Abstract
Cities concentrate the means of production, wealth, political power, infrastructure, educational institutions, and a relevant share of our cultural heritage. As such, they are seen as places of opportunities. Contemporary urbanization, however, being central to the accumulation of capital, has also escalated environmental problems that are usually suffered by the urban poor due to an uneven production of urban space. Mexico City is not an exception. It has mainly expanded through a lively auto-construction process and, more recently, under the incentive of a speculative urban development. The first trend reinforces the informal housing sector, in certain cases, involving significant environmental implications such as the degradation of land of ecological value. The second trend responds to capital accumulation dynamics, promoting urban renewal in central areas or where a greater potential rent-gap exists, underpinning the uneven production of urban space, and usually withholding most of its related socioenvironmental impacts. This paper focusses on this second process. It assesses the so-called “urban growth machine” in action, its socioecological impacts, and related contestation processes. With that in mind and after a general introduction and a brief description of urban development in Mexico, the real estate industry in Mexico City is evaluated in terms of the potential ecological implications of the building stock expansion from 2012 to 2018. A spatial distribution analysis of contestation processes, correlated to such urban expansion, is presented as well. The case study confirms what has been learned in other locations of the Global South, where a contradictory and uneven process of urban development has also been experienced under the stimulus of capital speculation. The paper, however, offers a novel approach by bringing together urban political economy, industrial ecology and urban political ecology analytical tools. Such hybridization, it is argued, enables a more comprehensive understanding of contemporary urbanization and its socioenvironmental impacts, which in turn is central to any effort for urban transformation.
Highlights
The production of urban space is highly tied to the rationality and stage of development of the means of production and reproduction of life, a logic that certainly shapes land use, economic function and structure, governance systems, and even the configurations and scale of potential urban conflicts
Though, that due to the low availability of land within Mexico City and its high prices, most of the formal low-cost peripherical urban growth has progressively moved to the metropolitan area borderlines [38,39,40]. Notwithstanding that both the informal expansion and formal peripheral metropolitan expansion of the built environment are relevant for understanding urban space sprawling and its implications [41,42], this paper focuses on the formal expansion of the built environment within the Mexico City administrative boundaries
Difficulties accessing information and its corresponding quality have been evaluated for each municipality by using the following categories: opacity or lack of transparency during the process of accessing to information (LT); difficulty of the process or bureaucratic obstacles (BO); and the deficiency of information delivered by local authorities (DI)
Summary
The production of urban space is highly tied to the rationality and stage of development of the means of production and reproduction of life, a logic that certainly shapes land use, economic function and structure, governance systems, and even the configurations and scale of potential urban conflicts. Under the current mode of production, land has become a fictitious form of capital that derives from expectations of future rents [1,2,3], a feature that places urban land as an epicenter of capital accumulation Such a process takes place unevenly in long working periods and turnover times, as not all urban land and its corresponding built environment has the same potential in any given period of time, and because of the different lifetimes of most investments. They are themselves intensively commodified insofar as their constitutive sociospatial forms are sculpted and continually reorganized in order to enhance the profit-making capacities of capital.” Such capacities have reached to a point where the value of all developed real estate worldwide already represents 58% of total global assets, including equities, securitized debt and gold, according to data from 2015 [5].
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