Chinampac de Juárez: This angular tianguis cuts through an area once dominated by self-built housing, though much of the land has been cleared since the 1980s and rebuilt with mid-rise aesthetics and urban culture Any work that focuses on the creative artistry of everyday urban life in working-class communities runs the risk of aestheticising social or economic precarity. Seen from above, the brilliant colours of the tianguis do not immediately announce the intense human labour that comprises the system of food and household goods provision in Mexico City; nor do the colours provide clues as to the wages earned or distances travelled by vendors in the course of their hard work to support their families and feed the metropolis. At the same time, the colours viewed from the ground convey neither the scale nor extent of the tianguis across the metropolitan landscape, nor the collective assemblage aesthetic that characterises the tianguis as a creative artefact. Rather than aestheticise precarity, this project seeks to connect forms of labour, political economy and social organisation to aesthetic production across scale by working-class people. Tianguis vendors have made collective decisions to organise themselves spatially and to announce themselves chromatically. Their actions both
social blocks, Unidads Habitacionals. Some of this housing remains; corrugated metal roofs are visible as small white and gray squares packed in tight lines to the left of the market and in the
upper right corner of the image. The large white- roofed buildings contain a Home Depot and a discount supermarket that compete with the tianguis.
reflect and give rise to a vibrant urban culture of trade, signified by the brightly coloured canopies of the street markets. The images included here reveal an already extant set of aesthetic choices made by ordinary people through recurrent spatial assemblages. The tianguis constitute a vernacular expression of people’s tacit commitment to a polychromatic urbanity; the artistry emerges from the application of a routine thousands of times over in an ongoing practice of city making. Mexico City is a metropolis made of concrete: poured, stacked, mortared, cured and repeated millions of times over. Zones of new construction tend to be coated in layers of concrete dust, rendering them even greyer than the older settled districts that surround them. Amid this monotonic aerial view, the city’s tianguis stand out as linear bursts of colour, at once enabled and constrained by the streets and roadways through which they unfold. Specific forms of action, embodied, tacit and routine, produce aesthetic work at the scale of the urban landscape out of
everyday social and spatial negotiations. It is not so much an aesthetic of resistance as it is one of presence, of occupation, of collective dreaming. The polychromatic patterns of the markets convey both individual choices made by vendors as well as their associational stake in the city. Their aesthetic commitments ultimately reveal a collective desire to claim space amid the vast metropolis. assembling the tianguis The tianguis are a polychromatic urban form that unfolds in repeated, temporary and dynamic bursts across the metropolitan landscape. They grow out of the great urban rhizome through axillary nodes such as plazas, parks, roundabouts, churchyards and street junctions. From there they spread their filaments through the interstices – the streets, roadways, sidewalks, paths and open space edges – only to disappear and return again. They range dramatically in size and extent, from a handful of vendors on a street corner to thousands stretched out on major thoroughfares and arterial roads.
on site review 36: our material future
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