The Peripherization of Mexico City

The Peripherization of Mexico City Christian v. Wissel1 ‘The city’, it is widely agreed, has to be regarded as process rather than as thing.2 This in mind, it becomes apparent that when describing a city it can only be the description of urban change. Yet this change, too, is not single cut, following a clear line of narrative. To the contrary, it is an array of processes, pointing in multiple directions while being entangled on multiple scales. The city, then, is a kaleidoscope of tendencies of urbanization as well as the site of their conflict; and Mexico City, surely, is to both these perspectives no exception as well as a good example. In the following, I will briefly picture those currents and crosscurrents that channel the most Mexico City’s urban transformation at the time of this writing. My focus will lie on those territories of the city that can be described as its periphery: material and social geographies that are subjected to, in conflict with, or left in oblivion by ‘centrality and its movements’.3 Here, on the frontier of both citification and urbanization,4 that is, in the ‘peri-urban continuum’5 where the urban is right in the process of its becoming both in material and in cultural terms, is where the future of Mexico City is currently under dispute. Furthermore, I will describe these tendencies of urban change by framing them as competing concepts that are both specific to Mexico City and, at the same time, allow drawing comparisons to urban agglomerations elsewhere. Developing these concepts, I will draw geographical, sociological and anthropological perspectives together in order to arrive at a more complete, yet certainly also more complex map of the city’s transformation. This is not to pass over problematic issues such as waste disposal, water supply, traffic, air condition or social marginalization and displacement or environmental risks, but to concentrate on the underlying forces that bring about their materialization in urban social space. Taken together, Mexico City’s tendencies of change can be described as the city-region’s comprehensive peripherization, a process that leads to the formation of an essentially different type of city6 in which the periphery is increasingly substituting the city as the dominant everyday experience and common denominator of the urban imagination.7 Metropolitan Area of the Valley of Mexico Rather than ‘a city’, 21st century Mexico (City) is an urban agglomeration extending over some 1.600 square kilometers of continuously built-up land covering extensive grounds – and continuously expanding grounds – of five former lakes as well as of a small island where the original city happens to have been founded by the Mexicas/Aztecs and re-founded by the Spaniards in the 14th and 16th centuries. Today this urban region spreads over three federal entities: the Federal District – the administrative entity that contained the entire city called Mexico until its ‘explosion’ mainly between 1950 and 1980 – as well as the two federal states State of Mexico and Hidalgo. Nevertheless, Mexico City is also contained in one single, although certainly over-spilling valley which is why it is denominated the Metropolitan Area of the Valley of Mexico (ZMVM). This urban/urbanizing valley is what we refer to when we talk about Mexico City being a city of twenty million inhabitants.8 Beyond this valley, the ZMVM is tying into its expanded urban system the two neighboring metropolis of Toluca and Pachuca, giving rise to the ‘Central Mexican Megalopolis’.9 Incomprehensibilization The first tendency of change I want to point to describes the cultural implications that come along with a city that is a process of overcoming further and further any territory and name to hold it. Metropolitan and megalopolitan Mexico City forces its inhabitants to deal with the increasing incomprehensibility of their habitat. The formula goes something like this: proximity squared by distance times diversity squared by its simultaneousness and both of these divided by everyday life. Hence, coming to terms with the sum of such “urban unfathomable”10 has become an essential aspect of life in Mexico City. Equaling the population numbers and ethnic and cultural diversity of the Central American subcontinent, the anthropologist Nestor García Canclini refers to the ZMVM as a “city-continent” in order to describe the “heterogeneous multitude of zones, neighbourhoods, journeys and experiences offered by the urban ensemble.”11 Metropolitanization In regard to these multiple zones and journeys, the second tendency of change becomes apparent on the geographical level of urban/urbanizing affairs in the valley: the physically and demographic expansion of the city into the region.12 Over the past decades, the four inner city boroughs have lost up to fifty percent of their population while municipalities such as Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, Ecatepec, Tecámac and Ixtapaluca located in the