Radical Cities Radical Cities Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture Justin McGuirk For Dina First published by Verso 2014 © Justin McGuirk 2014 All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 www.versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-280-7 eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-655-3 (UK) eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-281-4 (US) 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 (hardback) 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 720.1′03098–dc23 2013051123 Typeset in Fournier by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall Printed in the US by Maple Press Latin America is Africa, Asia and Europe at the same time. Félix Guattari in Molecular Revolution in Brazil ‘What do you want to be?’ the anarchist asked young people in the middle of their studies. ‘Lawyers, to invoke the law of the rich, which is unjust by definition? Doctors, to tend the rich, and prescribe good food, fresh air, and rest to the consumptives of the slums? Architects, to house the landlords in comfort? Look around you, and then examine your conscience. Do you not understand that your duty is quite different: to ally yourselves with the exploited and to work for the destruction of an intolerable system?’ Victor Serge paraphrasing a pamphlet by Peter Kropotkin, in Memoirs of a Revolutionary Contents Introduction 1. From Buenos Aires to San Salvador de Jujuy: Dictators and Revolutionaries 2. From Lima to Santiago: A Platform for Change 3. Rio de Janeiro: The Favela Is the City 4. Caracas: The City Is Frozen Politics 5. Torre David: A Pirate Utopia 6. Bogotá: The City as a School 7. Medellín: Social Urbanism 8. Tijuana: On the Political Equator Acknowledgements Index 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 Nonoalco-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 industrialised 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, not Tlatelolco, which was still under construction. You can almost feel his hosts’ frustration. Two years later, the city would have an infinitely more impressive site to show off. The photographs of Tlatelolco taken when it was completed in 1964 are some of the most powerful images of social housing I’ve ever seen. Row upon row of megablocks stand proudly over the low-rise sprawl of Mexico City. With their gridded, ultra-repetitive facades, they resemble banks of mainframe computers, or server farms before the fact. Here was the modernist utopia built on a scale that Le Corbusier had dreamt of but was never able to realise. This city within the city comprised 130 buildings, providing 15,000 apartments. At its height, Tlatelolco housed nearly 100,000 people. It was the kind of solution that the problem of Mexico City seemed to demand, a problem of population explosion fuelled by industrialisation and the accompanying mass migrations from the countryside. What was a population of a little over a million in 1940 was on its way to becoming 15 million by 1980. Tlatelolco’s architect was Mario Pani. Like other prominent Latin American architects of his generation, he was trained in Europe, indeed in Paris, where he attended the École des Beaux-Arts in the 1920s before imbibing the spirit of Corbusian modernism. An earlier housing project, the Presidente Miguel Alemán estate, built in 1948, even uses the zigzagging blocks of the Ville Radieuse, Corbu’s blueprint for an ideal city. But while on one level Pani was being derivative, on another he was bringing those unfulfilled ideas to fruition. For Tlatelolco took the modernist idea of social housing to its logical, many would say absurd, conclusion. If, in the mid twentieth century, the city of the future would comprise rows of megablocks sitting in parklands and gardens, then the future looked like Tlatelolco. Indeed, Pani’s plan had been to build ‘five or six Tlatelolcos’ on that site, with an extension of three million square metres. In his eyes, much of Mexico City deserved the wrecking ball so that a new vision could flourish. Invoking Le Corbusier to the end, Pani never accepted that the Swiss genius might be, to borrow Henri Lefebvre’s description, ‘a good architect but a catastrophic urbanist’. In 1964, Pani was still progress. In Luis Buñuel’s film about a group of delinquents in Mexico City, Los Olvidados (The Forgotten), there is a scene in which a youth who has settled into a life of crime murders a rival and steals the money out of his pockets. It’s a primal scene, like watching Cain kill Abel, except that in the background is the steel frame of a modern building. Is it housing? It’s impossible to say. But, rising out of a wasteland, this space- frame is surely a symbol of approaching progress. In Buñuel’s unremittingly bleak portrait of life in Mexico City in 1950, crime is depicted as the inevitable result of poverty. The fleeting shot of that construction site is arguably the only moment of hope: it suggests change, modernism riding to the rescue. It is not Tlatelolco that is being erected in the film, but it might as well be. The estate was built on the site of an overcrowded slum district, and Pani’s design, commissioned by the government, was intended to