IN-PERSON ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

This article analyzes the case of Val’Quirico—a themed real estate development in Tlaxcala, Mexico—as a paradigmatic example of an urban graft: a spatial operation that inserts foreign urban and architectural imaginaries into local landscapes to reconfigure their meaning, use, and value. Drawing on the metaphor of botanical grafting, I propose the concept of the urban graft as an analytical lens to examine contemporary forms of spatial simulation, aestheticized experience, and symbolic aspiration. Through a multi-scalar and interdisciplinary methodology, the study explores how Val’Quirico emulates a Tuscan village—not as a faithful copy, but as a curated fiction that activates desires for beauty, order, distinction, and elsewhere. The article traces the theoretical, territorial, architectural, and socio-economic dimensions of this graft. It situates Val’Quirico within global patterns of duplitecture, themed urbanism, and touristification, while grounding its analysis in the historical transformations and spatial inequalities of the Puebla–Tlaxcala Valley. It argues that the project reflects postmodern conditions in which architecture and planning become narrative, space becomes product, and symbolic capital is embedded in the built environment. The urban graft is not neutral: it reshapes land tenure, labor dynamics, and class relations, staging an affective fiction that privileges aesthetics over civic substance. Yet this work is not merely critical—it is also personal. Written from the perspective of a Mexican urbanist living in Berlin, it reflects on identity, memory, and spatial longing. Val’Quirico is approached not only as an object of study, but as a mirror: a site where cultural contradictions, aesthetic aspirations, and neoliberal fantasies converge. By theorizing the graft as both spatial and symbolic, this article offers a vocabulary to read how urban desire is designed, performed, and territorialized in our time.