Christopher Alexander on the origins of the collaborative approach to housing: the Mexicali experience

Abstract

Collaborative interventions on the environment tend to present themselves highlighting their innovative aspects, as if representing an absolute clash with the previous state. This strategy of standing out, within a context of individualism and competition, implies the risk of creating a constant sensation of amnesia and transience that ignores the depth of its origins. In order to bring historical footing and conceptual density to these interventions, the proposition is to reconstruct their conceptual roots by investigating the input of participation in housing architecture, as one of its main aspects. With this objective, there’s a recovery of strategies developed by Christopher Alexander’s team when seeking to counter the housing deficit in a Latin-American city facing rapid population growth: the Mexicali experimental project in Baja California, Mexico. Through a bibliographical revision, which integrates the theory produced by this recently deceased author in books and articles, along with interviews and documents pertinent to the current state of the project, successes and critical points of the intervention are synthesized to trace their continuity in the current context of this community-led housing, and specifically in the social production of habitat.