ENGLISH VERSION

URBANISMO ASCENDENTE TIJUANA

One of the main ideas of PCDI Project is the State of Exception, which by definition is the circumstances that generate empty spaces of power or control, where the rules are not followed, creating a sense of anarchy or state without law.

The State of Exception has been developing in many cities around the world. It is a result of the cynicism of citizens about the city's authorities and, as a result begin to take action using whatever democratic tools are available.

As the people from the cities realize the situation of discordance they become aware that the solutions of their problems are not going to come from the institutions that are already there. As in other cities, in Tijuana, the citizens became empowered by their community work. In the recent past there have been a lot of civic organizations, working under diverse themes.

The state knows their incapacity to handle the total amount of necessities that the citizens require; therefore they begin to encourage the civilmovements to do the things that they want. In this manner they control the appearance of the state of exception, and at the same time they share the goals that the citizens are reaching, as their goals.

Even tough, there are a lot of civic organizations in Tijuana, we found that they are insolated from each other. “Urbanismos Acendente” -UA- is a project that we organized to bring together all the efforts of the citizens, groups or organizations that are doing something for their community.

The UA project might sound , in the actual situation of chaos in Tijuana, but it is an effort from the citizens that we try to identify the positive ideas and projects that are already out there and no one know about them. And in case that we do not get enough responses, we can make new questions, with new data.

There is a urban theory that calls this kind of citizen’s process “everyday urbanism”. The concept is not utopist; it is a relation between the ordinary city and popular life and the public spaces, making the distinction between frame and function.

The urban structure in Tijuana has become chaotic and anarchic. Urban development never reaches all the needs of a community. If we approach the city problems as everyday urbanism, we are going to get more efficient projects to improve the public spaces and fulfill many existing needs.

PROJECT STRUCTURE: URBANISMO ASCENDENTE

What is the quality of urban life?

Dose it have the same meening in every area of the city?

What are we doing to reach it?.

These are the questions that UA presents.

With UA we are going to use different approaches to finf out how the citizens in Tijuana see their quality of life and to identify how they are coming up with different actions to improve their community across the city. We are going to invite as many as we can (citizens, groups, and organizations that are doing something for their community) to use the UA platform as a network for their goals and a way to share experiences. And we beleve that UA can be a good collective effort for reaching the common goal which is to improve the quality of urban life as they see it, and not as some person in a desk thinks it is.

Urbanismo Ascendente, UA, is going to be a social network based on a webpage where every person, group or organization can upload their actual projects. Within the webpage we will have a visual map of the localization of the projects and what kind of civil action they are doing. This social network will improve the interaction between all the positive efforts of the citizens.


We will spread the news of UA by:

· Sending an invitation to each civil organization that is already in the municipal records

· Sending an invitation to cultural groups

· Send emails

· Giving presentations in every university and high education centers in the city

· Using the mass media

The webpage consists of a user-frendly format where everyone can upload their projects and they can interact with each other and view statistics of the participation of the citizens across the city by the kind of action that they are involved in: Social, Environmental, Urban Spaces, Economics, and Cultural.

The webpage will show a list of all projects with a picture and images of the each project and more specific information about the projects.

We are going to open a free space - no charges -, with an easy way to access it in any part of the city. We are going to use municipal and state buildings to reach as many people as we can.

We know that the webpage and all UA project is only a tool that can be used or not, but all our effort is going to be to spread the word of the possibilities of power to use.

Theory Framework

The esential questions behind Urbanismo Acendente (UA) project:

What is Quality of Urban Life?

Do we have the same parameters to define it in every neighborhood in the city?

Are we going in the right direction as society to improve it?

To approach to these issues we are going to map all citizenns projects in a network of every thing that is happening to regenerate the city of Tijuana. On a webpage we are going to keep as many as we can all the actions that citizens as individuals or groups are doing to improve their quality of urban life. Our goal is to give a tool to create a social network of participation.

The main question that we are going to present to the citizens:

What are we doing as citizens to improve the quality of urban life in Tijuana?

Are there any ideas about what we can do?

Giddens defines a social movement as "ones which places people into new relations of trust and dependency with each other, to reach goals beside of the established institutions", and as a subcategory he calls them reformist, if the goals that they are trying to change socially are reaching in a progressive perspective. Then in this way of thinking we can put the project UA as trying to make a social reformist movement, because Tijuana Calidad de Vida is an organization based on citizens for the citizens, and we have the commitment to make UA a reality.

Also we can say UA is an exercise that experiments with a form of criticism of conteporary politics. Habermas criticizes the democratic mechanisms when he talks about democratic traditional process. He said they do not give space to the collective decisions, but in a public sphere they can be reformed by the public participations of the citizens. In this way UA is trying to encourage the participation of the citizens in their efforts to improve their quality of urban life. As a annotation to the theory AU can be seen as a empirical part to these paradigms. On the other hand we can see UA as a usefull collective exercise that can empower the actual participation giving the people a power tool for interconnections, as Habermas also calls it, a way to empower the community organs.

Manuel Castells also can give our UA project more theoretic support. If we call UA an effort to encourage community actions, it becomes an example of his informational society concept, because he said there is a social organization within the process of generation and transmission of the information which becomes an important source of empowerment, for productivity and power. Then UA is going to be, in Castell´s terminology, a facilitator in developing a informational society which can improve the quality of urban life in Tijuana.

Again if we see UA as a reformist social movement, it can be reached in a urban social anthropological perspective. Ethnographic Activism is sometimes called militant research investigations ( Norman K. Denzin, The Call to Performance, 2003). There is a methodology where the research activities are at the same time a political practice if they have concrete goals. In UA we have concrete goal of improving urban quality of life.


As we can read above it is possible to have a theoretical frame to put the project Urbanismo Ascendente into as a part of a academic work. But at this time we can clarify that the real intention for UA is to become an active social network where citizens can feel empowering their actions, regardless of any scientific label that we can put on this effort. As UA reaches their goal to become an active social network where every active citizen or group participates, we are sure it will help to improve the quality of urban life in Tijuana.