Otra Nation the last frontier

In an increasingly global world, it's pretty anachronistic to think about building walls again. MADE Collective - a cross-disciplinary national team of architects, builders, designers, engineers and urban planners from Mexico and the United States - has given a contemporary sense to this architectural form.


“The 19th century brought us boundaries, the 20th century we built walls, the next will bridge nations by creating communities based on shared principles of economic resiliency, energy independence and a trust based society.” These are the words written by MADE Collective, people with lots of experience in the field of design and planning, and recognised for their architectural work in Mexico and in the United States.
Their idea is as simple as it is ingenious and it is based on a “co-nation strategy”. While plans are being made to build an apparently impenetrable wall, complete with its very own “no-man's land”, Otra Nation is instead planning what they call an “everyman's land”. We're talking about a 10-km wide regenerative agriculture system that could create tens of thousands of jobs. A special economic zone intended to ensure sustainable healthy food for both the United States to the north and Mexico to the south of this open, co-nation border.
Otra Nation proposes a blueprint for all-round sustainable living and responds to the many problems associated with physical borders, including social, criminal, economic and environmental issues. The intention is not to return to a non-existent pastoral farming world but to head in the direction of a new model of co-living between the nations based on state-of-the-art technology, such as the OTRA ID System for biometric recognition of people and the E-residency smart chip.
The Otra Nation project is becoming the banner of a new approach to one of the world's hottest issues right now: borders seen as opportunities for cross-nation cooperation and for creating new forms of co-living and sustenance.

Christiane Bürklein

Otra Nation project
by MADE Collective
Find out morei: http://www.otranation.com/proposal
Images: Courtesy of Otra Nation