The Promise of “Good Design”: Architectural Imaginations of Ravines in Postwar Guatemala City

• In Event: Social Sciences of the Artificial: Interrupting and Interrogating the Meanings of Design

Abstract

Forty-two percent of Guatemala City are ravines: deep, canyon-like sites that fracture the city into twenty different zones. Covered in dense foliage from the region, ravines are contentious ecological forms for Guatemala City residents. They are often described as physical borders that disconnect Guatemala City; opportunities for landfills that are out of sight; and informal housing for gangs and the city’s poorest. In particular, architects have taken special interest in ravines. They argue that ravines’ geological and vertical forms are the physical manifestation of social inequality in Guatemala City. Using the language of “good design” (buen diseño), Guatemalan architects have proposed various plans for ravines that promise simultaneously to alleviate the social inequality engendered by a ravine’s great divide, as well as to improve the ecological conditions of the city. From interviews and three months of participant observation, this paper presents the architect as a political subject in postwar Guatemala City. This paper argues that what encompasses “good design” of the ravines in Guatemala City emerges from a subjective connection to, and understanding of, the local contexts, histories, and communities of ravines. This project intervenes in studies of design by locating the meaning of “good design” in the architect’s preoccupation with twenty-first century international concerns and movements to collapse the built and natural environment—a transition away from the twentieth century and modernist theories of total planning (Escobar 2018; Holston 1989; Rademacher 2018).

Author

• Melanie Ford, Rice University