
A Mexican architect has a vision for a city straddling the U.S.-Mexico border - waqasaday
http://www.citylab.com/design/2016/09/instead-of-a-wall-build-a-binational-city-us-mexico-border-trump/499634/
======
dogma1138
The problem with US/Mexican "relations" isn't cultural, ideological or
philosophical it's mostly due to the economic disparity between the 2 nations
and a city won't change it.

There are already places where the US and Mexico effectively share a cross
border municipality/urab environment.

Adding another one won't change anything it can either create a false state if
only the richest of Mexicans move in or will result in the same state as many
other border urban areas right now where the Mexican side provides cheap day
labor and a "safer" platform for criminal activity due to the financial
disparity.

~~~
aaron-lebo
> The problem with US/Mexican "relations" isn't cultural, ideological or
> philosophical it's mostly due to the economic disparity between the 2
> nations and a city won't change it.

I don't believe this is completely true. How does an economic disparity
happen? Through material factors or cultural, ideological, or philosophical
factors.

Mexico for various reasons has had an incredibly difficult time having a
stable political system. Santa Anna came back from exile and screwed his
people over how many times? How many times did power violently sway back and
forth between the liberals and conservatives in the early part of the 20th
century? Why is Mexico now effectively a narco state ruled by the cartels and
crony politicians?

I'll give you a hint: it's not because of resources or good land or good
people: all of which it has in plenty. Mexico should be booming due to NAFTA.
So much of this development we now see in East Asia could have very easily
gone right across the border if it had a working political system.

No, there's clearly bigger issues. Building a new city on the border isn't
going to fix that. We already have Juarez.

~~~
dmix
> I'll give you a hint: it's not because of resources or good land or good
> people

This is a bold claim which you don't really back up. If they can't put
together a functioning state where the economy can prosper then they most
certainly have their fair share of bad people too, many of them in powerful
positions in the state, offsetting all of the good ones.

Just look at the disappearances of people and kids in the country which the
state was complicit with. This and other lawlessness destroyed tourism in
Acapulco which used to be a primary tourist destination there:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Iguala_mass_kidnapping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Iguala_mass_kidnapping)

Or the foreigner-owned hotels taken over by armed thugs and corrupt judges:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/17/world/americas/mexico-
tulu...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/17/world/americas/mexico-tulum-
corruption-evictions.html)

Or entire towns being taken over by vigilantes because of police corruption:
[http://www.naturalnews.com/039808_vigilantes_Mexico_armed_ci...](http://www.naturalnews.com/039808_vigilantes_Mexico_armed_citizens.html)

Their all-out war with the cartels hasn't done much to reduce the flow of
drugs either, it mostly created a series of power vacuums for the next round
of poor kids to take over. The failures in enforcement makes the police/army v
cartels comes off as two parties with a very thin line of morality separating
them. That's not helping the situation and the opposite of leading by example.

These are just some recent examples. In this environment it's no wonder they
haven't developed a thriving (legal) economy. Maybe they should focus on
letting the good people run things and take a good hard look at the people
they are letting hold power...

