Espacios en transición: autoproducción de la casa urbana en Mérida, México
- Autores: Angélica Alvarez Quiñones
- Directores de la Tesis: Alfredo Linares Soler (dir. tes.), Othón Baños Ramírez (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) ( España ) en 2014
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Marta Llorente Díaz (presid.), Benedetta Rodeghiero (secret.), Sergi Valera Pertegàs (voc.), Manuel Delgado Ruiz (voc.), Núria Salvadó Aragonès (voc.)
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: TDX
- Resumen
The United Nations Human Settlements Programme predicts that by 2030, the number of inhabitants in urban self-produced settlements (slums for UN-HABITAT) will reach 2 billion. These places have a classic definition: overcrowding, poor or inform al housing, inaccessibility to health care and clean water and insecurity of property. The problem of the definition of self-produced settlements is that although the physical characteristics of poverty are common, the social aspects are defined locally. This work shows that the historical construction of social differences is a local process with global influences, manifested through the buildings: subjective and objectified forms of culture. lf culture can be understood as a group of beliefs and practices historically contextualized under guidelines of meaning, here we analyze the meaning it has the selfproduction of urban houses in a particular case, Merida, Mexico, in order to shed light on the interpretation of the phenomenon in other contexts. To do this, we use the notion of modernity as a bridge between culture, architecture and selfproduction houses. Among the many elements of a general concept of modernity, we chose three of its dimensions to categorize our analytical observations: the city as a physical space of modernity, the exaltation of privacy as a place of individuality, and consumption as participation way in the social space. Under these dimensions, are grouped a number of construction practices that can be seen only under a notion of modernity as ambivalent concept. Modernity, whose elements are the new, progress, technology, science, and the urban order, are us ually understood as the polar oppos ite of self-prod uction contexts townhouses, contexts of tradition, poverty, backwardness, unemployment and disorder. But instead of considering the phenomenon of self-production as opposed or outside from modernity, we understand it as part of it, as the other side of the same coin, where rural refe rs to urban, prívate to public, individual to collective, and self-production to cons umption. The poles are the references of the desirable and despicable to decide about the form of the self-produced house. Ali space is built under a project, a mental process of decis ion-making, choices to be close or far from the social group to which one belongs. Building is an action and a product of the cu lture, its league with time makes ita dynamic object, always moving. But sorne spaces, like the self-produced house, express through the transformation of its forms, a shifting identity of their occupants. In this thesis, the idea of home as a space of transition is the idea that through the transformation of territory, illegal urban land occupiers cross down a path of transition between ambivalent dimensions of modernity. The self-produced house is a transition space. lt is always in a time of change, chasing the unattainable modern urban house model, while recalls and recreates every house of the past: the one of the childhood, those of the rural origin, the one of the pattern, the houses of the city.
