alliance took advantage of the vacant lot in front of the mural to create the Jardín de la Memoria, which directs the gaze to the drawn faces of six missing young people and dignifies the space that brings mothers together.
An anonymous garden grows on the corner of the Oaxaca and Guanajuato passages, where mesquites, bougainvilleas and agaves represent another form of resistance. A pocket park in this urban desert contravenes the use of land, abandonment, and aridity. It represents hope and gives a glimpse of a possible solution for the voids in the area.
LOST ARCHITECTURES, RUINS, AND NEW USES
The facades of the incipient premises in this area resorted to a picturesque neo-colonial style. But a decade after the Civic Centre was completed, the first commercial complexes with air conditioning and ample parking were erected in Mexicali (i.e., Plaza Fiesta and Plaza Cachanilla), affecting the permanence of the architectural simulation typical of border cities (Méndez 2010). These new spaces deepened the abandonment of the Zona Rosa. Modest office buildings were also built to house law firms, notaries, or public offices, using a late-modern language.
This image was integrated with the brutalist architecture of the neighbouring government centre. However, between the pastiche of the viceregal city and the formal rigour of reinforced concrete, nondescript buildings began to appear; versatile but insignificant constructions, if at all decorated with synthetic cornices.
Today, offices and some administrative dependencies have arbitrary typologies, non-present under the closed guidelines of the initial proposal; this is also the case for restaurants, canteens, private schools, protestant temples, even an art gallery. Some buildings were adapted as collective housing, in contrast to others that are in ruins and serve as a refuge for homeless individuals.
Within the assortment of forms, functions, voids, and remains, the few well-preserved late-modern pieces appear out of place, which in this case will be called lost architecture. These works –from the 1980s– invite us to imagine possible futures. Finally, another deviation arises amongst the interstitial and erratic landscape: a small oasis where a plastic pool occupies a property, supplied with shade, electricity, and a sofa, illustrating that there are no limits in this area.
CONCLUSIONS
The events in the commercial area of the Civic Centre show that the principles of modern urbanism were incompatible with the context of Mexicali. For a young city, flexible planning schemes would have been required. Given its border position, the impacts of migratory flows on the social construction of territory had to be considered. For its climatic condition, important open space adaptations were omitted.
The economic crisis experienced in Mexico in the early 1980s stopped the completion of the project. In addition, a decade after the creation of the area, new commercial spaces emerged a few kilometres from the site, equipped with indoor walkways and large department stores. With this, the obsolescence of the Zona Rosa was prematurely reached.
The survival of the passages can be credited to citizens demanding the experience of walking the city. Urban voids guarantee the condition of openness and the opportunity for a reactive and immediate strategy, without the need to add more buildings. The architecture of the complex shows the border hybridisation in which the revival, the ephemeral and the formal are combined. It also motivates the recycling and recovery of the ruins to create spaces of transition between interior and exterior, between past and present. Simultaneously, there are tensions between the landscape of power and the counter-hegemonic place.
With this case of open space, the task of closely approaching the voice and the imaginaries of those who cohabit and transit through this area is also left open. This work argues that flexible methodological frameworks are required to approach the case study, to access the subjects and social groups that interpret and transform the environment, as well as to capture the prospects underlying the passages, the voids, and the lost architectures.