TIJUANA // QUICK, LOOSE, DIRTY

UCLA Research Studio
Spring 2005
R.E. Somol

Borderline Urbanism: The Intensive Ecologies and Informal Economies of the Tijuana Network

Incubated as a kind of "offshore" recreational and entertainment zone, Tijuana has emerged as a paradigmatic posturban landscape through the catastrophic extremes of free trade and security paranoia, massive immigration and relaxed legal enforcement, monumental planning and improvised development, combining the lowest unemployment rate with the highest degree of infrastructural disinvestment, an "atmosphere" dense with particulate matter characterized at the same time by an ingenious reuse of discarded products and detritus. Although it forms a mirror twin to San Diego in terms of geography and economy, it in fact constitutes a more complex global node: an island, as much "not-Mexico" as it is "not-U.S." >>

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