The boogieman runs through the Latin American city: the ghost of insecurity and violence. All the forces of archaic convictions (now renewed) have taken advantage of these specters to rearticulate our environments: surveillance cameras and their security forces, public disinvestment and speculative deregulation, metal fences and every wall that defends property at all costs.
For how long will we continue to build in the same way; using the typologies advocated by vertical powers? Why do we continue to fall into the trap of the fence, when we have managed to advance so much in the construction of organizational alternatives and materialize initiatives for citizen reactivation?
From this crossroads a double proposition results:
An urbanism that seeks to reexamine the permeability and dynamism that the limits of our collective spaces can contract, as well as the capacity of citizens to directly transform their fundamental infrastructures, in order to negotiate with the boogieman from our cultural capacities.
An architecture that reinvents the fence (unconscious archetype of urban construction) as a separating and exclusionary resource, onto a spatial device that encourages measured congregation, the strengthening of social ties, and public activity, thus functioning as an instrument for transfiguring the commons.
It is time for citizens to reclaim their ability to act on their spaces: to oppose the bogeyman through a material manifesto that transcends central control.
To this end, thinkers and activists will be able to meet in Mexico City to articulate this possible manifesto, in the quest to remake the threshold of the common.