Without Number
Sin número (S/N) is a project that rescues the existing structures of the “Modules of Security and Citizen Participation” in Mexico City to transform them into urban infrastructure based on the principles of the New UN Urban Agenda.
The address of the Modules appears on the SEDUVI page as numberless, W/N, since they are located in parks, ridges and residual spaces of the city, in locations favored to have a large-scale urban impact.
Around 400 of these constructions were built in the 1980s with the aim of monitoring and being emergency centers. However, today surveillance is carried out with an advanced security camera system and citizens can call by cellphone in case of emergency. For this reason, these structures are now intended solely for citizen participation. Typologies remain closed structures with only police access.
This project proposes to understand them as an urban infrastructure system. Each of the 16 neighborhoods in the city has its own typology. Each typology has a lot of flexibility to become a space that houses various activities or that offers a certain infrastructure.
The project also suggests that the security modules can be used by citizens collectively. The trigger are the new programs that have been assigned, but from the architectural transformations that are applied, the structures will be prepared so that users can feel them as their own and get involved with them. In this joint way, greater security would be achieved in the influence areas of these structures.
S/N proposes to reuse existing architectures instead of building new architectures, analyze, deconstruct and sensibly complement what we have to adapt it to the moment in which we live.
Project: Alessandro Arienzo
Consultors: Margarita Flores y Felipe Leal
With the support of: Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (FONCA), Programa Jóvenes Creadores 2016-2017
Photos: Camila Cossio