State of Mexico and Hidalgo have accumulated the highest population figures and growth rates of the region.13 This way, the ZMVM has seen the transference of its population gravity from the ‘center’ to the ‘periphery’. According to the last census from 2005, ‘only’ nine million inhabitants lived in the Federal District while the remaining eleven million lived in the surrounding two states. This shift from city to region has been addresses as Mexico City’s ‘metropolitanization’, a process in which the main city is intensifying its functional influence over its equally expanding hinterland, together with setting off peripheral urban growth as the result from “centrifugal flows from the metropolitan core”.14 Diffusion Yet this is (of course and again) not the whole picture unfolding on the ground of the ZMVM’s peri-urban continuum. Increasingly, urban restructuring shows also the pattern of ‘region-based’ as opposed to ‘city-based’ urbanization.15 This tendency of expansion is challenging a clear-cut direction of development from inside to outside. As a consequence, it gives rise to the formation of what has been addressed as the ‘diffuse city’, an urban system now increasingly blurring the boundaries between city and hinterland, centre and periphery, not only in territorial and functional terms but equally so in terms of our understanding of the city as such.16 The land-use pattern of this emerging regional city of the valley of Mexico is increasingly characterized by a heterogeneous mix of urban, suburban, peri-urban and rural conditions where industrial and agricultural territories are tied into the urban/urbanizing composition as much as military zones, wastelands, and ecological reserves. Sub and counter centralization Despite, or rather, because of the dynamics of diffusion, the social geographer Adrian Aguilar attests this new regional city to be developing new forms of centrality in their own right.17 In the current transformations of the ZMVM, he identifies tendencies also of re, sub, and counter concentration: tendencies, which produce and reproduce centers and peripheries of various scales and scopes. In accordance with centrifugal dispersion, this sub-centralization takes the form of “polycentric islands” and “linear developments of higher densities”.18 These morphological re-concentrations of the urban landscape become apparent also in economic and cultural terms: either in the proliferation of commercial nodes, ‘centers’ more like in ‘shopping centre’ than in ‘civic centre’ – although this second category does persist in form of historic villages that are drawn into the urban system, too – or in form of sub and counter cultural sites of resistance, as in the case of Valle de Chalco, for example, a municipality located to the far southeast of the valley. Due to its explicit peripheral condition, over the years, this municipality has become the home of the biggest community of indigenous Mexicans in the valley. Today, 44 out of 62 ethnic Mexican groups can be found living here and even though they continue to live on the margin of society due to open and disguised racism, the once dusty grounds of their now hometown have emerged as the most cosmopolitan space of them all in the valley: the central place where their many languages converge to a vibrant pluralist voice of the other city that often goes unseen.19 Fragmentation The diffuse regional city, therefore, is not a process leading to entropy, making all black and white fading out into egalitarian grey. Rather its dynamic of increasing differentiation of centre-periphery relations and the simultaneousness of the contradictions they entail is that of a scattering of urban functions, elements, groups and forms, as well as of their concerns and conflicts, and of the concepts by which to address them; not of their annihilation. The diffuse city is blurring conventional distinctions between what ‘the city’ is and what not, yet it never ceases to be a city of very tangible divides and competing socio-physical fragments, increasingly differentiated by territorial disintegration, multi-directional expansion of its parts and the proliferation of social borders.20 Multi-directionality The first of these (sub)tendencies inherent to fragmentation is the deficiency of shared urban visions and inappropriate governance.21 The ZMVM is composed of 76 boroughs and municipalities located in three federal entities. Together with the country’s central powers, which are also located in the city region, all these levels of government do not only act as agents of its change but change it into multiple directions. “Hence, legislation, planning and urban taxation (tax on property) barely have any common ground” the geographer Alfonso Iracheta affirms.22 The resulting competition in directing the processes of urbanization between the region’s parts leads to the situation that the policies of one body are often made redundant by another. Examples for this abound on all scales. We find them in the