¡SUPER NAFTA LAND!

Images from architecture thesis ¡SUPER NAFTA LAND! created by Richie Gelles at Rice University. Thesis Director Carlos Jimenez. Thesis Advisors Eva Franch and Fares El Dahdah. Thesis Readers John Casbarian, Albert Pope, and Fiamma Montezemolo. Team of helpers: Asma Husain, Melissa McDonnell, Timmie Chan, Tzu-yu Chen, Adam Casey, Jen Daniels, Nkiru Mokwe, and my family.

supernaftaland.tumblr.com/
www.sellegr.com

Project Summary:

The Mexico / US border is a line of division between two nations and a moment of connection between the local communities along the border, specifically the sister cities. These competing (often directly conflicting) interests of the border region at the federal and local scales have created a dynamic, hybridized, and rapidly growing regional zone known as 'Amexica' or the 'third space'. The emergence and potential of this 'third space' as an economic engine and potential immigration buffer has been jeopardized by US policies towards Mexico such as the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which insists on understanding the border as a line, rather than its reality as a blurred zone of transition. This project proposes building a thickened, connective infrastructural corridor landscape to unite the sister cities (in place of the divisive 700 miles of fence currently under construction by the US government) and generate the resources and conditions for an independent, neutral border nation to emerge.

Free trade agreements such as NAFTA open up borders for goods and capital, but restrict the flow of the people and labor that generate this value. This selective filtering creates the bottle necks in economic migration that paradoxically cause the bi-national border cities to form and grow rapidly at first, but then actively thwarts any subsequent development through divisive measures applied at the federal level to keep both sides split along an increasingly anachronistic political line. ¡SUPER NAFTA LAND! is a critique of the increasingly militarized linear border as nothing more than ineffective if deadly and expensive political theater and presents an alternative model of establishing border regions as independent bi-national zones of productivity, trade, and culture that grant to people and architecture the same freedoms that the products of their labor are already granted.

By the end of the 21rst century ¡SUPER NAFTA LAND! exists as a giant self sufficient artificial landscape growing out of the border of the US and Mexico. It uses a modular system of production pods to generate enough food, water, and energy for the entire border population. 3 different structural systems allow these pods to interface with the variety of landscapes and natural resources available in the various border regions. High speed trains, pipelines, and cable networks connect the isolated border cities together and allow for trans-border as well as cross-border trade. The existing border cities and their unique culture interface and expand into this new connective landscape turning the region into a zone of productivity, trade, tourism, and cultural exchange instead of an area of violence, security, and fear.

36 photos | 2,324 views

items are from between 30 Sep 2007 & 08 Feb 2009.