Project by: Jihye Park - Kuan Fu (Jeff) Huang - Zongping Liu - Rebecca Koh
Community Owned Micro Maquiladoras reimagine how jobs in border cities can serve their communities and landscape better. We propose a cooperative-led economy as an alternate system to combat entrenched poor living conditions and instability perpetuated by Maquiladoras. Currently, workers are trapped in a cycle of economic dependency on a system that extracts and exploits. This project shows that sources of income do not have come at the expense of the environment and worker rights. Instead, we tap on existing ground-up networks to build a community cooperative that employs locals to partake in sustainable supply chains and construct a productive landscape. Neighborhood-embedded production enables types of production that prioritizes local demands, such as production of building materials from recycled waste to construct collective housing. Repaired landscapes will thereby be able to reap ecosystem services. Hence, this serves as a model of how communities can reach economic resilience while stewarding their environment.
