What is the huachicol-scape? —Navigating the multiple identities, landscapes, and architectures of an ecology of stolen gasoline

Abstract

This project used Harvard Graduate School of Design tools and resources to treat fuel theft as an object of study through three frames:

politico-economic, 2) socio-environmental, and 3) historic-spatial.

Following the tradition of urbanists looking at conditions that do not fit our current frameworks, these proposed frames aim to document and thickly describe the unique spatial, socio-economic, political, and environmental structures enabling an informal gasoline supply chain in central Mexico. The goal is to use traditional architectural tools (diagrams, plans, sections, elevations) to reveal the 1) symbiosis between gasoline theft, the state, and private capital, 2) how this symbiosis materializes into the built environment, and 3) how ecologically entangled these urban types are into the landscape. With more than 60% of the population actively participating in the informal economy, in Mexico, "informality" is the most accessible mechanism for providing livelihood, income, and service development, especially for disenfranchised populations. Fuel theft, known in Spanish as huachicoleo (pronounced "watchy-coh-leh-oh"), have exponentially increased since the introduction of NAFTA, today representing an annual market of 3 billion dollars. Despite existing socio-economic studies regarding petroleum’s role and impacts, what is the role of space as an agent in shaping the environment that oil — and in this case, the state (or Pemex)— has made possible? This work contributes as a disciplinary critique towards traditional economic and urban formal-informal dualisms by introducing an alternative state-enabled and controlled informality that is not just vernacular but also corresponds to a particular political-economic shift.