Radical Cities Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture Justin McGuirk VERSO London • New York For Dina Latin Amen"ca is Afn·ca, Asia and Europe at the same time. First published by Verso 2014 Felix Guattari in Molecular Revolution in Bratil © Justin McGuirk 2014 All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted 13579108642 'What do you want to be?' the anarchist asked young people ill the middle of their studies. 'Lawyers, to invoke the law of the rich, which Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London WIF OEG is unjust by definition? Doctors, to tend the rich, and prescribe good US: 20Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 food, fresh air, and rest to the consumptives of the slums? Architects, www.versobooks.com to house the landlords in comfort? Look around you, and then examine Verso is the imprint of New Left Books your conscience. Do you not understand that your duty is quite different: ISBN-13, 978-1-78168-280-7 to ally yourselves with the exploited and to work for the destruction of e!SBN-13' 978-1-78168-655-3 (UK) an intolerable system?' e!SBN-13, 978-1-78168-281-4 (US) Victor Serge paraphrasing a pamphlet by Peter Kropotkin, in Memoirs ofa Revolutionary British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McGuirk, Justin. Radical cities: across Latin America in search of a new architecture/ Justin McGuirk. pages cm ISBN 978-1-78168-280-7 (hacdback) 1. Architecture and society- Latin America - History - 21st century. 2. Cities and towns - Latin America - Growth. 3. City dwellers - Political aspects - Latin America. I. Title. NA2543.S6M39 2014 720. I '03098----dc23 2013051123 Typeset in Fournier by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall Printed in the US by Maple Press Contents Introduction 1 1. From Buenos Aires to San Salvador de Jujuy: Dictators and Revolutionaries 37 2. From Lima to Santiago: A Platform for Change 67 3. Rio de Janeiro: The Favela ls the City 99 4. Caracas: The City Is Frozen Politics 139 5. Torre David: A Pirate Utopia 175 6. Bogota: The City as a School 207 7. Medellin: Social Urbanism 231 8. Tijuana: On the Political Equator 259 Acknowledgements 285 k~ m Introduction Saturday, June 30, 1962. 9:35 a.m. President Kennedy arrives at the housing project. Tours project~ brief ceremony. This I found in the John F. Kennedy Library's digital archive, in the schedule of the president's official visit to Mexico City in 1962. I'd been told that on this trip he'd been taken to see N onoalco-Tlatelolco, a vast housing estate, the biggest of its kind in Latin America. And that made sense. In the 1960s, what else would you show the US president to flaunt your modernising nation if not indus­ trialised ranks of housing stretching as far as the eye could see? Mechanisation, social mobility and economic power all wrapped up in one potent image. My source was wrong, however. A few pages further into Kennedy's itinerary briefing it emerges that it was the Unidad Independencia housing project that he visited, 2 RADICAL CITIES Introduction 3 not Tlatelolco, which was still under construction. You ideas to fruition. For Tlatelolco took the modernist idea can almost feel his hosts' frustration. Two years later, the of social housing to its logical, many would say absurd, city would have an infinitely more impressive site to show conclusion. If, in the mid twentieth century, the city of the off. The photographs of Tlatelolco taken when it was future would comprise rows of megablocks sitting in park­ completed in 1964 are some of the most powerful images lands and gardens, then the future looked like Tlatelolco. of social housing I've ever seen. Row upon row of mega­ Indeed, Pani's plan had been to build 'five or six blocks stand proudly over the low-rise sprawl of Mexico Tlatelolcos' on that site, with an extension of three million City. With their gridded, ultra-repetitive facades, they square metres. In his eyes, much of Mexico City deserved resemble banks of mainframe computers, or server farms the wrecking ball so that a new vision could flourish. before the fact. Invoking Le Corbusier to the end, Pani never accepted Here was the modernist utopia built on a scale that Le that the Swiss genius might be, to borrow Henri Lefebvre 's Corbusier had dreamt of but was never able to realise. This description, 'a good architect but a catastrophic urbanist'. city within the city comprised 130 buildings, providing In 1964, Pani was still progress. 