When we visited Parque Corrales for the first time, Jorge, our community liaison opened up to us about Miravalle. The middle-aged teacher in the Marist Middle School, long-haired and thin, told us that after living there for twelve years, he felt “a sense of identification amidst the community because we all suffer from the same problems: gang fights, drug traffic and consumption, or water shortage. We only get water once a week, for two hours! We all live this, and that makes us understand one another and feel for the troubles we all collectively experience.” César, a young resident, expressed similar sentiments, “here the youth doesn’t have the education for talking and engaging in dialogue; they were taught that fighting is how one settles differences.”

Today, Mexico still remains one of the most violent places in the world. These disruptions affect millions like Jorge, largely the consequence of violent, drug-related crimes made worse by rampart government negligence. In some parts of the Mexican republic—Estado de México, Guerrero, Michoacán, and Sinaloa—the mortality rate is higher than in war zones. ¹ Too often our only contact with violence comes through statistical figures we read on a page, but in places like Miravalle violence is manifest in other and much more painful dimensions affecting friends, neighbors, and loved ones.

Miravalle is a relatively new neighborhood in Iztapalapa borough, on the furthest eastern edge of Mexico City (Fig. 2) . Rogelio Estrada, a member of the resident-led Asamblea Communitaria de Miravalle, spoke to us about the challenges facing Miravalle: "... first of all, this is a community with many needs. INEGI and official studies classify it as a highly-marginalized area.” ² Residents here have poor access to public infrastructure and regularly experience socio-economic discrimination especially when, for example, many have menial day jobs in the capital where they are often treated like second-class citizens. Miravalle has around 11,000 inhabitants, most of them between twelve and twenty-five years old. ³ Less than 3 % of the population has attended high school or even received a middle school diploma. ⁴ Even if the will and social opportunity for the youth to attend school existed, educational facilities cannot meet the existing demand as they are often in run-down conditions. This educational deficiency is manifested in the community’s low income levels and high rates of violence. As Oscar Pérez, a manager at the local plastic thermo fusion workshop and member of the Asamblea, tells us, “adults feel a nuisance when they see so many youngsters in the streets with no work, no education, no prospects.” ⁵

With the invitation to participate in the 2016 Venice Architectural Biennial, Reporting from the Front, the project “Walk the Line” was conceived –apropos of the theme-– as an architectural intervention that could aid and ail a specific community. The effort was a collaboration among Tatiana Bilbao Estudio, and Alejandro Hernández. In one of the first discussions concerning the proposal, Alejandro Aravena (curator of the 2016 Biennale) commented that the funds provided for the Biennale were enough to build two units of social housing in Mexico. Rozana added that she was already involved with the Miravalle community, and we immediately decided to take on the challenge of helping transform the neighborhood. We wanted to initiate an immediate and lasting positive change on a place in need of a small-scale restructuring gesture. With the task before us, we established a joint-fundraising effort to match the amount of the Venice Biennale grant.

All of the aforementioned firms see the architect’s role as improving people’s quality of life through spatial means. We favored a simple intervention but one whose social implications would initiate a broad, positive and lasting social transformation. It wasn’t until our first visit to Miravalle, first interviews and field work, that we settled on Parque Corrales as the site where we could have the maximum possible impact.

Situated at the limit, the threshold between the neighborhoods of Miravalle and San Miguel Teotongo, an empty lot had become an impromptu park somehow overlooked and forgotten by the relentless pace of the explosive informal urban sprawl. As a neglected natural reserve and a potential link between four surrounding neighborhoods the site presented a real opportunity to work toward residents’ and the assembly’s vision of forging a true sense of community. Although it was a strategic piece of land with tremendous potential, Parque Corrales had the reputation as a hotbed of muggings and violence throughout the largest part of the last decade. Residents had not yet figured out how to transform such a valuable piece of land into a community recreational space, despite other successes in renovating other neighborhood spaces.

Due to the potential danger in crossing the park, many residents chose to spend more time and money circumventing the park to get to and from homes, schools, and businesses. Some people like young middle school teenagers, while crossing it to get to school or walking back home had little choice but to risk a possible mugging or exposure to potential sexual harassment. Cristina, one of the middle-schoolers we interviewed, told us how she had already been mugged four times. When asked why she continued to cross the park after such experiences, she explained that she preferred the potential risk over the forty added minutes to her commute that circumnavigating the park entailed. We were shocked to realize how such a state of permanent insecurity had become normalized, how experiencing danger, violence, and insecurity had become a part of that community’s identity.

The topography of the park grounds had been eroded by natural elements; in addition, the pedestrian paths in the park were lined with heaps of trash.

The budget for the lamp posts and site reconstruction was roughly the same as for the sixty-meter path installation built for the Venice Biennale. The idea behind building an illuminated path at Miravalle was to partner with an at-risk, marginalized community already thinking about its social needs and working towards solving its problems. To achieve such goals, partnering with other institutions became a key part of the project.

