Wastescapes

Infrastructural geographies of a bi-national urbanism | Type: Research, speculation, typology. Year: 2015.

Founded on a vision of the US/Mexico border line as a transnational zonal affair, the project speculates a schematic evolution of a bi-national planning initiative, and imagines a new waste repository typology to transform resource logistics and land use in relation to the Santa Teresa, NM foreign trade zone.

The USA/Mexico border is the longest contiguous one of its kind that separates a developed country from a developing one. Although majority of the neighboring cities along the border have complex histories of co-dependency, 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, signed between USA, Canada, and Mexico, led to increased integration of regional economies, through series of logistical and operational exclusivities. 1990s also saw an increased trend of privatization in Mexican markets, simultaneously paving the way for foreign investments, influence, and dependency in domestic matters. Within the national crust of neo-liberal governance, NAFTA proved to be a factor of imbalance for Mexico, as the gap between per-capita incomes of USA and Mexico resumed its rising trend since 1994, as opposed to the narrowing trend the agreement was hoped to influence. Mexican farming industry was particularly harmed, being unable to compete with its heavily subsidized US counterpart under NAFTA provisions, leading to loss of agricultural jobs, and migrations to industrialized urban areas as well as triggering illegal immigration to US. Agriculture continues to be a significant push/pull factor for migrants, as 15% of all agricultural laborers in US are undocumented Mexican immigrants. Moreover, remittances sent by both documented and undocumented Mexican laborers in the US, from all industries, exceed $20 billion on average, annually, marking a significant lifeline for the Mexican economy while signifying the co-dependent genetics of regional finance.

A spatial consequence of international trade in the urban scale is the notion of the “foreign trade zone”. In US, these are special economic zones, whose operative authority and internal zoning is granted to a non-profit public entity by the Homeland Security. The main advantage of operating in an FTZ for a private tenant is being exempt from import tariffs; that is to say, any product imported into the zone to be processed is exempt from tariffs if it is to be exported again. This practice enhances international trade, while providing control to US Customs Border Patrol and Homeland Security over international trade, as they are the main actors responsible of actual initial site selection and monitoring of activity. FTZs, thus, become a way for Homeland Security to channel “free” market bi-national trade into specific zones, spatially control them, and monitor them. How free is the free trade? An emerging relation is that of state controlled trade through zoning, constructing the city as a political-economic instrument. The Mexican counterparts of FTZs notably contain “maquiladoras” within their boundaries, which are industrial assembly plants, serving sectors ranging from electronics to automotive. Especially propelled by NAFTA, border cities on the Mexican side became hubs of cheap labor for US while facilitated foreign investment meant more jobs for an increasingly unstable Mexican economy. Today, global actors including the likes of Chinese and Japanese companies make up to majority of maquiladora owners along with American entities, exploiting the trans-border interdependency. The border line becomes less about national sovereignty and more about a back-and-forth transgressive necessity to sustain a globalizing ecology.

Dissolution of the traditional meaning of the border is also apparent through surveillance practices related to border crossings, ranging from infra-red plate recognition systems that provide expedited lanes for participating commercial entities, to programs such as Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism that allow reduced number of inspections in turn for increased information collaboration, increasingly popular weigh-in-motion applications that replace static weigh-stations, and CBP checkpoints that scatter across a 100 mile zone behind the border. Border is not a horizontal line anymore but a transect that cuts deep. The logic of a singular choke point is replaced by that of a zonal understanding. And on the barren Southwestern landscape, management of transit flows become a “natural resource” of sorts. This is the context within which the project positions itself.

The border region between Santa Teresa and San Jeronimo embodies a turning point for international trade and logistics practices, as their collective planning effort is the first in US/Mexico history. As opposed to the traditional trade relations prevalent in sister border towns along the US/Mexico border, where Foreign Trade Zones that catalyze bi-national trade operate within enclaves they find in existing urban fabrics, the master-planning on the clean slate of Santa Teresa region presents a new model wherein extra-state zones come before the fabric, bound to influence an urbanism that will be dependent on its autonomous rules. Coordination between US and Mexican municipalities for a master-plan is the first of its kind in history, driven by private domestic and foreign investments. Taiwanese electronics assembly giant Foxconn’s biggest-ever-maquiladora on the edge of San Jeronimo, Union Pacific’s intermodal transportation facility next to Santa Teresa international airport, and a railway project financed by the Chinese government, that would allow bypassing US port of Long Beach, CA, through connecting Nayarit (a southern Mexican port) to Santa Teresa are recent developments in the region already propagating new threads of speculation. Santa Teresa, NM potentially finds itself as a crucial node not only on regional trans-border operations, but on global supply chains.

