How does the city become attractive to the great creative minds?

Where are the urban scenarios of Latin America heading for the future?

The phenomenon of the conurbation experienced since the end of the 20th century in most Latin American cities has expanded the spot from its historic center from inertia. Key actors have occasionally guided this development without knowing it. and they are the ones who channel it.

With the turn of the century, the increase in global relations and the fast world, airports began to stand out in this construction, not only from the perspective of their aeronautical and commercial exchange dynamics, but also from their construction role of new paradigams urban, in the form of a generic city, and giving us a new subject: airport-urbanism.

Air terminals are true magnets of the economy. And, taking advantage of its position, an immense number of economic clusters are concentrated around international airports in forms of companies, free zones, business centers, exhibition areas, producers of technological materials, processors of raw materials and generators of information, which daily are attractors of an increasingly broad, more diverse and more specialized labor mass.

In my research project entitled “SJO: Airport + City: Plan 37”, developed between 2016 and 2018, I was able to focus on the impact on the territory of the Juan Santamaría International Airport, its conformation patterns, its range radios and its future scenarios. I also delved into socioeconomic issues, starting with the new worker colonies, and I crossed this information with chaotic traffic phenomena and low accessibility to the territory. This experience has opened the opportunity for me to be an international speaker, twice.

Finally, I noticed that in the area adjacent to airports there is a rapid evolution of the sectors of the economy. In other words, that companies go from dedicating themselves only to producing or processing goods, to offering services; and lately, it goes with rapid steps towards an economy based on information, technology and research. If we are going to produce a city, we should take advantage of the favorable conditions that are being generated around the airport: qualified workforce, groupings of companies and good economic indicators. Almost as a utopian reality in relation to the rest of the Costa Rican city. Latin America goes from being a producer to a creator, and in that I have focused my studies in recent years, realizing several important facts.

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The bad: Latin America is one of the regions with the lowest entrepreneurship and application for patents worldwide, a symbol that we lack spaces that stimulate the grouping and organization of creatives. I share alarming figures:

“South Korea registers about 12400 patent applications per year with the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and about 1600 Israel. Comparatively, all the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean together barely reach 1200 patents (660 from Brazil, 230 from Mexico, 140 from Chile, 80 from Colombia, 26 from Argentina, 18 from Panama, 13 from Peru, 9 from Cuba and 1 from Venezuela) ”Andrés Oppenheimer. Create or die

The not so bad: We have stalled in the drift of the policy that confuses, the poverty that mistreats and the laziness that often accompanies us, forgetting that we also have a place in the world and that as societies we can cultivate dozens of Steve Jobs, Mark Zurckerbergs and Bill Gates. Latin America advances in issues of added value in production, boosting economies that align with the digital world and exhaling more and more its creators, building more qualified and more active workforce in decision making.

The good: The impulse of free zones and foreign investment has consolidated special territories that offer proximity and grouping to the labor force. These territories have been established over time and have gradually gone from being generic economic regions to being new cities. The move of workers to sites closer to their jobs, has also generated some empathy and belonging to the site, a fact that is very timely to establish a creative society.

The best: Innovators want to live in vibrant places, and there are sites as such in Latin America. In my research I noticed this opportunity in suburbs near Juan Santamaría airport, such as La Aurora, Río Segundo and La Ribera de Belén.

From this approach, what is my idea of city-making?

My idea is that traditionally productive and industrialized cities do not lag behind and become spaces for innovation and creation, that we think about what face we want to face with the remainder of the century and that we theorize and practice in these regions so dynamic and so full of capital. You never know what the next Silicon Valley will be, what you do know is that there are trends that let you know what the weather is for the next few years, get wet or dance in the rain; It is the task of us who produce the ideal city.

Arch. Juan Pablo Moya Álvarez