Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

The Mexican Pentagon 173
5 million in 1960, 14 an explosion that was accompanied by a torrent of public
works—freeways, expressways, overpasses, tunnels, and ring roads—that,
much like Robert Moses’s network of highways and bridges in New York,
radically transformed the region’s urban fabric. A city that had once been
Wlled with Xaneurs and lively streets rapidly became a megalopolis of trafWc
jams, insurmountable cement structures, and homicidal vehicles. Sidewalks
were narrowed to make room for more cars, and tree-lined dividers were demolished
to transform quiet streets into expressways. Neighborhoods were
slashed by highways, making it impossible for residents to get across a few
blocks without getting into a car and driving over a maze of bridges and
overpasses.
José Joaquín Blanco, a writer who lived through these modernizing
projects, has described their detrimental effects on city life in the 1970s:
For several years, the city government has launched spectacular highway projects that
beneWt motorized individuals. This state of affairs, serious enough already, is becoming worsened
by some even more alarming developments. The constructions favoring the individual
transportation of the privileged not only take precedence over public transport for the
masses, but positively hamper it, making it even slower and more tiresome; they destroy
the lifestyles of the neighborhoods they cut through; they tend to ghettoize the poorer
enclaves (some of which were not so badly off before, when a mixture of social classes
brought with it better services). These areas are thus turning into quasi-underground
slums, covered by fast, streamlined bridges carrying the privileged driver across and preventing
him from touching or even seeing what lies beneath as he cruises in a matter of
minutes from one upmarket zone to another. The proliferation of bypasses, urban freeways,
expressways, turnpikes, and the like has a twofold purpose: to link together the city of
afXuence while insulating it from the city of indigence by means of the retaining walls of
these grand constructions. 15
The street, in other words, was under attack by modernizing forces:
public spaces where random people could come together to meet, stage demonstrations,
or simply congregate were being demolished to make way for
freeways that discourage interaction (drivers, unlike pedestrians, are physically
isolated from one another as they move through the city). Mexico City
was becoming what Rem Koolhaas has called a “generic city”—a metropolis
of highways and disconnected neighborhoods where “the street is dead.” 16
The attack against the street led not only to widespread alienation
but, in some extreme cases, to death. The most striking example of the
potentially devastating consequences of urban modernization was the student
massacre of October 2, 1968, at Tlatelolco, which was made possible,
in part, by urban planning and architecture. Tlatelolco is a middle-income
housing project designed by Mario Pani—a well-connected architect whose
vast projects so transformed Mexico City that he could be described as the
Mexican Robert Moses—and its architecture played an important role in