The project builds up on the increasingly common practice of “pre-clearance” that allows private entities operating on Mexican soil to pay CBP to clear them within the boundaries of their leased land, in turn allowing expedited border-crossing processes. Speculating upon a schematic evolution of the site within this mindset of commodification of security, the project eventually proposes an infrastructural waste typology that could influence a state of co-dependency between global entities and the local bi-national municipality, imposing limits against a potentially pervasive extra-state craft urbanism.

Speculated schematic evolution of the site predicts a future scenario where municipal coordination, combined with the aforementioned idea of operational dissolution of the border as a singular line, leads to dissection of surveillance practices and logistics into specialized components along linear transects across the desert landscape. Abstraction of flow as resource reflects in abstraction of landscape as assembly line. Albeit being schematic, the strategy allows further analysis of potential nested complexities of layers of land ownership in such a scale. In a context where US would outsource its security to secure itself, yet the commodification of security allows a privatization-driven spatial production in an urban scale, can a waste management infrastructure become a material manifestation of power structures – assuming an agency to turn the system in on itself? In regards to the currently under-practiced law that requires any waste produced to be returned to its raw material’s country of origin, can industrial residue be thought of a commodity for the entity that manages it, in the face of the entity that needs to get rid of it?

The waste repository program re-defines industrial residue as an asset, enabling municipal entities to construct subsidiary zones upon which private industrial entities would depend – consequently striking a balance between privatization and state-control.

CONSTRUCTIVE TACTICS: INFRASTUCTURAL GEOGRAPHIES

Five generic classifications of industrial wastes (toxic solids, toxic liquids, low-level radioactive, residual dust, compacted waste) are accommodated along the infrastructure’s axis and topographies created through agglomeration. Each unit is composed of a core structure of pre-cast slabs and walls, enclaved by continuous counterfort-retaining walls, changing in thickness and filling materials along the structure’s axis, creating chambers of repositories of varying quality. Topographic consideration of agglomeration allows more soil contact on the edges for adequate insulation of respective wastes, while less contact towards the centers where embedded passive aeration strategies are favored. Elevational differences that result from agglomerative strategies create opportunities of in-between “pits” for residual dust storage and compacted waste terracing along contours.

As these sites become material expressions of surrounding regional and global transactions, they are bound to reflect inflations/deflations in certain industries. Repositories, in time, might evolve to become archeological indexes of past residual affects as topographic changes in the site might require tactical re-appropriation of securitized use, ranging from temporary repositioning of military apparatus to utilizing emerging elevational peak points as “watch towers”.

On a greater scale, the strategy provides a chance to understand these infrastructures as active constructors of intelligent sites – or a vision of infrastructure as a site upon which flows will act. As the project particularly investigates the potential of infrastructure to construct operable landscapes, consequent organizational logic aspires to construct a site upon which various logistical practices can act. Complementing the low-tech intelligence of the concrete construction’s attitude, surveillance technologies grafted into the topography elevate the notion of repositing waste from merely an undesired reality of industrial activity to potential constructors of intelligent geographies that could manage transgressive flows between neighboring zones as well as stimulators of a novel economy - and consequently an urban fabric.

EPILOGUE

In a near future where border security is partially sourced by global entities in accordance with their expedited-customs-processes, a turning point has happened: archipelagos of pre-clearance-embedded industrial estates constellate across the border on the clean desert slate, propagating an urban fabric based on its linear rules.

“Wastescapes” is the response by the bi-national initiative, to revert this pervasive trend, through superimposition of a layer of co-dependency. Private industrial tenants rely on repositories to effectively manage their wastes and abide by international laws, thus sponsoring the security on the sites to keep expedited qualities of the system, while also investing for repository services. Waste repository landscapes also act as flow managers within the system, as well as bringing increased surveillance and consequently development, to their localities, since security has become an outsourced commodity in the post-preclearance future.

State operated waste zones replace singular surveillance infrastructures, managing transgressive flows between the border and linear specialized production channels. Exclusive development belts naturally occurring as a result of securitized waste landscapes grafted into the otherwise idiosyncratic extra-state craft industrial urbanism offer a chance of varied growth and sustainable mixed use zoning through allowing exclusions based on material land formation – rather than abstract limits imposed by foreign trade zones.

Project: Aykut Imer.