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We are two students (Mexican and French) who studied last year in Darmstadt, Germany. Supervised by Jula-Kim in the TU Darmstadt, we worked on fusion cities: cities over the world, divided by a border. We interpreted what’s going on at the US-Mexican border, more precisely in the fusion city of San Diego and Tijuana (the world busiest entry/exit) and drew schematics maps.

San Juana

San Juana is the fusion of San Diego, US and Tijuana, MX.

The topics are diverse but to get an overview of the project and its problematic, we can say that we answered the following questions: “WHO is living WHERE? HOW and WHY? What are the CONSEQUENCES on the URBAN LANDSCAPE?”

We also focused on the exchanges taking place at the border: material and immaterial, visible or hidden. Material exchanges are illustrated with an example of recycling house. When the US bungalow crossed the border!

The idea of heterotopias followed the thesis of Foucault which says that some places are in-between worlds, artificial places faking “real places” but which of course are in our real world! Indeed on both sides of the very restricted US-Mexican border you find these kinds of undefined places – two examples: there are more than 600 Mexican restaurants in the US and the wealthiest housing in Mexico takes its typology from the US…

To respond to the last post (about Mexican places in Los Angeles), we can keep in mind that in these fusion cities not only Mexican are creating “faking places”. In the US as in Mexico everyone tries to take advantages of these attractive cities. There are numerous situations: you can find Mexican objects for Mexican people in the US as well as US objects for US American people in Mexico. It’s a situation which does increase the movement and the diversity of lifestyle consequently of urban situation, too.

These maps try to explain what we understood and illustrate the topics or wink at a particular situation.

About Heterotopias you can read more on http://foucault.info/

And you may find other links in the pdf, arguing the different topics.

Clara Irazábal Zurita is an assistant professor at the Columbia Univeristy in New York. She has been researching on migration. Today we talk about the Mexican space in Los Angeles: the shopping centre ‘Mexico Plaza’, where Mexican immigrants bring their children to teach them how life is in Mexico. The funniest thing about it is that the investors are Koreans, which is the second largest group of immigrants.

interesting links:
La Plaza by Los Angeles Times
Imperial Highway: Plaza Mexico
Plaza Mexico official site

A short and superficial overview on the HISTORY OF FILM in Brazil. As you know I made a critical remark to the Golden Bear for Tropa de Elite. I just would like to suggest some other favela-films which are worth to be watched.

Next monday you get a cast on TV Roc, the broadcasting from Rocinha.

Auf könnt Ihr das Thema Film hier nachlesen.

Topics of the Brazilian film history and films I am refering to:
I tried to find the youtube links – only the newer ones are in English. When I linked the English title than it should be in English.
Cinema Novo
= italian Neo-realism (for example: Roma Città Aperta from Bertolucci)

• ‘Rio 40 Graus‘ /Rio at 40 degrees, 1955/ and ‘Rio Zona Norte’ /Rio Northern Zone, 1957/ from Nelson Pereira dos Santos,
  You may watch the whole film in Portuguese. This here is just the first sequence. The rest you can find on youtube.
• Cinco vezes Favela /five times favela 1962/, a collective film

Gláuber Rocha calls it in 1965 the “aesthetic of famine”.

Cinema Marginal

• ‘Terra em Transe‘ /Gláuber Rocha, Land in Trance 1967/,
  DVD out just in portuguese.
• ‘Macunaíma‘ /1969 by Joaquim Pedro/,
  in Portuguese and French
  The scene with the swimming pool is from the Parque Lage.
• ‘O homem que Virou Suco‘ /The squeezed Man, 1979 by Jaoa Batista de Andrade/

Paulista
(more for TV than for cinema)

• ‘Olhar Electrônico’ /electronic view/ with ‘Garotos do Subúrbio’ /The boys from the suburbs, 1982/
• ‘Solo, the Law of Favela’ (1994),
• ‘Zezé’ – The boy, the pod-lid and the favela’ (1995),
• ‘Geraldo voador’ /Flying Gerald/(1996).

Favela-Pop

• Noticias de Uma guerra Particular /News from a private war, 1998
• Cidade de Deus /City of God 2002 by Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund/
• Cidade dos homens /City of Men/ = Telenovela
• Uma Ondo no Ar /FavelaRadio 2003/,
• Favela Rising 2005