Open Collections

Rivera Espinosa, Juan Luis

University of British Columbia

The Mexican Pacific Coast has historically been a popular vacation destination. A rapid expansion of Hawaiian surf culture in the 1960’s via Southern California, also lead to a different type of tourism on the North American Pacific Coast. The search for undiscovered surf breaks began to drive tourism to many small, rural communities. Due to converging factors which will be examined in the introduction of this thesis, the pace of growth has increased exponentially. This rapid expansion has not been accompanied by a proportional investment in infrastructure and planning, causing an array of negative environmental and social impacts. There are also many missed opportunities to leverage the significant potential of these communities to complete smaller projects which could have many cascading impacts, reducing government reliance. The definition, prioritization, and execution of development projects, both public and private, would benefit from a shift in current common practice. This thesis proposes the Potential Identifier for Community Evolution as an alternative approach. The town is understood as a system, composed of many sub-systems, each containing nodes and flows. Regenerative opportunities can be found at any point in the system. Using Sayulita as a case-study, the thesis lays out a methodology for efficiently leveraging local knowledge of place to identify potential and prioritize points of intervention at any nested scale. Ultimately, the goal of these interventions is to trigger the gradual evolution of the system into a new, balanced, state. The methodology is organized in phases, which, despite having an inherent order, are designed to be iterative and feed back into previous phases as well as informing the following phase. Once an intervention is identified, the implementation phase begins, the impacts of which are assessed and fed back into the understanding of the systems of place. The systems mapping matrix tool developed for this methodology is designed to be updated and used as a working document to continue leveraging potential following, or in parallel, to the implementation of any given intervention. For each phase, this thesis will describe how it was developed, the tools and methods of engagement, and simulate results as a demonstration.

Text; Dataset

2024-07-30

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88732

Architecture

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/