Microgeographies: Cultural Geographies as Relational Link Between City and Hinterland
2012
In the coming 20 years the larger San Antonio region will undergo major changes. The city aspires to establish itself as a global city but at the same time to maintain the charm of a small town; we must also consider major infrastructural changes, environmental problems, questions of cultural sustainability and tourism, and the challenges that come with expansive sprawl. All of these issues are apparent, however, when we look at the larger San Antonio Rio-Grande valley region the relationships between urban-, suburban- and regional-systems remain unknown. The truth is that there is a spatial phenomenon of much larger implications that merits greater attention. The “thickness” of the San Antonio region has historically been constituted as a strategic region that converges complex ecologies and infrastructural systems, and more than ever it continues to be a critical space in the twenty first century. The San Antonio Expander aims to spatialize the formation of San Antonio as a larger geographic entity and recasts the city and its region as a spatial model. The idea was to expand our understanding of the boundaries between the urban and the rural, the city and the small town, the world and the local, and how these relationships can be shaped by design. This project did not “simply fall into mechanistic and technocratic ways of rendering it as a whole” but had the ambition to differentiate and use architecture as a relational link between the city and its hinterland. Within this broader ambition the San Antonio Expander dismantled the regions prevailing geographic, spatial and cultural meanings and activated critical questions about conventional boundaries [and perceptions] of the city and its hinterland. In four phases, we explored how San Antonio relates to its hinterland, and what role architecture plays in articulating this relationship.