46 Otoño-invierno 2012 places was not clear, but in practice it worked like private property, they can be rented or sold. Modification of property relations contributed to transform the neighbourhood into a support for the development of the street market. Main square, streets, local shops and houses were used as a support for the street market activities. Space has reduced to an instrument of market activities. Part III. Transformation of the vecindad Aztecas n° 63 into a renovation unit The vecindad in the 60’s: use value of space8 The vecindades were built in the 30’s and 40’s as a solution to offer a low-income collective housing option to the migrants coming to Mexico City. Aztecas n° 63 had 16 “rooms” of about 25m² around a central patio and 2 shops opening to the street. It had washing places in the patio and common toilets, diagram (1). Shops had local uses, one was a local grocery store and the other was used as a place where empty glass bottles were bought. These bottles were collected and sold afterwards to a nearby factory to be recycled. The person who ran this business, Mr Horta occupied 3 of the rooms of the vecindad. He lived in one room and used the other to storage the bottles. Space was extremely efficient, working as a low-input system9 There were in total 7 shoemakers working and living in the vecindad. Four of them assembled the shoes, one cut leather, other do the shoe finishing and other the shoetrees. The vecindad worked as a “collective shoe factory” doing complementary productive activities. This way of making shoes promoted complementary relations and solidarity among neighbours. The neighbourhood had an artisans based economy. There were other productive activities in the vecindad. The woman who lived in the room n.7 sold sopes, prepared food in the street outside the vecindad. As we 8 Information was gathered during PhD field trip in 2011 and 2012 directly in Tepito with inhabitants information, in-depth interviews and mapping. 9 Low-input systems are those systems that needs few energy (fuel) to work, from a Systems Theory perspective. This kind of systems are less exploitative than high-input systems, which require a huge amount of energy (entropy) to keep functioning. Spatial practices in 1960´s (vecindad located in Aztecas Street nº 63)
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