A proposal for a site transformation cannot merely be an isolated gesture, however well-intentioned or poetic. It is not enough. We sought to determine a plan of action to build relationships among people, the spaces they occupy and the objects they interact with. The inaugural intervention consisted in a line of actions that aimed to reinforce relations between people and raise awareness of the space they inhabit and how they inhabit it, instead of underlining the antagonisms of their own community reflected in the park.

The first stage of our intervention involved illuminating a 360 meter path through the entire length of the park. The idea behind the light path that could act as a bridge — not only interconnecting the surrounding areas, but also interlacing its people — was to be a line of recognition, a lit trail, a dialogue, a conversation and a catalyst of safety. Because design by itself cannot fix social ails, we made sure to enrich the process by working alongside the community with the hopes of building a real connection among the park borders, its different neighborhoods and the inhabitants of the greater region of Iztapalapa. By creating a safe way to cross and inhabit the void while working with the community, we could leverage the power of design to enact a positive and transformative chain reaction in the spatial use of that particular area. More specifically, working with a self-managed community became a key feature of the project, since we did not want to appear as outside actors that produced an external project; hence, it was our thinking that, by working alongside the Asamblea Comunitaria, we could together conceive a comprehensive and coherent action manifested into a particular space.

We are aware that lighting fixtures alone cannot eradicate the insecurity of an area, but by providing a well paved and illuminated path, we hoped it would help create a more welcoming environment which would .increase transit and maybe, in the the long haul, transform the derelict lot into a park buzzing with activity. Meanwhile, we hoped it would also demarcate a space of reinsured interaction, a “place of encounter” — as Henri Lefebvre would call it — where other public activities can take place. A transformation of such nature can only occur through an active social practice of space. To pursue such change into space we ought to construct the medium for positive interactions to unravel, while cancelling negative ones.

An urban transformation towards a safe area is simultaneously the cause and result of more people circulating around public spaces. Walkable places must, by definition, have a reasonably cohesive social structure that provide safety, a sense of community and a healthy public life. The profession at large and our studio have learned from the mistakes and broken promises of the placelessness of the International Style Modernism. For such complex problems architecture cannot be the only solution, but in working together we can spark social changes through thoughtful, precise and punctual spatial interventions.

The collaboration with other architects and the local community highlighted the importance of the activity that happens between buildings and neighborhoods, the in-between, and how such partnerships might meaningfully explore the ways in which we may contribute further. The prerequisite for a civic life is a walkable urban environment. If a safe line crossing the park could help diminish the insecurity and strengthen the connections between people and space, then architectural interventions as a stead for social development are warranted.

Little did we know, darkness was an ally of people with more nefarious ideas, rendering them invisible. After a quarter of an hour gasoline battery ran out, as did Rafael’s car battery. During the following minutes, we folded the cable, removing the bulbs from their sockets. In the blink of an eye, just when darkness had swept in, blanketing our surroundings anew, we discovered that two light bulbs had already been stolen.

Had some residents been resentful of a group of foreign professionals? Perhaps. Were a couple of light bulbs an opportunity to score some quick cash? Most likely. Despite that, we not only felt, but could appreciate from our experience that afternoon, that the majority of people were happy during the symbolic event, and that alone was enough of a reason to carry on with the construction plans. It was a good sign, as well as an enriching exercise for us, and a feasible imaginative act for them, to continue working there.

This event was a statement and an experiment to see how the line could bring transformation in the blink of an eye. A few weeks later, the formal construction of the line began, replacing illogical semi-destroyed paths and formalizing the desired lines traced by residents’ activities into permanent paths.

It was almost a usual Sunday in Miravalle: the Tianguis, ⁹ religious confirmations, parties in the corners or sidewalks, roasted chicken and soccer matches in the small courts around the borough. But that morning of the 26^th of July, we met at 8:00am with mothers and fathers that were summoned for their monthly community labor activity. This activity had in Miravalle a key part of its resident-led transformation.

The site had already been under construction for a few weeks. It was a slow process, but the once broken paths and unwalkable steep rocky roads had finally become smooth and uniform.

The families were ready for a robust working day. They came ready with picks, shovels, buckets, brooms, wheelbarrows, and grandmothers, brothers, children, uncles: all gathered in alliance for collaborative teamwork. They helped us unload the gravel out from the truck and lay it over the bare earth path that should become the Line. The families’ gathering was so enthusiastic that even the young kids wanted to chip in, moving gravel and sprinkling chalk.

There is no doubt that Miravalle is a self-managing community. It is an example of how collaborative efforts can render a community, especially the informal ones (which today represent the majority of the world’s built environment), more resilient, thus reinforcing social integration. In this case, the change was provided through the construction of cultural spaces within the neighborhood (for example: art education spaces for kids and youngsters, small scale cultural and ecological programs, etc.). Perhaps architecture can only contribute as a kind of “detonator” (a catalyst), for participation and involvement, staging a socio-spatial transformation, but it is an important role nonetheless.