Written by Jesús Torres
The way humankind has experienced communities throughout time has been changing constantly. Ever since our primary ancestors saw themselves with the urge of moving their settlements towards greener lands, to the explosion around the world created by the industrial revolution which generated massive migrations from the rural areas to the urban sectors of the planet.
Communities create their surroundings, that across the lapse of time have been evolving as well, as a concept and as a physical entity, and within this evolution, there are intrinsic challenges.
The dynamics that take place in cities, and the way they are growing constantly, are producing multiple problems for humankind. Waste of resources, decrease in human health and life expectancy, and massive contamination due to the usage of private transportation just to name a few.
For this very first episode, we’re chatting with a friend of ours, José Antonio Ramírez Reyes. Born and raised in Torreón, Coahuila, a city within the metro area of La Laguna, located in the north of Mexico. He’s got a bachelor in Architecture from Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila (UAC), and a master’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). He’s currently the Executive Director of IMPLAN Torreón (Torreón’s Municipal Institute of Planning and Competitiveness). He’s been very enthusiastic about our conversation and the idea of sharing his vision of his duty to our audience.
Jesús Torres: It’s a pleasure to have you with us today, José Antonio.
Jose Antonio Ramírez Reyes: The pleasure is mine, Jesús, I’m honored to be here with you today and with our young audience in other countries.
Jesús Torres: Let’s begin straight to the point. José Antonio: what is urbanism?
Jose Antonio Ramírez Reyes: To answer that question, we need to state what’s the meaning of “city”. Most of us live in cities, but we don’t even know what they are. The city is the entity that, we, as a community, had a common agreement to use it to live, work and grow. This invention generated an outcome that translates to the creation of schools, parks, workplaces, and markets, places where we get to interact with other humans, places where we can create friendships, and sites where we can share our points of view, and gather around thoughts in common.
The city is an outcome of a virtuous circle and is the product of the dynamics of its citizenship. Urbanism studies cities. As complex as a human being can be, cities in their dimension, as a human creation, are complex as well, which means that the discipline that studies cities must be too. Urbanism studies cities from different human perspectives: social, economic, environmental, political, and infrastructural, among others, to guide and propose the best alternative for our cities to keep developing.
JT: So you’re telling me that Urbanism only studies the city with all these different frames and that’s it? Do urbanists at some point put this knowledge into practice?
JARR: The difference between Urbanism and other sciences, where you can put into practice your knowledge on a computer and see possible outcomes through an algorithm, Urbanism needs to face the reality and complexity of a city. You cannot “pause” a city to see how an alternate scheme of land use, economic model, or public transportation could work.
We need and have to put into practice our knowledge, but first, we have to collect historical information related to what has been successful and what hasn’t. Once this point has been cleared, I need to say that urbanism projects are long-term-aimed. We need to see how citizenship assimilates change, and if it is accepted, we need to keep observing to adapt the projects to the dynamics of our co-citizens.
I’m not quite sure if I answered your question (laughs).
JT: You did! You also brought up a topic I was concerned about. You were talking about public transportation. Is there a correlation between the global environmental issues we’re dealing with now and the approach Urbanism has towards transportation?
JARR: There’s a relationship between global issues and cities. Therefore, Urbanism is implied within this formula. 2% of Earth’s surface is urbanized. Only 2%. It’s nothing. In Latin America, over 80% of its population lives in urban areas. It means that cities are the areas where most goods and services are demanded. Cities DO have a direct impact on global issues. 2% of Earth’s land is having a huge impact against the other 98%.
If we’re demanding goods to, for example, create a thousand doors for a thousand houses, we need to get enough wood to supply our needs. Where do we take this wood from? The Amazonia, for instance. Or maybe we need fish to satisfy the hunger of our population, so we take our ships to get those fish from our oceans, which get contaminated due to the fuel expelled by our transport methods.
JT: With that being said, can Urbanism face the challenges of cities, and solve their issues?
JARR: First we need to state what “solving an issue” means. We need to clarify what we want to see as an outcome, and even before that, we need to see and understand our reality. How do we move around the city? Do I want safe public transportation to take me from my house to school? When I play outside with my friends, is there a park close to my neighborhood, or do my parents have to take me there using their car? Is the park in good condition; is it safe to play around this specific park? With such points cleared, now: what are we aiming at? Do we want more efficient public transportation? Do we have enough resources to spend on a possible solution?
Now, I know our main audience is European, and these problems have been tackled, more or less in certain countries or cities, but for instance, when it comes to refugees one could ask: are we prepared to receive them? Do we have safe conditions to receive refugees? Do we have a well-planned structure to have them join within the productive community? So, in a nutshell, as urbanists, we need to have a clear understanding of our reality to have the best approach possible when it comes to developing a possible solution for an issue.
JT: This conversation is been great, I’m loving it! But what if we slow down a little bit? I would like to know a bit more about you. Why did you decide to become what you are today?
JARR: I come from a relatively small city, and I always have pictured myself as the architect who would design the very first skyscraper in my hometown. That began when I was 12. From that moment I thought that my path would take me to Architecture of Psychology. For a moment I thought about becoming a doctor, but the idea flew away fast when I knew that I had to open rotten bodies (laughs).
Luckily right after I graduate from University, I started to work within a firm that was very interested in social projects, not only these big house projects for wealthy people but projects that could make an impact on our society.
I had the chance to study Regional and Urban Planning at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and while I was studying it I had the chance to study abroad for a semester at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, and this path led me to be invited to work in the Municipal Institute that I’m currently leading, first as the manager of several projects, and for the past months as the executive director.
I had the chance to be a professor at Universidad Iberoamericana, and at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, I have collaborated with other institutes around Mexico, and now I’m here (laughs).
