Borders are magnets in the journeys of displacement, constantly facing the permanent need to shelter transient populations. These borders amplify in space, the transactions of global economies between goods and people, displaying the often uneven consequences of trade and government policies at the scale of local communities and resources.
At the Mexican side of the US-Mexico border, the responsibility to shelter is magnified by the long-term lingering process of US migration. While there are government programs for returning (not deported) Mexican migrants living in the US, there are also programs towards affordable housing across the nation, but the continuing challenge to shelter migrant populations in Mexican border cities is a constant improvisation between local officials and the community. As of July 2022, twenty-six shelters operate in Tijuana, out of those, only two shelters have been financed by the Mexican government, and the rest come from local community centers and religious institutions.
Research drawings by alumna Cynthia de Leon, class of ’22, illustrate the locations of Tijuana shelters and detail the diverse services they provide. For example, Casa del Migrante (for males) and Instituto Madre Asunta (for females) offer a range of support, including lodging, meals, legal aid, medical care, educational programs for children, and various humanitarian services. These drawings reveal the complex network of assistance available to migrants, highlighting the significant role of community and religious institutions in filling the gaps left by limited government support.
Despite community efforts, resources are scarce for the numbers, additional emergency housing take on the form of camping sites, large tents, temporal appropriation of auditoriums, stadiums, or warehouses; while all are important contributions to immediate needs, many individuals and families stay for years or permanently in disorientation or involuntary engagement.
If shelter is an architectural problem as much as it is a political, social and economic one, what are the models for building shelters? What forms do they take? The design of spaces have the power to organize societies and identities as much as people have the power to transform environments for living. In its most fundamental sense, architecture as a shed is the initial act to shelter, to care for individuals or groups. Primitive forms of shelters from non-industrial cultures use materials from nature to protect from the environment; the oval and circular structures usually are light and respond to portability needs of nomad societies, while square or rectangles take longer to assemble and reflect permanence from settlers. These structures demonstrate the natural heterogenous condition of architecture, a natural practice of negotiation between land resources, climate, and the social structures that organize them.
In contemporary architectural history, sheds are often explored as architectural manifestos, as Bernard Tschumi states: “Each building exists to represent an idea, to develop a concept, to be a manifesto of sorts”. The Expo pavilion by architect Alvaro Siza and structural engineer Cecil Balmond in Lisbon Portugal, is a provocation to imagine space as a canvas of culture and identity: it is as much a structural ingenuity of a long-span curving concrete sheet by post-tensioning technique, as it is a bold statement of claiming public space with lightness and heaviness, creating friction in the framing of time and events underneath.
But what happens when we translate ideals to realities, what are the opportunities for architecture to respond to real urgent needs with dexterity and responsibility? On one side, we have auditoriums and warehouses unable to properly adapt to serve the basic caring needs of vulnerable groups, and on the other, informal tents claim public and urban spaces with despair.
How can a person maintain a sense of identity and be able to create connections to new communities as they escape to unfamiliar landscapes? If spaces adapt to environments as much as people adapt to contexts, physical space is therefore an ongoing construct of identity, similar to the Manhattan transcripts by Bernard Tschumi, who states that buildings have no meaning, until something happens in it, in other words, space is transformed by events.
The forms to shelter migrant populations at the border are pressed to go beyond merely providing lodging spaces; many migrants themselves have initiated established food services called “comedores” to provide food on a regular basis. In Latin America, as it is the case in many cultures, the act of eating together at a table and sharing the time, space and food, is a daily simple yet powerful act for building social ties and growing roots.
In Kitchenless City Anna Puigjaner explains how Mexico City (along with other places like Peru or Japan) has historically provided comedores for the worker communities, a social invention that started by families opening their kitchens to support community with affordable food and efficiency in time for eating together; such model was adopted by the government, making comedores official urban kitchens completely subsidized. While there is a strong tradition in México for such initiatives involving public and social programs, Tijuana is too far away from a centralized government, too close to a bi-national political complexity, and too centered within the challenges of a border city.
Comedores in Tijuana have been evolving as critical sites of migrant participation with locals. The act of preparing food, and the ability to share food with others, from family members, friends, or strangers, takes the act of transforming spaces, often invisible ones, and become appropriated in creative ways, building an environment of safety and nourishment between locals and foreigners: cooking, eating, cleaning, and redoing it all over again, displays the importance of spaces to adapt and exchange, sheltering the cycles of living.
In the famous thesis project “Exodus” by Rem Koolhaas and his colleagues from the AA in London in 1972, the border wall becomes the shelter of the voluntarily segregated, it flips the infrastructures of control as possibilities of an architecture of freedom by self-imprisonment.
“The title of the project alludes to Cold War West Berlin, a restricted enclave encircled by a forbidding wall—in effect, a prison on the scale of a metropolis, and one in which people sought refuge voluntarily. Exodus proposes a walled city in a long strip, with tall barriers that cut through London’s urban fabric—an intervention designed to create a new urban culture invigorated by architectural innovation and political subversion.”
In Tijuana, while caring urban sites exist and are systematically self-organized with community support throughout the city, the architecture often remains absent or improvised. How can we create design opportunities that foster connections between local and displaced communities? What kinds of spaces can promote the construction and integration of diverse identities? How can we balance the relationship between permanence and transition? These questions challenge us to envision a more inclusive and responsive urban environment that challenges shelter at the border to transform the exodus of displacement into a catalyst for architectural and social innovation.
Student Team: (F22) Siena Adams, Elania Berwind Hoffmann, Kate Blair, Camila Contreras, John Garcia, Giancarlo Guerrero, Elise Kowalski, Nathan Mendoza, Daisy Morales Zaragoza, Ryan Mossbarger, Sophia Rigatti, Nathan Savant, Olivia Stenseth, Aidan Sullivan, Reid Willens. (S23) Joseph Anakar, Lindsey Armas, Lia Freehling, Andrea Fridono, Annika Goodwyn, Sophia Hall, Audrey Hill, Emma Jimenez, Jack Johnson, Mary Kissinger, Natalie Kushner, Rosalie Maxwell, Maya Moranda, Alessia Nicosia, Rene Quezada, Mariah Reynoso, Riley Ryan, Jesus Vazquez.
PI: Adriana Cuellar
REFERENCES
Alfredo Brillembourg, Hubert Klumpner, and Alexis Kalagas, “Migration is a complex and urban spatial challenge” Metropolis Magazine, August 8th, 2017
Anna Puigjaner. Bringing the Kitchen out of the House. E-Flux Architecture Magazine
Bernard Tschumi, The Manhatan Trasncripts. Academy Editions, New York 1981.
Cartha Edithors, “Anna Terron: How inclusive cities manage refugee migrations”. Metropolis Magazine, September 12th 2016
WOLA, Advocacy for Human Rights in Las Americas
https://www.borderreport.com/immigration/shelter-space-badly-needed-for-migrants-in-tijuana-officials-say/