Di Vece arquitectos. Installation view at Palazzo Bembo, 2016.

A Suburban Reconciliation Project, in the southern periphery of the city of Guadalajara, Mexico, where a number of actions have to be implemented in order to solve the segregation and fragmentation caused by the new housing settlements.
These spreading clusters have been rapidly absorbing cheap land from the agricultural parcels, causing chaos and disruption by the construction of barriers that give them a false sense of security.
Thousands of families have arrived to the suburbs looking for cheaper housing but depending heavily on the automobile. Induced traffic has forced the construction of a high-speed, overloaded highway that connects to the metropolis. This vehicular infrastructure interrupts local connectivity between provinces and agricultural parcels, which promotes segregation and social decay in neighboring rural towns.
Furthermore, these new communities still depend on the city as their source of employment, services, and amenities, ignoring the advantages of the neighboring local cultures for the fulfillment of their communitarian needs.
We propose to implement a new sequence of urban spaces that will conciliate between the new housing clusters with the Rural-Colonial province named San Agustín; a project that restores the local tissue and implements the necessary mixed-use buildings at the same time. An intervention that solves connectivity between neighboring settlements and proposes an alternative for an integrated community with the added provincial character.
The master plan, on one hand, centers on the idea of dissolving the borders of the walled-in communities by opening up their public spaces to communitarian activities that will promote social interaction and connectivity. San Agustín, on the other hand, will recycle some of its buildings and public spaces in order to introduce new commercial, cultural, artistic, and ludic services, improving the interaction with the isolated clusters.
Pedestrian streets, bicycle lanes, plazas, mixed-use buildings, organic markets, research institutions, cultural and agricultural activities are some of the actions to be implemented or reinforced, point by point, in order to improve social and urban integration. The sequence of urban spaces departs from an emblematic piece of art and architecture that better synthesizes the intention of the project entitled the “Filamentario Chapel”; this is a space of art and faith that promotes the dissolution of social boundaries and opens up the reconstruction of the suburban fabric.
This building for art and personal seclusion is inserted in the middle of a housing complex that has already dissipated its borders in order to welcome visitors from the region: it is open to everyone. This is the beginning and the end of a sequence of rural and urban spaces that connect the clusters to the civic center of San Agustín; this XVI century province will be upgraded with the necessary programmatic insertions and remodelings that will consolidate the concept of a more balanced Urban-Rural style of living.