From Global to Local: spontaneous consciousness and artisanal attitude in the self-built city in Latin America - San Martin de las Flores-Mexico’s self-built fabric. A perspective and tools for contemporary design.

In a world stressed by a cultural crisis, carachterised by excessive abstraction and virtuality (ex: R.Reich’s Symbolic-analysts or/and R. Florida’s Creatives), observing self built city constitute not an escape but an exploration to change our point of view and find a new path of development. Self building involves at any scale, a practical attitude and return to an psychosomatic interaction among inhabitants and built environment. Focusing in self-building can become a Slowskij’s “estragement” to reactivate different sensibilities, for a new philosophy in contemporary design. Morphological reading of self-built environments has a double importance: for self-built cities themselves, to give response to the need of social cohesion, for a restructuring that traduces these needs into building and transforms the plural individual needs into a collective urban structure; for the enrichment that this reading can give to the architectural community culture, a new panorama where we can search new path to go over the crisis; The paper focuses on the scales that goes from building and construction material scale to urban fabric scale. Starting from the observation of  a brick’s furnace, through the observation of an original constructive system, up to the aggregation of each built organism in the urban fabric it will be possible to read and interpret the formative process and to evaluate, through design experience cases, some new path for the contemporary design that come from this interpretation of self-built: design as a formative process re-activation, artisanal-not authorial sensorial design; References G. Caniggia, G.L. Maffei, Composizione architettonica e tipologia edilizia: 1. Lettura dell’edilizia di base, Marsilio, Venezia 1979; Gianfranco Caniggia, G.L. Maffei, Composizione architettonica e tipologia edilizia: 2. Il progetto nell’edilizia di base, Marsilio, Venezia 1987; L. Pareyson, Estetica : teoria della formatività, Bompiani, Milano 2005; G. Strappa, L’architettura come processo. Il mondo plastico murario in divenire, Franco Angeli, Milano 2014; V. B. Šklovskij, Teoria della prosa, Einaudi, Torino 1976; R. Sennet, L’uomo artigiano, Feltrinelli, Milano 2008; J. F. C. Turner, Abitare come Verbo, in J. F. C. Turner, R. Fitcher (a cura di), Libertà di costruire, Il Saggiatore, Milano 1979;