How Tijuana’s award-winning Xicoténcatl Park united a neglected migrant community

On the outskirts of Tijuana, successful an unassuming residential area, sits Xicoténcatl Park, a assemblage abstraction opened successful 2020 that’s been noticed worldwide arsenic a best-practices municipality renewal task — 1 that did what these sorts of projects should do, but don’t always: instrumentality into relationship the needs of the assemblage that volition usage it.

That assemblage is made up of astir 5,000 erstwhile migrants from Central America, the Caribbean and Africa who were incapable to transverse the borderline into the United States and ended up settling successful this marginalized country adjacent the Mexico-U.S.border. Today, what started arsenic an irregular encampment connected bare onshore has grown to astir 5,000 radical inhabiting an urbanized country connected a hillside populated by humble homes. Over time, the assemblage began transforming a watercourse furniture facing the assemblage into a makeshift nationalist abstraction by filling it successful with debris and leveling the crushed for recreational use, a determination that marked the opening of the park’s story.

Xicoténcatl’s innovative parkland plan transformed a country of municipality blight into a recreation abstraction featuring a shot pitch, a playground, seating areas and landscaped pathways. Designers utilized abandoned tires, a contamination occupation for Tijuana, to make landscaping, elevated recreation structures and fencing. (Sedatu)

A plan pivot 

Initially intending to simply amended municipality blight and forestall flooding, Mexico’s Ministry of Agricultural, Territorial and Urban Development (Sedatu) had planned successful 2019 to conception sidewalks present and cleanable the watercourse furniture successful bid to transmission stormwater runoff. However, the concern changed erstwhile the project’s contractors arrived and saw what the residents had done.

“We realized that tons of rubble had been dumped into the bed, altering the travel of water, dividing the assemblage and creating areas of utmost violence,” explained Loreta Castro Reguera from Taller Capital, the steadfast that developed the task successful collaboration with the School of Architecture astatine the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

The designers projected utilizing immoderate of the rubble successful the ravine to alteration it into a safer, much appealing parkland abstraction by gathering platforms. They besides championed a fashionable section operation method called llantimuro, which creates structures similar retaining walls and fencing retired of piles of utilized tires arranged successful an aesthetically pleasing way.

Border cities similar Tijuana person millions of utilized tires imported from the United States each year, often abandoned successful riverbeds and successful marginalized areas successful large, unsafe and unsightly piles.  

“The tire-wall strategy supports the onshore wherever the platforms person been built. We created 9 descending platforms that present relation arsenic nationalist spaces, and these platforms assistance usher rainwater runoff consecutive to the oversea and person formed 1 of the city’s largest gardens, connecting radical connected some sides of the stream,” Castro said.

Members of the assemblage thin to the park’s plantings. Use and attraction of the nationalist abstraction has brought unneurotic neighbors who were antecedently separated by an unnavigable watercourse bed. (Roman Meyer via Tijuana Local/Facebook)

A spot for neighbors to conscionable and connect

Designers utilized the tires to conception a bid of factual and world platforms, creating elevation changes of implicit 15 meters on a magnitude of 390 meters. The tyre partition besides created habitats for astatine slightest 84 trees, 890 shrubs and 13,400 succulents, creating appealing landscaped greenish spaces. 

The parkland features multipurpose courts, playgrounds, seating areas, a meditation country and walking paths. The task besides constructed perimeter channels to divert rainwater runoff and support streets wide of h2o by directing it downstream to little disturbed areas of the Xicoténcatl Stream.

Also, importantly, Xicoténcatl Park by uniting the 5,000 residents surviving connected some sides of the watercourse bed, has promoted societal connections among neighbors.

“It has besides fostered a consciousness of assemblage work for its upkeep,” Castro said.

A multi-award-winning park

Since Xicoténcatl Park’s opening successful 2020, its unsocial context, inspiring communicative and galore benefits to the assemblage person earned it planetary attention.

The task has received 8 planetary awards successful countries arsenic varied arsenic Chile, Spain, Ecuador, the United States and the United Kingdom. These awards person included the 2020 Architectural League of New York Award, the 2020–2021 Architectural Review Emerging Architecture Award, the 2020 Quito Pan-American Architecture Biennial Award and the Ibero-American Architecture and Urbanism Biennial Award. It besides won an honorable notation astatine the Seoul Design Award successful 2023 and the Make It Circular Challenge, a Dutch contention organized by What Design Can Do successful collaboration with the IKEA Foundation, which invited designers, originative entrepreneurs and start-ups worldwide to envision and physique a circular society.

Tijuana’s Xicoténcatl Park task exemplifies however circumstantial section needs tin beryllium addressed with innovative solutions — which, successful this case, brought a amended prime of beingness to 1 of Tijuana’s often-forgotten communities.