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Two Million Homes
for Mexico“Your First Home”, Ensenada, Mexico, 2009, C-Print, 76.2 x 101.6 cm © Livia Corona Benjamin.
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“French Restaurant”, Ixtapaluca, Mexico, 2009, C-Print, 76.2 x 101.6 cm © Livia Corona Benjamin.
“Single to Two-Story Expansion”, Santa Barbara, Mexico, 2009, C-Print, 76.2 x 101.6 cm © Livia Corona Benjamin.
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In 2000, Mexican presidential candidate Vicente Fox Quezada proposed an unprecedented plan to build two million low-income homes throughout the country during his six year term. On the eve of his election, Fox proclaimed: “My presidency will be remembered as the era of public housing”. To enable this initiative, the federal government ceded the construction of low-income housing to a small group of private investors. Almost overnight, grids containing 20-80,000 identical homes at a time sprang up in remote agrarian territories all over the country.
These are not neighborhoods of a “Home Sweet Home” dream fulfilled, but ubiquitous grids of ecological and social interventions on a scale and of consequences that are difficult to grasp. In these places, urbanisation is reduced to the mere construction of housing. There are nearly no public amenities and only very few commercial structures. Yet the demand for these low-income homes continues to increase and developers continue to provide them with extreme efficiency.“Yard to Home Conversion”, El Sauzai, Mexico, 2011, C-Print, 76.2 x 101.6 cm © Livia Corona Benjamin.
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“Progressive Development”, Los Heroes, Puebla, Mexico, 2009, C-Print, 76.2 x 101.6 cm © Livia Corona Benjamin.
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Livia Corona Benjamin was born in Baja California, Mexico. She currently lives in New York and Mexico City and was recently awarded with a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for her photography book project, “Two Million Homes for Mexico”. Unlike regular architectural photography, Corona's images do not claim to document architecture. Corona says she constructs “pictures informed by concrete or intangible aspects of buildings”, developing scenarios that transform thematic and formal aspects of the respective architectonic concept. The photographs tell of the life of the project, peculiarities of its protagonists, characteristics of the site, and atmosphere of its spaces.
Fox’s presidency lasted six years, during which some 2,350,000 homes were built, which equals a rate of 2,500 homes per day – and this trend is continuing.
Over the past four years, I have been exploring these developments in my project called Two Million Homes for Mexico. Through images, films, and interviews, I look at the spaces between promises and their fulfillment. In my photographs of multiple developments near Mexico City and in Baja California, I consider the rapid redefinition of Mexican “small town” life and the sudden transformation of the Mexican ecological and social landscape.
These urban developments mark a profound evolution in our way of inhabiting the world. In my work I seek to give form to their effect upon the experience of the individual… what exactly happens in these two million homes? How are tens of thousands of lives played out against a confined, singular cultural backdrop? I“Living Room to Bedroom Conversion”, Merida, Mexico, 2011, C-Print, 76.2 x 101.6 cm © Livia Corona Benjamin.
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