Local Culture and Urban Retrofit: Reflections on Policy and Preferences for Wall and Roof Materials

Retrofitting strategies aim to reduce environmental footprints promoting the development or upgrade of existing infrastructure. One crucial aspect of successful retrofitting strategies is local culture, which can harmonise or come into conflict with retrofitting initiatives. However, investigations on the influence of local practises, particularly in the global south, are limited and such influence deserves more attention. This article explores the connexion between local culture and retrofitting strategies, focusing on wall and roof material selection in the Metropolitan Valley of Oaxaca in Mexico (ZMVO). We begin with a brief review of the retrofitting initiatives at related governmental levels. Then, through a survey, we analyse the choices and reasons for selecting specific materials for walls and roofs in the ZMVO. We discuss to what extent cultural practises and preferences have been considered or left behind in the strategies and ensuing challenges. The findings confirm important premises. First, tradition and community support were not relevant factors in wall or roof material selection. Material reuse, energy efficiency, and sustainability-related reasons were also not essential to the preferences. Instead, protection (against rain, earthquakes, theft and accidents), hygiene, and aesthetics had a consistently higher priority. We also found that poverty or lack of other options intersects with the use of precarious materials, creating constrained choices. However, the most crucial finding was that choosing less environmentally or culturally compatible materials was strongly connected with deprivation, having important implications in the selection of materials and retrofitting strategies. The current retrofitting initiatives call for sustainability and efficiency, but the local practises render these efforts insufficient and incoherent. Poverty and informal housing are the main emphases of the local policy. However, the policy focuses on new infrastructure and much less on the existing housing, causing less efficient retrofits. Guidelines for more sustainable material selection have advanced, but regulation and enforcement remain weak. We conclude by discussing all these challenges and providing a set of recommended actions in new initiatives.

Open and closed mid-front vowels in Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec

Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec is spoken in the community of Teotitlán del Valle, in the Central Valley of Oaxaca in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Teotitlán Zapotec is one of the Central Zapotec languages, which belong to the Zapotecan language family within the Otomanguean language stock. Teotitlán Zapotec has two mid-front vowels. The distribution of these two mid-front vowels is conditioned by the nature of the adjacent consonants and accent and presents challenges to formal analysis due to a number of properties predictive of the distribution: the disjunctive set of consonants conditioning the alternation, the ganging effect of consonant type and syllable structure as triggers, the featural characterization of the process as raising assimilation, and asymmetries between derived and non-derived environments in the observed patterns.

The geography of evolutionary divergence in the highly endemic avifauna from the Sierra Madre del Sur, Mexico

Background: Mesoamerica is a remarkable region with a high geological and ecological complexity. Within northern Mesoamerica, the biotic province of the Sierra Madre del Sur (SMS) in southwestern Mexico harbors exceptionally high avian endemism and diversity. Herein, we searched for spatially and temporally concordant phylogeographic patterns, in four bird genera from three distinct avian orders co-distributed across Mesoamerica and investigated their causes through hypothesis testing regarding historical processes. Selected species include endemic and differentiated populations across the montane forests of Mesoamerica, and particularly within the SMS. Results: We gathered mitochondrial DNA sequences for at least one locus from 177 individuals across all species. We assessed genetic structure, demographic history, and defined a framework for the coalescent simulations used in biogeographic hypothesis testing temporal and spatial co-variance. Our analyses suggested shared phylogeographic breaks in areas corresponding to the SMS populations, and between the main montane systems in Mesoamerica, with the Central Valley of Oaxaca and the Nicaragua Depression being the most frequently shared breaks among analyzed taxa. Nevertheless, dating analyses and divergence patterns observed were consistent with the hypothesis of broad vicariance across Mesoamerica derived from mechanisms operating at distinct times across taxa in the SMS. Conclusions: Our study provides a framework for understanding the evolutionary origins and historical factors enhancing speciation in well-defined regions within Mesoamerica, indicating that the evolutionary history of extant biota inhabiting montane forests is complex and often idiosyncratic.

The geography of evolutionary divergence in the highly endemic avifauna from the Sierra Madre del Sur, Mexico

Background Mesoamerica is a remarkable region with a high geological and ecological complexity. Within northern Mesoamerica, the biotic province of the Sierra Madre del Sur (SMS) in southwestern Mexico harbors exceptionally high avian endemism and diversity. Herein, we searched for spatially and temporally concordant phylogeographic patterns, in four bird genera from three distinct avian orders co-distributed across Mesoamerica and investigated their causes through hypothesis testing regarding historical processes. Selected species include endemic and differentiated populations across the montane forests of Mesoamerica, and particularly within the SMS. Results We gathered mitochondrial DNA sequences for at least one locus from 177 individuals across all species. We assessed genetic structure, demographic history, and defined a framework for the coalescent simulations used in biogeographic hypothesis testing temporal and spatial co-variance. Our analyses suggested shared phylogeographic breaks in areas corresponding to the SMS populations, and between the main montane systems in Mesoamerica, with the Central Valley of Oaxaca and the Nicaragua Depression being the most frequently shared breaks among analyzed taxa. Nevertheless, dating analyses and divergence patterns observed were consistent with the hypothesis of broad vicariance across Mesoamerica derived from mechanisms operating at distinct times across taxa in the SMS. Conclusions Our study provides a framework for understanding the evolutionary origins and historical factors enhancing speciation in well-defined regions within Mesoamerica, indicating that the evolutionary history of extant biota inhabiting montane forests is complex and often idiosyncratic.