A “scrap landscape” in Ciudad Juárez — Urban Mining proposes a design that reflects the steel-scrap economy at the US–Mexico border: the waste produced, its potential reuse, the politics of its categorization, and the environmental and health impacts it imposes on local communities.
The project also calls attention to the displacement of people at the border due to financial instability and the ongoing war on drugs — Ciudad Juárez has appeared on lists of the most dangerous cities in the world multiple times.
Context
The project reads the steel recycling industry across the border as a single system — mine, scrap yard, steel mill, new-product manufacturing, and landfill — and maps where it touches people. In Ciudad Juárez, informal scrapyards operate inside dense residential zones under loose regulation, while El Paso keeps its few large recycling plants outside the city or within industrial parks. That proximity became a health concern most notoriously in the 1980s, when radioactive hospital material was sold to a scrapyard and made into rebar that was subsequently sold to the US. In parallel, violence and financial instability have driven large-scale displacement; the Zaragoza neighborhood the project focuses on carries a vacancy rate of up to 60%.
Approach
The design uses subtraction as its primary tool. Rather than build on empty ground, it proposes the systematic demolition of uninhabited residences to extract valuable materials — some refurbished and reused or sold locally in Juárez, ferrous metals recovered for EAF steel production at El Paso — turning scrap and construction rubble into a visible part of the urban fabric. The rubble left behind becomes the base and demarcator of a new landscape, cleared away or left for the desert and its flora to reclaim in an organized fashion.
Where houses are removed, new public program is inserted: outdoor theatre, tianguis (street) markets, sports courts, and parking. These both create new spaces for social interaction and extend the neighborhood’s existing programs — a sports court beside an existing school, a plaza for outdoor seating in front of existing shops — while blurring the already-loose line between sidewalk and street. New inserts, including new housing typologies and a recycling-and-sorting center, are staged across different time frames so the process runs from demolition to sorting to construction, leaving room for a returning population to reinvigorate the abandoned neighborhood.
Teamed with Alfonso Pelaez. Rice University, Fall 2021.
