the tianguis of mexico city
joseph heathcott
Tepito: This massive tianguis stretches out from the two public markets at top right, illuminating the grid of the barrio Tepito just north of the Centro Historico. With some 12,000 merchants,
this is the city’s largest regular tianguis. Tepito sustained extensive damage during the 1985 earthquake, which the city used as justification to evict residents, impose redevelopment schemes,
and crack down on the tianguis. Vendors and residents pushed back, with some success, and today the tianguis, barrio and government persist in a tense stand-off.
One of Mexico City’s most vital institutions is the tianguis or street market. 1 On any given morning, scores of tianguis blossom across the metropolitan landscape, abuzz with activity, their coloured canopies stretching through the arteries and intersections of the urban fabric. Organised on a quasi-formal basis, the municipal government estimates that over 1,400 tianguis regularly operate in the city, drawing on 46,000 suppliers and providing economic sustenance to some 800,000 people. And while they are not part of the city’s formal planning apparatus, they nevertheless constitute a routine feature of everyday life in the capital. Mexico City’s street markets resonate with an emergent architectural quality grounded in a habitual and repetitive practice. Architecture is not reducible to the production of unique, geo-spatially fixed buildings designed by professionally credentialed architects. Rather, architecture instantiates through generative practices of form making, temporal marking and aesthetic expression grounded in human culture. These practices unfold along continua from
professional to untrained, fixed to mobile, unique to repetitive, integral to modular and permanent to momentary. The form and content of the city reflect constant negotiation among people over the nature of beauty, the making of habitat, the occupation of space, the terms of exchange and the conduct of everyday life. Such negotiations can be found in high concentration in the tianguis; street markets in Mexico City take shape precisely around people’s unceasing efforts to produce convivial spaces – spaces with life, for gathering the things of life, for making meaning and creating a home amid the vast metropolis. As an integral element of social reproduction, the tianguis rise out of the city’s manifold geometries, taking form in the vortices, filaments and public thoroughfares of the everyday urban landscape. At each step of location, assembly and operation, vendors and their advocates must contend with a tangle of interests, from police and inspectors to local residents, business owners, delivery drivers, porters and customers.
At the same time, while the city is an intricately negotiated expression of human community, the capacity to shape the built environment is by no means evenly distributed. In Mexico City, as in most large cities, real estate investors, developers, financial institutions and governing agencies exert far greater power over the city-making process than most capitalinos. With a high percentage of poor families, many of the city’s neighbourhoods continue to be characterised by economic precarity and social marginalisation, particularly in terms of employment, land rights, water access and transportation. However, in the case of the street markets, working-class people have produced a highly resonant urban practice that flows from a particular mode of spatio- temporal organisation, scalar assemblage and creative expression. Through this urban practice they are engaged, in the words of Raymond Williams, in the art of ‘writing themselves into the land’.
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on site review 36: our material future
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