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Students Explore Transnational Waters, Interconnected Lives
Michigan Ag Connection - 07/18/2018

On one side of the Río Grande, residents have access to one of the most advanced water purifying systems in North America that feeds the booming economy of El Paso, Texas.

On the other side of the river, residents of Juárez, Mexico, have sporadic access to drinkable water and many live in constant peril that their houses--built during the furiously fast development brought to the region by international trade agreements--will be washed away.

A group of 12 graduate students from the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning traveled to the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez region to study the water issues affecting the area, where some 2.7 million survive off the Rio Grande River and Paso del Norte Watershed.

But while its waters were once earned the river its name ("Big River" on the US side, "Fierce River" in Mexico) many fear agriculture, industry and people are sucking it dry. The water that remains is managed through international treaties, multiple organizations, and several dams. Solutions tend to be complicated as the river itself marks the border between the US and Mexico.

"In Juárez, there's massive amounts of environmental and social injustices where people don't have running water.

"I wanted students to start to recognize that there is this asymmetrical infrastructural development in the ways that, for example, water rights and the rights to water were being manifest on the two sides of the border, but also how the control of the water has become part of the urbanism, of the architecture of the city through the dams that partition the water."

After spending time in Ann Arbor studying the area and mapping its waters and urban infrastructure, the students traveled to El Paso-Juárez to document the sites and the living conditions of those living on both sides of the border. In El Paso, the team worked with Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller of the Texas Tech School of Architecture.

In Juárez, students visited the city and its markets and spent time in the floodplains and other areas to gain a real sense of the challenges those communities face. With professor Alfredo Granados-Olivas of Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, the group traveled to relevant areas they wouldn't have accessed otherwise, allowing them to get an even deeper understanding of the issues and communities involved.

Back in Ann Arbor, students developed their vision of what a common "water institute" would look like. At a recent presentation showed a variety of designs that included landscape designs for rehabilitating the ecology of the Rio Grande; a research institute that engaged a former toxic copper smelting site; a wastewater reclamation project; a community water emergency network; a "water parliament" for binational water negotiation; and a new public space that also cleaned the waters of one of the irrigation canals of Juarez.

Taubman graduate student Sneha Reddy said the contentions around water reminded her of similar problems between two different states in her native Bangalore, India.

"We have to share our water with another state and it's been a fight for three decades: Who gets more water? It's the same kind of issues but here is a larger scale because it's two countries," she said.

Reddy wanted to propose practical solutions that might help alleviate water shortages, and focused her project on colonias, informal settlements from the 1960s and '70s that developed as industrialization of Juárez increased. The colonias lack reliable water sources and sanitation services, and were built on arroyos (gullies), putting them in the path of destruction.

"There's a lot of water. Mountain water would flow in but nobody is using it. It was a challenge for me to look at how, as an architect, we could address this issue," she said.

Reddy proposed using materials readily available in the area to slow down the flow of water so it can be gathered and utilized by the community. She envisioned a water retaining pool and a community center.

"It is their water, they should be empowered to use it," she said.

Shane Donnelly, U-M graduate student in architecture and urban design, said he found out that until recently, people on both sides could easily cross the river and participate in a community that transcends borders.

"Currently, the border is very contentious," he said. "People are on one side, while their aunts and uncles are on the other."

His project was inspired by the "third nation" concept developed by Michael Dear, who has written at length on issues facing the border region.

"My proposed project looks at embracing this shared community and subverts the border by envisioning a floating urban territory that removes itself from the physical territory of both nations--instead, making its own," he said.

"This area is culturally, historically and geographically unique, and people who live in it feel more connected to one another than they feel to their host countries, thus the idea of a 'third nation,'" Donnelly added. "This project embodies this idea and proposes it as a physical territory."

Velikov said the students' diverse take on the project was exactly what she was hoping for.

"It is called a wicked problem, a problem that's probably not solved by design but that design can address," she said. "This isn't about easy answers. There's a lot of complexities and contingencies involved."

Velikov's "Transnational Ecologies of the Rio Grande" studio is part of the initiative "Two Sides of the Border: Reimagining the Region" by Tatiana Bilbao, an architect in Mexico City who teaches at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico and Yale and Columbia universities.

The students' work will be part of an exhibit at Yale University's School of Architecture in November. Other schools of architecture involved are: Universidad de Mexico, Universidad Iberoamericana, University of Cincinnati, Cooper Union, Cornell University, University of California-Berkeley, Texas Tech University-El Paso, University of Texas, University of Washington, Yale and Columbia


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