City and River: Memory, Myth, Identity

This essay is part of the book “Río Ciudad Monterrey: Space production, Ecology and Culture”, result of a study conducted under the direction of Peter Rowe, Roberto Pasini and Patricio Ortiz at the Universidad de Monterrey. The book is organized in five sections. The first is a general introduction with an overview of the work conducted. The second section (this essay) provides a historical analysis of the urban genesis and metropolitan evolution of the five-million people settlement of Monterrey. A hybrid apparatus of natural platform and anthropic structure has been forming through the incessant dialectics between the Río Santa Catarina corridor and the physical construction of the built infrastructure. The third section provides a contemporary characterization of the area by identifying the most relevant systems, urgent problems, and latent potentials. The fourth section presents a set of scenarios of strategic action cast by the work team into the possible future of the area. A fifth section synthesizes general conclusions. This essay constitutes the second section of the book, providing a general fresco of five centuries of nature/human struggle, or process of coevolution, in the area of Monterrey. The text analyzes the evolution of the city/river relationship across time focusing on how the identity of the dwelling community precipitates about nuclei of spatial signification, such as the consolidation of collective memory and identitarian narrative. The grounding of immaterial sociopolitical regimes over an ever-larger context can be subdivided in four phases. Colony: the colonial establishment of a permanent settlement, the grabbing of the land, the extermination of nomadic natives, the imposition of a new myth of identity through the physical organization of the Spanish town, the relocation of subjected labor. Modernity: the escalating violence of the assaults upon natural resources for extraction, consumption, and waste discharge, through the progressive technological accumulation of industrialization and mechanization; the construction of a modern collective memory upon the myth of functionality. Post-modernity: the advent of the post-modern socio-economic regimes; the monumentalization of the metropolitan identity through operations of urban mega-iconicism; the construction of a novel, retinal metropolitan identity to be cast into the international circuits of communication and economic and financial competition. Present-future: the recent call for the re-equipment of the metropolitan platform for contemporary challenges, such as offering adequate living standards and contributing to an overall balance of sustainability. By plotting an account of continuities and discontinuities in the relationship between geography and human construction, the text reconstructs the layering of the locus of the city and its river, that is, the inherent sense of the place.