GIANCARLO DE CARLO Y ALEXANDER EN ARCH. CULTURE
TENER PRESENTE LO DEL NUMERO DE PALABRAS

(p. 103)1.	Plan of Neza. The uniform grid pattern starts immediatetly north of the state line.  Although in this plan the ‘central parks’ for each neighborhood read distinctly, over the years, most of these public areas filled with larger buildings. The empty triangular area above the  settlement grid is where Neza meets Lake Texcoco.

(p. 104)2.	Chalco Plan. Valle de Chalco’s Plan lacks Neza’s hierarchical street grid whereby wide avenues separate neighborhoods.  The diagonals avenues converging in the upper left corner extend towards Mexico City.  The voids left unoccupied represent land that owners would not develop or sell.

3.	From the parasitic to the symbiotic
The relationship between housing and infrastructure shifts from parasitic in the early stages of a settlement electricity by ‘hooking up’ illegally to the grid, to symbiotic in latter stages, where dwelling and street share the space of the power lines.  Issues such as right-of-way, property and air rights, are rendered useless in this kind of urban condition.

(p. 105) 4.	Official vs. Real Public Space
The occupation and transformation of a street into a space of public interaction (right)  has no match in the so-called planned public-spaces (left).  The flexibility of the former accounts for the limited success of the latter.

(p. 102) 5.	Bottom Left :Neza Aerial 1990. The seventeen years that separate the two images (1973) show that even from the start of the development, the block was considered an area to be infilled.  The darker spots in both pictures represent flooded areas.

p. 100 6.	Miguel Aleman Housing
Mario Pani’s project was designed under the assumption that the problem of housing was foremost a design issue.  The careful repetition project type would overcome the deficit in dwellings; modern housing for a modern country.  By the mid 1960s it was evident that this modality could never accommodate the city’s need for housing.

7.	Chalco Grid 1
(see description for Chalco Grid 3)

8.	Chalco Grid 2
The diagonal in the image is the high-tension electricity line, one of the few elements in Valle de Chalco that break from the orthogonal grid.  The large open space in the foreground was left open because the original ejidatarios would not sell it.  To recent dates, the site has been occupied by educational and medical facilities to serve all Chalco.

9.	Chalco Grid 3
There is a homogeneity in every block and every construction in Valle de Chalco.  The way that each dwelling occupies most of their lot area and the uniform treatment in materials, heights and construction techniques, transforms the individual house-objects into a block-texture. 

(p. 101) 10.	Mexico City with Chalco and Neza
The sheer size of Valle de Chalco and Neza within the metropolitan area is evidence of their importance.  Their location in the eastern part of the city responds to the lower land values, although informality is present to a lesser degree in all parts of the urban fringe.

11.	View of Chalco between Highway and waste canal
The convergence of the Canal de la CompaÒia, the sewage canal, and the federal Highway to Puebla is shadowed by the way in which informal housing in Valle de Chalco occupy the gap between the two.  This whole area was dramatically flooded in June of 2000 when the canal, which is above ground level broke, leaving thousands of families under water.

(p. 102) 12.	Ensanche plan by Ignacio Castera. Castera recognized the necessity to organize the future growth of the city. Nevertheless, his plan contemplated razing all forms of informal urbanization taking place outside the colonial grid, an eighteenth century version of urban renewal.

13.	Chalco seen from Xico Volcano
Valle de Chalco’s lacustrine origin is evident to this day.  The only difference between the background of this image (lake) with the foreground (urbanization) is twenty years.  Valle de Chalco’s soil quality is so poor that subsidience is the highest in the city, averaging over one foot a year.

14.	Indiscriminate appropiation of land
The patterns of land property result in peculiar patterns of occupation of greenfields and mountain areas.  The natural environment is always underscored by the artificiality of informal urbanization.  In this case, in the hills of Ecatepec, the municipal authorities concentrated efforts to improve the urban image by painting every single house the same color;  The tyranny of applied beauty...

(p. 99) 15.	Colonizing the Mountains. The slope of a mountain has never been an excuse for not colonizing it.  In their most provocative form, streets that run perpendicular to the topography dissolve into pedestrian steps until they reach the highest dwelling.  All natural features are covered by the artificial blanket of urbanization.

16.	Plan of Colonia Metropolitana
In this original plan for a neighborhood in Neza, the developers clearly had an idea of lot dimensions, street sections and even a rudimentary form of land use planning.  What is most surprising is that this form of brutal real estate enterprise operates through a very ‘conservative’ plan.

(p. 107)17. The stages of development and densification of a single-family house are made explicit in the construction material and aesthetic choices of the dwellers at the time.  This open-endness of the architecture in the informal city results in a cadavre-exquis; a house where growth is autonomous and where tectonics, composition

18.	Neza Aerial 1973
(see description of Neza Aerial 1990)

19.	Neza Grid 1
What is probably most amazing in the case of Neza is the absolute lack of vertical references in all the settlement.  If we add the more or less homogeneous use of concrete block as the primary building material, the uniform height of buildings, and the high density, then urban form becomes merely a carpet of a single family dwellings.  The ‘green’ corridor on the right side of the image is one of the avenues separating the different neighborhoods.

20.	Neza Grid 2
(could go together with Neza Grid 1)

Extra 1: The edge between lake Texcoco and urbanization
As much as informality tends to occupy land indiscriminately, there are still some strong edge conditions in the Metropolis which have not been invaded yet.  Probably the one between Ecatepec and lake Texcoco is the strongest one of them.

Extra 2: The urbanized mountain (Ecatepec, Mexico City)
(see descripition for Image 15, colonizing the mountains)