Laredo, Texas, United States
Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation I New York City
Team: Yicheng Xu, Niharika Kannan, Chenyu Xu, Leslie Chu Yin Chuang
The city of Laredo is a border city between Mexico and the U.S. that is under constant transformation. Although bound by a clear geographical border, the city has a fluctuating border region as a response to the Population that keeps moving between the city of Laredo (U.S) and Nuevo Laredo (Mexico) for various reasons. A cause-effect strategy has been applied to observe the pattern of changes caused by the urban growth through Policy, economy and the resultant system being the housing. Border cities, including San Diego, El Paso, Nogales and Hidalgo are taken into consideration for analysis and compared to their respective border Mexican city.
The policy we observed to have had a different impact on these cities and growth pattern largely varied in all the American cities. It is evident that Laredo is a “mid-city” that has a constant source of informal immigrants seeking work opportunity and settlement, resulting in a distinct contrast in urban densities in Laredo (Texas) and Nuevo Laredo (Mexico). There is a stable source of low-skilled informal working force crossing the border from Nuevo Laredo to Laredo. The pattern observed is a dense urban core in New Laredo, attracted by employment opportunity in the U.S., and an urban sprawl in Laredo. This wave of migrating workers has affected the housing development in Laredo; high demands for affordable dwellings resulted in densifying informal housing like Colonia since the majority of them are not qualified to apply for Public Affordable Housing.
The cities that people moved to after landing in Laredo shows a clear pattern of temporary settlement. The housing was largely influenced by this moving population and was never to be of a good standard. We also aim to zoom into the human scale to understand the formal and informal housing typological evolution. The hypothesis of our analysis aims to convey the fluctuating population is hazardous to the growth of Laredo and will impact its urban growth drastically.
A region is defined by a political and geographic border. However, we discover that there is an intangible border in Laredo which is driven by population and policy.
