Peninsula Roof Farm / Restorative Community Project, Tijuana

Kastanienbaum Villa Extension

Alessandro Bressan

March 25 2023

Peninsula Roof Farm

Tijuana is a city that lies at a crossroads, to the north the United States and to its south the rest of the western hemisphere. This ecotonal nature has allowed for a bottleneck to occur, a bottleneck of markets, people, and moreover immigration. These externalities have situated this north Mexican city as the last stop along an arduous path many in the world most cross to reach their final destination. Many migrants find themselves shutout from reaching said destination and must wait, leaving them in a state of limbo. With nowhere else to turn and no immediate prospects available it has become the job of Tijuana to offer shelter, work, sanitation, education, and food for these refugees.

This project, the Peninsula Roof Farm seeks to address one of the aforementioned issues by offering the latter. By utilizing the influx of trained agricultural laborers who might work north of the border seasonally or have been stuck in the Mexican border city for a variety of reasons, Peninsula Roof Farm would be able to capitalize on that transitory labor force so that food could be provided for all migrants if necessary.

One of the largest issues faced when confronted with the given site was the lack of available land to implement the strategy. To circumnavigate the density that is quickly taking hold of the entire city, the project moved to the less traversed, underutilized roofscapes, particularly that of the recently developed Peninsula fashion mall which wiped out much of the once found ecology and wildlife that was once found on the site. In order to take back the land from this now all too common capitalist endeavor we propose that we use the mall's steady water supply to provide water to the farm. Furthermore, we would create bridges that provided safe pedestrian passage over the channelized rivers and series of highways that overlap our site since inexplicably none are present anywhere along the site, illegally crossing the highway as well as the river are the only methods of crossing available to the citizenry.

Lastly, a parameter was set to create a system that could be assembled as cheaply and as quickly as possible as the situation on the ground is as dire as ever and seemingly continues to worsen. A system of construction that satisfied those requirements was the humble scaffold as it allowed for quick assemblage and reassemblage if the situation, as fluid and dynamic as it is called for it. In essence this project aims to provide permanent structures for an impermanent city so that there may be solid footing for locals and migrants alike to land on.