GLOBAL IDENTITY

By Vicky Castro

 

Monterrey has a strong identity; it conserves and bears a strong history too. Known as the Northern Titan maintaining a title for being an important industrial city of Mexico, the city has been growing outrageously out of scale. The city follows a sprawling system that demands better infrastructure. Apart from this, the city seems to be losing its identity and becoming a paradigm for sprawling. A new suburbanism is responding to international citizens, people coming from inside the country, looking for employment or new businesses opportunities and the desire for better life, trends from capitalism, globalization and a sense of internationalization.

 

Rem Koolhaas refers to this phenomenon as a factor for the creation of a generic city. The generic cities are all equals. Probably the concept has its advantages, but undoubtedly it exists a strong lost of the unique. When it means that everything is equal, people start losing a sense of belonging or stop feeling identified with the city they live in. The characteristics and the bows that join them with their place get lost and history banishes.

 

In a city that supports and compromises with capitalism and globalization, the idea of identity is promoted to an easy disappearance. Monterrey is already in the vortex of global competition, from great scale real-estate developments that includes vertical and horizontal residences as well as mixed uses projects, to corporate and commercial buildings, hotels and high-level institutions for education. It is time to pause and evaluate how architecture can help the city to remain unique, solid and strong in front of the global movement, a moment to vindicate the city and promote social awareness for identity and a sense of belonging.

 

At the beginning might be thought the identity is getting lost, the participation of international architects is common in the city, the responsive urbanism and not planned, so much as the construction without regulation or the indefinite uses of ground, generate a displacement of the architecture corresponding to the region. Nevertheless, the city has a solid culture and perhaps its an architect duty to represent and reposition Monterrey’s identity, manifesting that spite the fact it has deep-rooted well, the city could compete and be recognized as global, but more regional than ever.