incomplete installation of street lighting in a neighborhood caught up in the quarrels between two municipalities (where one municipality installs the street lamps while the other declines to connect them to the electricity grit);23 in competing and, in their effect often contradictory legislation in regard to urban development and, for example, the environmental management of the valley;24 and even in the birth of a ‘political valley’, the so-called ‘Valley Cautitlan-Texcoco’,25 located inside the Valley of Mexico yet aiming at implementing partial policies of urban planning to those territories of the urban region that belong to the jurisdiction of the State of Mexico alone. Segregation Socio-spatial segregation is the second of these (sub)tendencies of change that come along with the multiple divides and directions of a fragmented city and society. Polarized in overall terms into a wealthier western and a poorer eastern part, the clearcut distribution of Mexico City’s population gives way to a much more heterogeneous picture at the scale of the urban region’s uncountable neighborhoods.26 Where cities vanish, gated communities and privatized streets rise. As a result, urban life is increasingly taking place behind fences and walls and under the surveillance of security guards and CCTV.27 Yet this retreat from, and privatization of, public space is the result not only of the elite cutting their bounds with the local. Today, closed enclaves have become also the dominant spatial pattern of market-driven commercial urbanization as well as the idealized architectural-urban form to which the middle and lower middle classes aspire. Finanzialisation Following the commercial developers into their very modes of production of urbanization we can identify another key tendency of change playing out in Mexico City. In contrast to the dominant informal and self-built housing production in former decades – making up some 40% of all the city’s built-up land28 – this production mode is now being challenged by a new type of urban development: that of (formal) mass-produced row houses which by the time of 2005 have reached delivery numbers equal to those of the continuing production of self-built housing, both ranging at about 100.000 units per year.29 This new urbanization mode is the result of increased finanzialization of Mexico City’s urban economy and landscape.30 By entering the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 and having successfully deregulated communal farmland two years earlier,31 large swaths of land of the Mexican ejido system of shared land ownership have by now become the object of desire of international finance in search for capital surplus production.32 The noteworthy shift here lies not in the urbanization of these lands per se – they have been squatted or illegally sold and subdivided for informal developments before, too33 – but in the change of purpose of urbanization: if the (informal) production of housing has served before the accommodation of inhabitants of a city growing in numbers, today (formal) housing production serves the business model of international finance in a city growing in surface (growth by migration into the city region has ceased since the 1980 and the current population increase is based entirely on natural growth).34 Residualization With the rise of the gated community as the product of segregation and commercial ‘island urbanism’,35 a new type of micro space is emerging between more or less fortified enclaves. I suggest addressing these social-physical urbanization gaps by the term of ‘border spaces’ (espacios limítrofes) as they mark the social distinction between groups as the physical distance between their territories.36 In their material appearance, they are best described as wastelands, as spatial leftovers or, simply, as residual space. In their social function, however, they are very diverse sites of active or passive, low or high intensive conflict as well as spaces of possibility and openness for new and contesting ways of navigating the city. Border spaces abound in the segregated city, not the least because of two out of several “undesirable” characteristics of diffuse urbanization, as Adrian Aguilar has bewailed them, namely: “poor land-use patterns and growing vacuums of law.”37 Exceptionalization This growing vacuum of law, that Aguilar identifies, calls for our heightened attention. On the one hand, it produces spaces where possibilities grow. This space is the wide field of informality, yet certainly not of illegality. It presents itself as a realm of opportunities yet one that come at high cost. Rather than a vacuum of law, this framework for action is based on a ‘legal system of exception’38 in which subjects are hold in extralegal relations of ‘clientelism’ and corruption as a replacement for a formal rule of law. Within this system, authorities exceptionalize the rules; they tolerate and often even encourage informal activities so people can find their own means for dealing