There seems to be a culture of turning a blind eye to people in power not
following the laws and this is only something they can solve internally by
holding up their representatives to a higher standard.

~~~
hyperliner
I read the "foreigner owned notes taken over by thugs" article and it seems
that these foreigner owners had pretended there was no competing claim to the
land they bought, and lost out in court. So it seems this is a case of an
individual who rolled the dice and lost, not that "thugs stole his hotel":

\------------------

Yet he soon learned that a family from the distant northern state of Nuevo
León claimed to have a title to part of the ejido land, a conflict that had
percolated for years.

Mr. Jacquet did not let it deter him. “I looked at everyone else, and we
weren’t worried because nobody had lost their land,” he said.

By the late 2000s, though, Tulum had taken off as a vacation destination. Room
rates soared, making beachfront properties more attractive as takeover
targets.

One of the first significant warning signs for business owners came on Nov.
30, 2009.

That morning, two dozen police officers and a judge descended on Ocho Tulum, a
hotel belonging to Mr. Wolf, the American entrepreneur. It sat on beachfront
land that he had rented since 2005 under a 30-year lease. In 2006, before he
started building, he had learned there was a competing claim to part of the
land, but decided to move ahead with the project.

“I heard that it would probably not amount to anything,” he said. “I never
thought that I was at risk of losing it.”

He challenged his loss in court, but was defeated after years of litigation.

------
mc32
It's interesting that Mr Romero didn't decide to want to build this city on
the Guatemala-Mexico border to grant Guatemalans access to the benefits of the
Mexican economy.

For reals though, Mexico needs better government. Dirt poor countries with a
quarter the resources are beating them badly, Korea, Malaysia, Chile. They
have squandered opportunity after opportunity, Venezuela is catching up
though.

Activists would do quite a lot more good by demanding better from their own
government. I mean better management and governance.

It reminds me of people saying if Trump wins they'll flee to Canada... That's
the worst thing you can do, if you actually care for outcomes.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _It reminds me of people saying if Trump wins they 'll flee to Canada...
> That's the worst thing you can do, if you actually care for outcomes._

Those who say that for sure won't actually do it.

In Poland, we had half of the country declaring they'll swim to Sweden if PiS
(a political party) wins. They won, nobody left. Fast-forward few years, we
had prominent people proclaiming they'll leave the country if PiS wins. They
won again, nobody left.

~~~
saosebastiao
I don't think this is entirely true. It's probably rhetoric for most, but
Trump is the most extremist politician we've seen in the US since Andrew
Jackson. It's not just that Americans want nothing to do with _him_...its that
they want nothing to do with _a nation that elects him_. I'm relatively
reassured that he won't win though [0].

[0] [http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-
forecast/](http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/)

------
eternalban
> “With technology, those borders are just becoming symbolic limits”

Architects say the darnest things, sometimes. Technology has not rendered the
legal regiments of distinct states to mere symbolism.

------
ASalazarMX
There's an annual celebration between the cities of Brownsville, Texas and
Matamoros, Tamaulipas which could have been the precursor of this idea. It's
called "Día del Charro" (Charro Day)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charro_Days](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charro_Days).

The two cities are in such good terms that even in the late eighties migration
control was suspended one day so people could freely cross forth and back to
see the parade starting in downtown Brownsville and ending in downtown
Matamoros.

This free crossing was discontinued due to federal laws, but the two cities
remain as close as ever.

------
DominikR
How many of these centrally planned utopias have ever worked out well for the
people?

I'd prefer if political parties would openly state their policy and how they
will change the laws instead of saying one thing and then in secret ignore
existing laws to create a situation with tens of millions of illegal
immigrants that is now hard to deal with humanely.

Nobody is going to win a popularity contest with the policy to deport millions
of people, but no one would have won a popularity contest either by importing
millions of people.

Now they can all shrug their shoulders and say it's not our fault, but it
clearly is someones fault. It is possible to have a secure border with mostly
legal immigration, other countries did it before and they do it today as well.

Aside from that it isn't beneficial for Mexico that some of their brightest
men and women move to the US while their drug cartels smuggle money and
weapons into Mexico which they use to corrupt and slaughter their own people.

------
whybroke
The Tohono O'odham people lived happily straddling the border drawn as a
straight line in Washington.

That is until 1980.

Strange that "progress" makes a human system that worked happily for 10,000
years suddenly an unthinkable conduit to crime in some people's minds.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tohono_O%27odham_people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tohono_O%27odham_people)

------
hasbroslasher
Good to finally see some hexagons put to use in city planning. The more-area-
per-perimeter effect is a great template for a future where automobiles are
less common and there are more people. Plus they just look cool.

~~~
nashashmi
This is the first time I have come across hexagonal city planning. A search on
Google reveals this is a well established and researched principle, but I have
not really found any actual cities planned this way.

I am just thinking about the the intersections of hexagonal systems. In
locations where you have 4 roads intersecting, the roads are not 90 degrees.
This is not ideal in intersection design. Second, at locations where you have
these diagonal streets coming together, it seems like traffic
bottleneck/nightmare. Currently existing intersections like this have been now
simplified into roundabouts or simpler 3-way intersections.

I am going to continue pondering on this subject, but these are my immediate
thoughts.

