the market and in the surrounding streets of Renovación.
Méndez: Also called ‘the towers’ because of the eight massive electrical arrays that loom over the area, this tianguis occupies a 9.2-hectare right of way belonging to the Federal Electricity
Commission. It is well known as a place to buy cheap car parts. There are also a significant number of narcomenudistas – small-time drug dealers who sell around the periphery of
uninhabitable – ravines, cliffs, pedregals (lava fields) and steep terrain. Despite intricate scalar negotiations and micro-adjustments between vendors, spatial allotments, associational and governance interests, traffic flows and built environments, tianguis tend to fall into five typologies: 1 The linear tianguis is a simple straight line along a designated thoroughfare. Some on each side of a street, leaving the central thoroughfare open, others cover the entire street with an unbroken canopy. Still others, alternate such arrangements from one block to the next, depending on the streetscape or the demands of the neighbourhood.
illuminating urban form A temporary, repeating modular construction, the tianguis take shape within a highly variegated urban morphology, with streets and blocks reflecting different moments in the city’s historical development. Centro Historico, laid out following Spanish conquest, is a rigorous orthogonal grid of square blocks emanating outward from the Zócalo. Nineteenth-century grids, by contrast, make use of longer rectangular blocks, often with chamfered corners. Twentieth-century planners and developers experimented with a panoply of forms from zigzagging streets and cul-de-sacs to towers on superblocks; they also experimented with diagrammatic forms, rigging streets and blocks to geometric circles, parallelograms and polygons. In the more marginal precincts of the city, streets and blocks typically conform to landscapes once deemed public markets could be constructed. After the oil shock and successive recessions of the 1970s, the government sharply curtailed additions to the inventory. Many areas of the city still lack fixed public capital investment in food provision. For most working-class families, the nimble, modular tianguis continue to provide the main access to food and household goods – a vital part of everyday communal life in the barrios and colonias of the city.
2 Clustered tianguis fill in square plazas, triangular intersections, roundabouts and other open spaces. Some of these open spaces are multi-purpose, so that the tianguis can only operate according to the weekly schedule of other activities. In many cases, tianguis fill in plazas that extend in front of fixed public market buildings, as shown at Mercado del Carmen, located in a recently built-up area of the State of México, just outside the city limits.
Progreso Nacional
Mercado del Carmen
all images Joseph Heathcott
on site review 36: our material future
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