with their (precarious) situation. This way, informal agents pay most of the costs for urbanization and for the provision of livelihoods by themselves (lack of services, lack of legal, social and physical security). On the other hand, the vacuum of law does produce (proper) spaces of illegality, too: spaces where instead of formal rule, criminal rule is becoming the law. At times when trust in the authorities, and especially in the police, is down to cero and criminal activity is high (mainly burglary, drug dealing and kidnapping of which the later two are related to the activities of several of the Mexican mafia cartels), society is atomized and people are left alone with their fears.39 Responsibilization Hence, where formal policies do not reach (on purpose or not), or where their powers to hold people in relations that make them governable are challenged,40 we encounter highly flexible and mobile ways by which inhabitants tie their lives into the movements of their city by taking on responsibility by their own. Informality, thus, does not appear as resistance, creativity or even the freedom of action of free citizens as which it is often addressed,41 but as the responsibilization42 of subjects that have been left alone by the state. The sociologist AbdouMaliq Simone has coined this selfdependency of urban residents as a mode in which people themselves act as the infrastructure they are lacking in formal terms.43 In Mexico City, we encounter such responsibilization in all forms: from self-build bus stops to community-built streets, as well as family-based social security systems or neighbor-based financial pyramids that are called for aid for paying a hospital bill or making small long-term investments into ones house as the only provision for one’s old age. Democratization A countercurrent to the exceptionalization of legal and citizenship relations and the responsibilization of subjects is the next tendency of change we can identify as having effect on the central Mexican valley. This is the ongoing process of democratization: very slowly, indeed, and hindered again and again by serious drawbacks but, nevertheless, opening up new spaces of participation throughout the region. We can find examples on all scales: in the only recently acquired sovereignty of the municipality of Tecamac over its local development plan as well as in the creation of a number of cultural and arts-and-crafts centers, called ‘FAROs’ (factories of arts and crafts = “lighthouses”), that allow young people to explore and claim their citizen rights. And while the first example is the result of a national project aiming at the decentralization of political powers, whereas the second is the result of a (fleeting) moment of progressive cultural policies both these examples, I believe, point to a (slight) improvement in citizen participation in the city region. Consolidation The last tendency of change, then, which I would like to point to, is that of the process of metropolitan integration.44 The dispersion of people and functions, inevitably, comes paired with the proliferation also of the ties –and issues– that hold and bring them together. Movement and its materialization provide a picture of the relation between core and periphery. At the Indios Verdes interchange, for example, we can witness how a multitude of intercity, intra-city-region and inner city buses, coaches and minivans knot together the different transport networks that organize passenger flows across the Federal District-hinterland border and against all political obstacles that it provides. At the same time, at the Buenavista train station we can see how the opening of a first suburban train line in 2008 has reduced travel times from centre to fringe from about one and a half hours by bus to 25 minutes on train. This second example is still a rare case where two of the region’s federal entities and the central government have overcome their lack of metropolitan coordination and have been working together on providing shared solutions for a shared space. This new line is revitalizing the existing railway network after the national rail company had abandoned all its passenger operations in 1999. Almost ten years of political negotiations were needed to reopen the first of potentially several suburban lines that are, in effect, already built in their main features. Despite these difficulties in coordination and together with the equally un-coordinated implementation of two new rapid transport bus systems (one in the Federal District and a similar yet disconnected system in the State of Mexico) these infrastructure projects nevertheless mark the path towards the consolidation of the valley as a dispersing, yet (slowly) integrating urban agglomeration. Conclusion: compact peripherization Drawing conclusions from the multiple and contradictory tendencies of urban change in the valley of Mexico outlined above is, of course, an impossible task. The city as process composed of numerous processes resists any