Geographies of water are elements which are closely related to human settlements starting from the origin of the city, conditioning its growth processes and its urban form and socio-cultural dynamics. As a fundamental part of the biophysical matrix of the territory, water has the power to structure the territory and the city in a spatial, cultural, social and symbolic manner, since it has served as the basis for land anthropization from the processes of ancestral occupation in which nomadic tribes followed the courses of rivers, to the present, in which large hydraulic engineering works transform the environment in order to ensure the water supply and drainage. Thus, the purpose of this thesis is to study the relationship between water and the city, focusing on the case study of San Marcos river in Ciudad Victoria, Mexico, in order to understand water as a factor which may provide a basis structure around which the anthropized territory is built. Therefore, water has a great potential for projects and urban proposals, because it determines occupation patterns, territorial structures, the morphology of the city, the productive economy and local culture.
The first part of this research proposes deepening into the concept of territorial and urban vertebration related to the geographies of water. To this purpose, a series of tangible and intangible factors, obtained through the observation of the relationship between water and city in different reference cases from various cultural settings, is provided. The intent of detecting this number of factors is its systematic research on a specific case study.
The selected case study corresponds to San Marcos river in Ciudad Victoria, a river with a set of pathologies in an intermediate city which has great impact on the territory, being the capital of the state of Tamaulipas, and a communications logistics node. Tamaulipas is a border state whose boundaries are defined by the biophysical matrix, i.e., by the Sierra Madre
Oriental to the west and by the geographies of water in the other directions: the Rio Grande (also known as Río Bravo) to the north, the Gulf of Mexico to the east and the river Pánuco to the south. In this way, the hydrological network is formed by runoffs that originate in the mountains and cross the plains before discharging into the Gulf of Mexico. Consequently, the second part of this research consists of finding the factors of territorial and urban vertebration in the case of the San Marcos river in Ciudad Victoria, through morphogenetic analysis of the evolution of the city, through timeline slipping and making progressive zooms in the San Marcos river territory. In this way, it was possible to study the territorial anthropization processes, the elements that structure the territory and the importance of San Marcos river in the development of Ciudad Victoria.
The third part of the thesis involves the study of several projects that have been proposed for San Marcos river, in order to identify specific vertebration values which lead us to present certain intervention strategies that favour the cohesiveness of the territory and the city.
To carry out the analysis of the case study, a Morphogenetic Atlas was developed, including a collection of old maps, plans of the various zooms to the territory and the urban artifact, interpretative plans of the processes of land occupation, a historical reconstruction of the growth of the city and several new cartographic maps of the territory of Ciudad Victoria, expressly built in order to show its relation with geographies of water.