Chronicles of discontinuous cities: Francesco Careri and Ciudad Juárez

Abstract

In August 2019, Francisco Careri visited Ciudad Juárez - a town in the north of Mexico, adjacent to El Paso (Tx.) - to give the workshop ‘Walking as an aesthetic practice’ and to map psychogeographically the urban space of this locality. Ciudad Juárez is on the border with the United States, it is industrial and Americanised, with a horizontal urbanism designed for automobiles that makes it difficult to read. However, what might at first appear as a traditional architectural problem - indeterminate, ignored or empty places - for Careri implied the possibility of putting into practice a participatory approach to the city, of directing the workshop towards a spatial and symbolic transformation that would respond to the needs and desires of its communities, of those who inhabited those spaces. Over the last quarter of a century, this renowned architect - and his Urban Art Laboratory Stalker/Observatorio Nómada (1995) - has employed two different creative instruments to relate to public space beyond conventional architectural and urban studies: walking and stopping. Thus, directed at successive walks, they allowed us to read the city in a participatory way, to inhabit it at certain moments, in order to project symbolically its different constructions.

By proposing them as a way of searching, creative and collective capacities are stimulated that transform what is being travelled through: each day involved taking the city playfully, juxtaposing narrative dimensions, adding the stories and experiences of the people who live and share it, to consider it as a relational space of exchange, complex and multidimensional. At the end of the experience, Careri gave an interview that served as a tool to configure the present text, to transcend the mere recording of experiences and to delimit possible answers to the question: what does it mean to make a city? Ultimately, to expose a territory that is simultaneously architectural and political, formless and plural, artificial and public, conflictive and shared, emancipated and appropriated, etc. In this way, beyond simply witnessing the encounter with Ciudad Juárez, both the workshop and its reflections opened up the possibility of mapping its anatomy and dimensioning its materiality, of understanding the different systems of power in the city - at the same time as its resistances -, of making its violence visible and of recovering coexistence through the activation of its citizenship. Thanks to this phenomenological practice, new readings and experiences of this environment emerged by considering the space from emotional perspectives that endowed it with aesthetic meanings.Thus, the text provides methods for a very specific spatial analysis of the city, one fed by the narrative key that - outside of officialdom - constructs it aesthetically as we walk through it.