attempt of holding it neither on the ground nor on paper. Notwithstanding, we can locate this array of currents and crosscurrents in lived and shared space and describe the overarching experience they produce in those who cause and/or are caught up in their dynamics. To describe this experience, the writer Juan Villoro refers to his hometown ‘simply’ as being a case of “horizontal deception” where neither the name ‘Mexico’ nor the term ‘city’ are actually appropriate because what they refer to is not only many cities but each disintegrating the contours of the other.45 The decisive result of such ‘fraud’ is the ‘dizziness’ it produces by means of its many and paradoxical movements of urbanization. However, Villoro’s image reaches even further: On the one hand, it points to the experience of peripheriality that is the result of a valley bursting of “cityfull noncityness”; of what Edward Soja has called the ‘exopolis’: the city “nowhere yet now/here”.46 This ‘city without’47 is the process of wholesale peripherization,48 a phenomenon that is both overarching tendency of change and a way of life; that is the process of geographical, economical, social, political and cultural transformation and the everyday practice of its occurrences. In its working, existing inequalities of the city are reproduced, scattered and differentiated in ever smaller unites into the region.49 On the other hand, it points to the deception itself which is this ‘horizontal deception’ called Mexico City. This is, comparing the ZMVM with the metropolitan area of Los Angeles, for example, it turns out, that Mexico City occupies only half of the territory of the Californian metropolis while outnumbering it by one third in population. Hence, the ZMVM is rather a compact megacity in regard to others.50 Adapting Canclini’s notion of the unfathomable to the topographic condition of the valley, we can therefore argue that Mexico City is a continent in a nutshell. Adapting Villoro’s notion of the horizontal deception to it, we can argue that the regional city of Mexico is a process of compact peripherization. References: Aguilar, Adrian Guillermo. 2008. Peri-urbanization, Illegal Settlements and Environmental Impact in Mexico City. Cities 25:133–45. Aguilar, Adrian Guillermo, and Peter M. Ward. 2003. Globalization, Regional Development, and Mega-city Expansion in Latin America: Analyzing Mexico City’s Peri-urban Hinterland. Cities 20:3–21. Alarcón, Sandra. 2008. El tianguis global. 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Berlin: b_Books. Wissel, Christian von, and Valeria Marruenda. 2010. Nosotros Ciudadanos: Percepción y Aprehensión de La Megalopolis. Public round table discussion Presented at the, Mexico, DF, 23 August. Available at http://bambuser.com/v/977924. 1 Goldsmiths, University of London, Centre for Urban and Community Research; and Technische Universität München, Chair of Theory and History of Architecture, Art and Design. 2 cf. Harvey 1996. 3 cf. Lefebvre 2008, 150. 4 cf. Häußermann, Läpple, and Siebel 2008, 22. The term citification refers to the material (quantifiable) becoming of urban form; urbanization, in contrast, describes a cultural (qualitative) transformation of social relations that leads to the formation of an ‘urban society’ in the Lefebvre’an sense. 5 Aguilar 2008, 134. 6 cf. Aguilar 2008, 134 with his account of the changing characteristics of Mexico City’s periphery. 7 cf. Peter Krieger, art historian and visual urbanist from Mexico City’s UNAM in: Wissel and Marruenda 2010. 8 cf. SEDESOL, CONAPO, and INEGI 2007, 34. 9 cf. Garza 2000b. 10 García Canclini 2007, 188. 11 García Canclini 2007, 188. 12 Aguilar 2008. 13 Garza 2000a, 240. 14 Aguilar and Ward 2003, 7. 15 Aguilar and Ward 2003, 4. 16 Delgado 2003. 17 Aguilar 2008, 134. 18 Aguilar 2008, 134. 19 cf. Juan Carlos Martínez, co-founder of community radio Xico Kaa’a in: Wissel and Marruenda 2010. 20 Ávila Sánchez 2009; Delgado 2003; Nivón Bolán 2005. 21 Aguilar 2008, 144. 22 Iracheta 2006. 23 Berry, Martínez, and Pedraza 2007. 24 Lacy Tamayo 2000. 25 GEM 2005. 26 cf. Rubalcava and Schteingart 2000. 27 Wissel 2007; 2008. 28 CONAPO 2000, 41–65. 29 Castillo 2007, 184. 30 Aguilar and Ward 2003, 7; For a definition of financialization see Epstein 2005. 31 Ward and Jones 1998. 32 cf. Harvey 2008, 24 for a general account of the relationship between urbanization and capitalism. 33 Olivera Lozano 2005. 34 Negrete Salas 2000, 250. 35 cf. Ngo et al. 2007 The term ‘island urbanism’ refers to a market-driven urbanization that produces land-use pattern characterized by social-spatial gaps. 36 Wissel 2007. 37 Aguilar 2008, 144. 38 Alarcón 2008, 9 drawing on de Soto. 39 cf. Álvarez et al. 2008, 153. 40 cf. Simone 2004a, 7. 41 cf. Varley 2013. 42 cf. Heeg 2013, 77. 43 Simone 2004b. 44 Islas Rivera 2000, 376. 45 Villoro 2008. The term ‘horizonal deception’ is develloped by drawing on Borges. 46 Soja 1992, 94–95. 47 idem Soja 1992. 48 Nivón Bolán 2005, 144. 49 Nivón Bolán 2005, 155. 50 Garza 2000a, 242.