Abstract
The ejido system, based on communal land in Mexico, was transformed to private ownership due to neoliberal trends in the 1990s. Based on the theory of stakeholders being agents of change, this study aimed to describe the land policies that changed the ejido system into private development to show how land tenure change is shaping urban growth. To demonstrate this, municipalities of San Andrés Cholula and Santa Clara Ocoyucan were selected as case studies. Within this context, we evaluated how much ejido land is being urbanized due to real estate market forces and what type of urbanization model has been created. These two areas represent different development scales with different stakeholders—San Andrés Cholula, where ejidos were expropriated as part of a regional urban development plan and Santa Clara Ocoyucan, where ejidos and rural land were reached by private developers without local planning. To analyze both municipalities, historical satellite images from Google Earth were used with GRASS GIS 7.4 (Bonn, Germany) and corrected with QGIS 2.18 (Boston, MA, US). We found that privatization of ejidos fragmented and segregated the rural world for the construction of massive gated communities as an effect of a disturbing land tenure change that has occurred over the last 30 years. Hence, this research questions the roles of local authorities in permitting land use changes with no regulations or local planning. The resulting urbanization model is a private sector development that isolates rural communities in their own territories, for which we provide recommendations.
Highlights
Mexico has an intricate land tenure system with historical bonds between communal lands and a combination of public and private ownership
We present a theoretical framework on the premise of stakeholders acting as agents of change that drive urban development; second, we outline our approach to the evolution and collapse of the ejido land tenure system in Mexico; third, we conduct a geo-visual analysis to measure how much land was urbanized in the areas under study; fourth, we provide our results and discussion to critically assess private sector urbanization of ejido land and the roles of land tenure change and stakeholders in promoting land privatization; and we conclude that the tendency of the model of urbanization based on private development to isolate rural communities in their own territory means that the benefits are outweighed by the negative impacts
From 1995 to 2018, how much ejido land from San Andrés Cholula and Santa Clara Ocoyucan was transformed into urban areas? According to Figures 3 and 4 and Table 3
Summary
Mexico has an intricate land tenure system with historical bonds between communal lands and a combination of public and private ownership. In the case of Altépetl (see Note 4), ejido refers to the land outside of the calpulli for agricultural purposes) is an endemic land tenure model and one of the most important bequests of the Mexican Revolution, consisting of. The ejido has been widely studied in Mexico and Latin America because of its complexity and importance as an agrarian land policy [2,3,4], its fragile socioeconomic structure [1], [5,6], its socio-spatial organization [7,8,9], its urbanization [10,11,12] and its liberalization [13,14,15] through the reforms of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution. The paradox of the ejido system is that it is going extinct because it is considered an “irregular land tenure system” by modern land policies, half of Mexico’s territory is still held by ejidos and rural communities, including mountains, forests, natural reserves, mines and lakes, among others
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