~~~
hasbroslasher
I think hexagonal cities are going to require different traffic patterns. I
think it would make the most sense to have cars drive in "circles" around the
hexagons, and then having the left (outermost) lane available for left turning
onto another hexagon. That way, it's really easy to do U-turns (just drive,
uninhibited, around the hexagon) and you could build highways at varying
distances that act as loops (like major metro areas already have). This sounds
like an interesting problem to model computationally! I wonder what the
optimal hexagon:car size ratio is? (essentially how many times longer should
the side of a block be than a car)

Granted, I think that it's going to become necessary at some point to have
cars and pedestrians operating on different "floors" \- in major metro areas,
pedestrians are already massive cluster fuckers and getting around downtown SF
or NY is incredibly inefficient in an automobile (at least during the day).

------
xigency
Ignoring the political significance of this design, the cubic street layout
would either be great or awful based on experience with diagonal streets.

Does anyone know of examples of other cities with striking diagonal layouts?

~~~
madenine
DC resident here - diagonal boulevards sure looks pretty, but 5+ way
intersections are always a mess.

All I saw from the road-map of this city was waaaay to many 6+ way
intersections of major (perimeter or axis of triangle/hexagon areas) roads.

Look at the central north/south road, you've got a 6-way intersection every
block. No thanks.

------
gok
"Also: No sprawl."

Fitting that the article this line actually links to is titled "El Paso Is
Learning That Not Everyone Hates Sprawl."

------
sverige
Laredo / Nuevo Laredo are pretty close to this already. Just remove the border
guards and build a couple more bridges.

------
kinkdr
Aside from politics, the hexagon pattern looks nice, but how is he planning to
manage traffic at the points of intersection? A 3-way traffic light will
create terrible traffic jams.

------
Grishnakh
This is a stupid, stupid idea. Cities that cross borders are a problem
wherever they are, because of the administrative difficulties involved: you
can't have a single, consistent set of rules and laws spanning the whole city,
you don't have a single government managing it, etc.

We already have a LOT of problems here in the US where metro areas are
comprised of multiple cities, and worse, cross state boundaries.

Ask anyone who lives in one state, and drives to the other state to go to work
every day, how they like doing their taxes: it's a nightmare of forms every
year because there's multiple taxing authorities they have to answer to.

Or look at public transit that crosses state boundaries, such as that used
between New York City and New Jersey. It's a mess, because there's no single
government that the transit agency has to answer to and is accountable to.
Funding is always a problem because again, there's no single government that
controls it, and no single electorate that government is accountable to.

Even a metro area within a state, but composed of multiple cities can have
problems. In the Phoenix metro area, there's confusion at traffic lights
because all the cities have leading left turn arrows, _except_ for Scottsdale
which has lagging turns. This has caused many accidents because drivers get
used to one or the other and then drive across one street and suddenly the
standards change.

There was an interesting college project back in the 70s called "The 38
States" (google it) where a class decided the current US state borders were
badly drawn and led to too much inefficiency, so they came up with a new map
of the US with idealized borders, taking into account local cultures and
locations of metro areas. One of the prime factors in how they drew the new
state borders was to make sure that no metro area spanned two states, and
instead the borders were drawn, whenever possible, in rural areas between
cities. This guy's idea flies entirely in the face of this.

The governments in Oregon and Washington already complain a lot about people
living in Vancouver (WA), where there's no income tax, and then doing all
their shopping in Portland, where there's no sales tax. Doing this over a
national border, between two countries as economically disparate as the USA
and Mexico, is a recipe for disaster.

Plus, as dogma1138 says, we _already have_ places much like this on the
border. El Paso/Cuidad Juarez is a prime example. It isn't a panacea, and last
I heard, Juarez had a huge problem with brutal gang violence.