To work in my position, one has to develop political abilities to arrange projects, and most important of all: tolerance. As an architect, one can develop a private project and it could be materialized within 1 or 2 years. As an urbanist, you can design and develop 10 projects, and if one of them can be done, consider yourself lucky.
JT: Now, coming back to the main topic: Antonio, can you tell me what professional event made you consider specializing in Urban Planning?
JARR: Moreleando. For context: La Laguna at some point became one of the 10 most violent places to live in the world. A group of youth realized that because of the fear, citizens wouldn’t take their city back, which created a vicious circle: people won’t walk their city, the city becomes abandoned, and therefore, the city becomes unsafe and violent. Moreleando was a social movement to take the city back to citizenship. Moreleando was a project to take an important avenue, once a month, as a platform for artists to display their art.
The very first-time Moreleando took place, a thousand people were walking Morelos Avenue. The last time it took place, twenty thousand laguneros were walking their city. Then, the municipality took over that civil project and created a development around it. The public administration took Morelos Avenue and turned it into a pedestrian-prioritized street. Seeing that a project with such kindness created by citizens can make such a difference, with such importance, made me realize that I can be part of the changes in our community. This project here in Torreón turned out to be a great innovation.
JT: Talking about what you experienced in Moreleando, I just remembered that the other day I read a book where the author said something about what he called “universal accessibility”. What is this, and how is this related to Moreleando and your current work in Torreón?
JARR: The concept of Universal Accessibility has been evolving due to the changing perception of safeness. I’m saying that it is evolving because at the beginning the concept used to be associated with people with limited motion, but then the scope of the concept reached people with visual or hearing disturbances.
Torreón is not well-planned for our citizens, it was planned for the mobility of motorized vehicles. When you have wide roads and thin spaces for our pedestrians to mobilize freely, it becomes hard for everyone to move around with no complications. Cities cannot be designed only for people who can afford a car. Cities must be designed for their inhabitants.
In the institute I’m leading, we’re developing an active mobility plan to turn our city friendlier towards people who would rather mobilize with other alternatives rather than private motorized vehicles.
Now, universal accessibility is a very important topic, but I’d like to take a step back, and just focus on accessibility, not only in physical terms but social and economically accessible. In Torreón, half of the public spaces are behind a fence, inside private housing complexes. I believe that when we put over the table the topic of accessibility, we need to see it with all its dimensions.
JT: Are we experiencing some sort of classism that we’re not aware of when it comes to the distribution of our population within the cities?
JARR: We are! We are aware of it. The classism in our cities is very obvious. Here in Torreón, we have housing complexes where only residents can access them. The big issue is that these complexes have public spaces inside them, but as I said, only residents have “permission” to enjoy these spaces.
These constructions became popular in Latin America because of the pursuit of safety perception, due to the violence we’ve been experiencing over the last decades. Recent studies have shown that citizens not only seek housing inside these locations because of this perception of safety but because of social status.
They want to live in private locations, among people who can afford a high price house such as theirs. This mindset, widely spread among our co-citizens, makes a polarized city: housing complexes with high social status are settling in the north of Torreón, and families with low incomes are settling in the south.
JT: Can we state that there’s a correlation between violence among classes and urban planning?
JARR: I’m not quite sure if there’s a correlation, but I can try to quote some cases to try to clarify that question.
Santa Fé, in Mexico City, which is one of the most important economic districts in Latin America, with the highest living costs, right next to it, there are irregular settlements, there's also a similar scenario in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where you can see big houses with swimming pools and high costs services, right next to the commonly named favelas, just separated by a thin wall. This creates a huge polarization and classism tends to take place among the inhabitants.
JT: It is indeed a huge problem. Now, José Antonio, I would like to take us back a bit. We were talking about universal accessibility, and I would like to talk about something really important: Has IMPLAN Torreón spotted that It is way different for a man to walk downtown at night than it is for a woman?
JARR: Definitely. The role that society has given to men and women determined the shape of our cities. Men’s trajectories inside the city tend to be more linear: from point A, let’s call it home, to point B, let’s call it workplace. In comparison, women’s trajectory tends to be a zigzag. Women go from house to school, to supermarket, to workplace, and back to the starting point. We see two main issues here: it has been normalized that women have to do more with no substantial payback, and the shape of the city doesn’t help them to have easier mobilization. The shape of the city it’s determined by the activities that men commonly do.
We have spotted the need for at least 6 daycares in the north area of Torreón. With this lack of infrastructure, young couples have to mobilize way more for their kids to be taken care of, which implies that they have to drive way more, which means they’re spending more money on gas for their cars, and this means that they’re polluting more our environment, and having less time to do activities non-related with driving, which also leads to health issues. Do you see? It’s a vicious cycle. An inclusive city is a city that also takes into consideration the mobilization of women.
JT: Thanks for all of this information, José Antonio! Now, could you tell me what does IMPLAN Torreón do?
JARR: The municipal institute of planning and competitiveness gathers information about its politics, population, environment, and economics, among others, we analyze the data, and therefore we propose projects for the city.
JT: It has been a great conversation, José Antonio, I’m very glad that we had it. I think that our time is almost over. Do you have any thoughts you would like to share with our audience?
JARR: First I would like to thank you, Jesús, for inviting me. I want to tell you guys that I urge you to live your city, to live your streets. I want you guys to live your street by caring for each other, by caring for your neighbor; living the street is caring for our refugee brothers and sisters, and caring for vulnerable people. Living the street is understanding that we can’t let our cities be taken over by gentrification. Our locals are being moved out of their houses to live outsides of the cities because of gentrification and we cannot let this happen anymore, not here in Torreón, nor in Sao Paulo or Barcelona.
Live your streets, live your cities.