Abstract
ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the work of the Public Space Authority (AEP) in Mexico City to explore the politics of site selection in public space infrastructure investment. By focusing on a pocket parks program as a case study, we explore how governments and agencies make efforts to configure their distributional criteria for urban public goods. We develop an explanatory framework around showcase politics, where agencies favor high-profile locations to create rapid demonstrations of their programs and their effectiveness for an audience of governmental and social actors. Through showcase politics, agencies deploy their limited resources for maximum exhibitionary effects with the aim of justifying the existence of the agency and its programs as a legitimate solution to urban problems, and to support the overall political agenda of the party in power. While this decisional logic makes sense for the maintenance of a newly created agency within a bureaucracy, it contradicted the agency’s own stated policy goals to distribute public space amenities broadly throughout the Mexican capital.
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