~~~
seszett
It doesn't work _that_ bad with cross-border metro areas in the EU. Or at
least the ones I know.

I live in one, it's perfectly good. Maybe I wish the metro could have a few
stations on the Belgian side of the border, but the buses do cross it so it's
still fine. Other than that I don't see a problem with the cross-border
situation. (By the way, it not only spans across France and Belgium, but also
across Flanders and Wallonia on the Belgian side).

But there is one common metropolis authority that the transit agencies have to
answer to and that coordinates what happens in the metropolis, it's like the
inverse of what you're describing in the US apparently.

~~~
Grishnakh
>It doesn't work _that_ bad with cross-border metro areas in the EU. Or at
least the ones I know.

It doesn't work _that_ bad in the US either, but there's tons of room for
improvement. But, just like the EU, in the US neighboring states are usually
at or near economic parity; this is not the case for US/Mexico. Imagine having
a city in the EU that's half in Germany and half in Greece (suppose there's a
freak seismic event that moves the two countries together).

>I live in one, it's perfectly good. Maybe I wish the metro could have a few
stations on the Belgian side of the border, but the buses do cross it so it's
still fine.

Well obviously it's not fine, and could be a lot better. Why settle for crappy
bus service when you can have a subway system that doesn't stop on one side of
an artificial and nonsensical border? If your entire metro area was within one
country, you wouldn't have this problem; if it made economic sense to the city
to put in those metro stations, they'd just do it, and wouldn't have to mess
around with a bunch of international (though at least intra-EU) political
problems to get it done. It's not easy to build infrastructure that crosses
political boundaries, and _especially_ national boundaries; look at the
Chunnel. How long did it take them to finally agree to do that?

>By the way, it not only spans across France and Belgium, but also across
Flanders and Wallonia on the Belgian side

That's probably not a big deal because it's in the same country, and I'm
guessing different regions within Belgium don't have quite the autonomy and
political bickering that separate US States do. But spanning France and
Belgium isn't as easy. Now, imagine that your city spans France and Spain;
don't you think there'd be more problems? How about France and Italy? Italy
and Croatia? France and Switzerland (which isn't EU)?

>But there is one common metropolis authority that the transit agencies have
to answer to and that coordinates what happens in the metropolis, it's like
the inverse of what you're describing in the US apparently.

We have that too, but it's frequently a mess. In metro areas that are within a
single state, there's usually a single metro transit authority that runs the
buses (not that many cities have subways here). In DC, there's a single agency
that runs the subways, which run between Virginia, Maryland, and DC, and that
agency is an utterly corrupt mess with horrible service and fatal train
accidents. In New York, the MTA runs the NY subways and buses and the LIRR
(Long Island Railroad), but then NJ Transit runs the trains and buses on the
New Jersey side, which also stop in Manhattan on the NY side, so there isn't a
single authority there, nor a single transit system (so to travel between
Jersey City and Brooklyn you'd have to take a PATH train or a bus to
Manhattan, then get off and go to a separate station possibly, get on a subway
with a separate ticket, and go the rest of the way; the entire trip would take
quite a while because there's nothing resembling a direct route. It's much
worse if you're going to the Bronx or Queens or Staten Island.). When there
isn't a single government or single transit authority, there's no consistency
and no single overall plan of how to implement an efficient system. And when
there is a single authority (like in DC) but no single government, you end up
with massive corruption and mismanagement because they don't answer to a
single governmental authority.

------
gjolund
Aka San Diego.

------
pacofvf
When did HN become /r/worldnews ?

> Dirt poor countries with a quarter the resources are beating them badly,
> Korea, Malaysia, Chile.

> where the Mexican side provides cheap day labor and a "safer" platform for
> criminal activity due to the financial disparity.

> Mexico now effectively a narco state ruled by the cartels

> The solution we've pursued thus far does indeed make Mexico richer, but it
> also makes parts of the US poorer.

> Well, as we can see from southern Tucson, that city has become progressively
> worse as more non citizens have taken it over.

------
awesomerobot
What if the wall was housing for the poor

