ABSTRACT
Many Mexican communities classified as rurban – not urban nor rural – are areas of poverty and marginalization abandoned for decades by governmental socio-economic and urban development plans but now facing pressures for the commodification of their material and immaterial heritage and patrimonial treasures. Contemporary development plans, following global trends, have found new economical meaning in them as their symbolic value and the tourist and life-style industry, frequently ignoring local realities, values, needs and ways of life, can exploit historical attraction (values are attractive to be). This chapter explores new approaches to locally sensible design and planning through critical realism and semiotics of architecture applied to architectural education through a pilot project conducted in 2018 in the rurban community of Tochimilco, Puebla, Mexico. The architectural-urban analysis informing design was focused not only on formal, functional and material aspects, but also on the interrelation between space and human performativity, habitability and all the meanings and symbols that they include. The main goal was to give students tools for a critical analysis conducting to sensible and socially responsible design strategies emerging from local meanings.
