Border fusion / Fusión en la frontera : integrating industry, habitation and exchange in a divided city

Abstract

The urban fabric of communities along San Diego/Tijuana's la Línea or border wall are characterized by high degrees of spatial fragmentation: -- a condition typical of border interface areas in politically partitioned or divided cities. Despite being centrally located relative to population and activity centers and their economic and social importance as sites for border crossings, these communities are sites of contention which have tended to attract a mixture of conventionally undesirable development programs. The critical interface connecting the US and Mexican halves of the city is, in substantial measure, a "no-man's-land." This thesis considers one such border community, San Diego's Otay Mesa district, and proposes a long-term urban design strategy for its transformation into mixed-use neighborhoods with the border wall itself as a key activating and organizing spatial element. What is a physical expression of urban form in Otay Mesa that simultaneously accommodates frequently conflicting national, local and environmental objectives for the site? How may man-made infrastructures and natural site systems be exploited, restructured and interlaced to facilitate the redevelopment of the site? What design interventions will improve the physical and social connections between San Diego and Tijuana, and support these connections by developing a new activity center at Otay Mesa? What will life be like in the neighborhoods that will emerge from this redevelopment? The proposed strategy takes the form of an integrated urban and landscape design and programming framework developed to achieve and supplement planning objectives for the site while overcoming proximity-related land-use incompatibilities.

(cont.) Extant urban systems, including hydrology, landscape, transportation and security, are restructured as interdependent physical systems, which, in interaction, may be deployed to generate a matrix of urban neighborhoods for habitation, employment, recreation and cross-border economic and cultural exchange. Specific proposals advanced include: (i) the development of an exchange-oriented mixed-use commercial center at the proposed Otay Mesa East border crossing; (ii) the transformation of the border wall into a garden and hydrologic feature linked into the district's developed fields, its ecology and landscape features; and (iii) reorganized infrastructural systems to mitigate heavy truck traffic.