rehouse its inhabitants while bringing in middle-class residents to create social diversity. In short, it was an old- fashioned slum clearance. Pani matched the extreme density of the slum he was replacing, which was 1,000 inhabitants per hectare, but with sanitised, vertical machines surrounded by acres of public space. We can quibble with the vision, on both urbanistic and aesthetic grounds, but where it went wrong was in its outcome. Intended for the poor, Tlatelolco ended up being occupied largely by bureaucrats and workers at the state rail and health companies. As usual, the slum-dwellers were shunted elsewhere. This was the key failing of a scheme that came to be notorious for altogether different reasons. At the heart of the estate is a historic site. The ruins of a pyramid mark the spot where the Aztecs were finally defeated by the Spanish, and right next to it stands the sixteenth-century church of Santiago Tlatelolco that heralded the new era. Pani incorporated these pivotal monuments into a centrepiece called the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, a broad square rimmed by his brutalist apartment blocks. The three cultures meeting here were the pre-Columbian, the colonial and the modern, providing a symbolic ensemble that tied a modernising Mexico to its past. But Pani’s architectural allegory was to be overshadowed by tragedy. In October 1968, only days before the Mexico City Olympics, students chose the Plaza de las Tres Culturas to stage a pro-democracy demonstration, challenging authoritarian president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and the single-party political system that produced him. Jittery about any signs of unrest as the Games approached, Díaz Ordaz called in the army, and hundreds of students were killed by soldiers firing into the square from the surrounding apartment blocks. The poet Octavio Paz described it as a repeat of an Aztec rite, ‘several hundred boys and girls sacrificed, on the ruins of a pyramid’. This was the first blow to Tlatelolco as an emblem of modern Mexico. The second came in 1985 when an earthquake brought one of its buildings crashing to the ground. The collapse was most likely caused by the construction companies cutting corners, a common problem at social housing estates across Latin America. A dozen other buildings had to be pulled down due to structural damage, and the whole complex had to undergo a major structural overhaul. This was ultimately the more devastating blow to Pani’s vision. Today, Tlatelolco is almost unrecognisable. In the butcher’s shop overlooking the square, among the corrida posters and the bull heads – the butcher is an ex-bullfighter – you’ll find blown-up photographs of the place soon after it was built. The checkerboard facades are now gone, covered by thick concrete skins. These new casings were superimposed after the earthquake to reinforce the buildings, adding another archaeological layer to an already historically loaded site. Some buildings, if you compare them to the butcher’s photographs, have quite clearly changed shape, as if several floors were shaved from the top to make them more stable. Around the corner there is a memorial on the site of the fallen tower block. After poring over his photographs, I feel I ought to buy something. I ask for a Coke but the butcher won’t let me leave with the bottle, so he decants it into a clear plastic bag and sticks a straw into it. Sipping on my bag, I stand in the middle of the Plaza de las Tres Culturas taking in the collision of ideas. On one side the black, volcanic rock of the pyramid and the church, and on the other gridded concrete – degrees of mysticism and rationalism, but three faiths nonetheless. There’s a plaque commemorating Hernan Cortes’s taking of Tlatelolco in 1521, described as ‘the painful birth of the mixed-blood country that is Mexico today’. If this square symbolises the birth of a nation, it also marks the birth and sudden demise of utopian modernist planning in Mexico. I start walking to the other end of the estate, nearly two kilometres away. The scale of Tlatelolco remains intimidating. After the earthquake the neighbourhood went into decline, becoming a no-go zone in the 1990s. It doesn’t feel like a no-go zone today, however. The gardens are lush and well tended – in this respect the tropical climates of Latin America were forgiving to the brutalist housing adopted from Europe, nature softening an unforgiving architectural style. It seems safe to walk around. Admittedly, that is pathetically unscientific, but the feeling is measured against estates in other cities across the continent where no local would accompany me or where they wouldn’t dare step out of the car if they did. Nevertheless, my impressions are academic, because residents are concerned about crime. Drug dealing and gang violence are a problem, and apparently half of all residents have either been victims of or witnesses to a crime. Furthermore, there are still concerns about the structural soundness of some of the buildings. This is a familiar story. Housing estates in Europe and America have faced the same problems and seen public opinion turn against them the same way. Though rarely a fault