15,000 apartments. At its height, Tlatelolco housed nearly In Luis Bufiuel's film about a group of delinquents in 100,000 people. It was the kind of solution that the problem Mexico City, Los Olvidados (The Forgotten), there is a of Mexico City seemed to demand, a problem of population scene in which a youth who has settled into a life of crime explosion fuelled by industrialisation and the accompany­ murders a rival and steals the money out of his pockets. It's ing mass migrations from the countryside. What was a a primal scene, like watching Cain kill Abel, except that in population of a little over a million in 1940 was on its way the background is the steel frame of a modern building. ls to becoming 15 million by 1980. it housing? It's impossible to say. But, rising out of a waste­ Tlatelolco's architect was Mario Pani. Like other promi­ land, this space-frame is surely a symbol of approaching nent Latin American architects of his generation, he was progress. In Bufiuel's unremittingly bleak portrait of life trained in Europe, indeed in Paris, where he attended the in Mexico City in 1950, crime is depicted as the inevitable Ecole des Beaux-Arts in the 1920s before imbibing the spirit result of poverty. The fleeting shot of that construction site of Corbusian modernism. An earlier housing project, the is arguably the only moment of hope: it suggests change, Presidente Miguel Aleman estate, built in 1948, even uses modernism riding to the rescue. the zigzagging blocks of the Ville Radieuse, Corbu's blue­ It is not Tlatelolco that is being erected in the film, but it print for an ideal city. But while on one level Pani was being might as well be. The estate was built on the site of an over­ derivative, on another he was bringing those unfulfilled crowded slum district, and Pani's design, commissioned by 4 RADICAL CITIES Introduction 5 the government, was intended to rehouse its inhabitants political system that produced him. Jittery about any signs while bringing in middle-class residents to create social of unrest as the Games approached, Diaz Ordaz called in diversity. In short, it was an old-fashioned slum clear­ the army, and hundreds of students were killed by soldiers ance. Pani matched the extreme density of the slum he was firing into the square from the surrounding apartment replacing, which was 1,000 inhabitants per hectare, but with blocks. The poet Octavio Paz described it as a repeat of an sanitised, vertical machines surrounded by acres of public Aztec rite, 'several hundred boys and girls sacrificed, on the space. We can quibble with the vision, on both urbanistic ruins of a pyramid'. This was the first blow to Tlatelolco and aesthetic grounds, but where it went wrong was in its as an emblem of modern Mexico. The second came in 1985 outcome. Intended for the poor, Tlatelolco ended up being when an earthquake brought one of its buildings crashing to occupied largely by bureaucrats and workers at the state the ground. The collapse was most likely caused by the con­ rail and health companies. As usual, the slum-dwellers were struction companies cutting corners, a common problem at shunted elsewhere. This was the key failing of a scheme social housing estates across Latin America. A dozen other that came to be notorious for altogether different reasons. buildings had to be pulled down due to structural damage, At the heart of the estate is a historic site. The ruins of and the whole complex had to undergo a major structural a pyramid mark the spot where the Aztecs were finally overhaul. This was ultimately the more devastating blow defeated by the Spanish, and right next to it stands the to Pani's vision. sixteenth-century church of Santiago Tlatelolco that Today, Tlatelolco is almost unrecognisable. In the butch­ heralded the new era. Pani incorporated these pivotal er's shop overlooking the square, among the corrida posters monuments into a centrepiece called the Plaza de las Tres and the bull heads - the butcher is an ex-bullfighter-you'll Culturas, a broad square rimmed by his brutalist apart­ find blown-up photographs of the place soon after it was ment blocks. The three cultures meeting here were the built. The checkerboard facades are now gone, covered pre-Columbian, the colonial and the modern, providing by thick concrete skins. These new casings were super­ a symbolic ensemble that tied a modernising Mexico to imposed after the earthquake to reinforce the buildings, its past. But Pani's architectural allegory was to be over­ adding another archaeological layer to an already histori­ shadowed by tragedy. cally loaded site. Some buildings, if you compare them In October 1968, only days before the Mexico City to the butcher's photographs, have quite clearly changed Olympics, students chose the Plaza de las Tres Culturas to shape, as if several floors were shaved from the top to make stage a pro-democracy demonstration, challenging author­ them more stable.