The Completion of Santurce
Preliminary Study for a Barrio Masterplan B.M.P.
by Leon Krier, editor
Oficina de Asuntos Urbanos. Oficina del Gobernador, La Fortaleza
San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1992
Spanish and English
Introduction
The absurdity of concentrating over a third of the Puerto Rican population in one metropolitan region must be for most on our mind if we want to solve some of the problems of Santurce's future.
Instead of occupying over 50,000 acres of good land the 1,200,000 people of the Region Metropolitana could be comfortably housed in 100 small, independent cities of 12,000 people, each not exceeding the size of Old San Juan, occupying altogether no more than 9000 acres (3,000,000 people live and work in Central Paris on 25,000 acres of land). Those towns if well located all over the island could largely feed themselves and dispense of the tyrannical daily chores of community, of circulation of peoples and hardwares, the principal causes for our wastage of time, land and energies. Whatever the fate of its suburban sprawl - our concern in this outline proposal is how to transform the area of Santurce into a Federation of 27 independent cities, no larger than Old San Juan. Indeed we consider Old San Juan not as an historic remnant, but as the paradigmatic model of Puerto Rico's urban future.
The citizens well founded distrust of centrally ordained masterplans would seem to defeat any such grand undertaking from the start. Rather than engaging into more grand slam enterprises I believe the success can only be achieved now, if the authorities are able to regain the public's confidence by creating urban models attractive enough to act as impetus for the democratic transformation of the city.
The realization of such a project is not so much a technical but and ideological problem. However the technical and legislative apparatus which has created and maintains the metropolitan mess of San Juan finds now few ideological defenders. Investing the countries main resources into more road building and vast public transport systems would be to condemn a terminally sick patient to the unending agony of intensive care and artificial life support systems. The solution is not how to travel more efficiently between, work, residence and shopping, but how to bring these commodities into pedestrian proximity of each other. The latter is the only reasonable way forward, if San Juan is again to become a place of civility and culture.
The immense popular success of Old San Juan's regeneration demonstrates that also in Democracy there exists consensus on matters of urban policy, once they have proven to work for the common good. If we want to be successful I believe that we have to go the way of the least resistance. I have to show in sketch-form, masterplans for 5 experimental areas within Santurce. They has been chosen without political wisdom and merely to explain a set of ideas and principles.
Politically, it may be easier and wiser to found on an attractive bay - location within the metropolitan region, ideas in a completely new creation. This, if properly propagated could in turn act as model for the transformation of Santurce and of other Puerto Rican Towns.
Leon Krier
15.V.88
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