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#NoShopultepec, #SíChapultepec: Citizenry Decides On Their Public Space For The First Time in Mexico City
#NoShopultepec, #SíChapultepec: Citizenry Decides On Their Public Space For The First Time in Mexico City
#NoShopultepec, #SíChapultepec
Citizenry decides on their public space for the first time in Mexico City
In 1976, Harvey Molotch pointed out a gap that needed to be filled in sociological research:
how the decisions of the power-sustaining elites – political and economic – shape the way
we live in cities (309). In 2015, the then mayor of Mexico City, Miguel Ángel Mancera,
Chapultepec, from hereon: CCC), a real estate project that would cover 1.5 kilometers in
length on a part of Chapultepec, one of the most historic avenues in the city located in its
center. In an area of 14 thousand square meters of construction, the CCC contemplated
an elevated corridor on a second floor with 230 commercial units: from restaurants, cafes,
bookstores, among other shops and a cinema (Durán 2015). Because of its elevated
design, this project not only represented the construction of a barrier between the three
neighbourhoods it would extend into: Roma Norte, Condesa and Juárez; but represented
the transfer of public space to private initiative through a public-private partnership
scheme that would have insured Invex, the winning company of the project, a concession
for 40 years (with the possibility of doubling that period) and a profit of 95% against 5% for
the local government (Cruz 2015). The aim of this paper is to understand how the decision
to build the CCC by the political elite in Mexico City was taken: represented by Mayor
Mancera and Simón Levy, director of the Social Investment and Development Agency for
Mexico City ProCDMX (from hereon: ProCDMX), affected the way how Mexico City would
be developed in the future: 1) It mobilized architects, urban planners, journalists,
historians, academics and the inhabitants of the three affected neighbourhoods, who,
since the announcement of the concession, have joined against the project they called "a
shopping center on public roads" (URL: 1), starting with the publication of statements on
the Internet and achieving a media impact never seen before in the city around an urban
issue. 2) It led to the creation of the first public consultation on public space – organized
by the local electoral authorities after months of demands by the citizen committees of the
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accessibility, insecurity, the problem of garbage on the streets and traffic jams, and that
four years after the cancellation of the project, they have not been attended at all. To date,
the avenue remains a dangerous place for pedestrians and cyclists, and problems of
insecurity and gentrification continue in the area.
#NoShopultepec/#SíChapultepec
On May 19, 2014, Mayor Mancera announced in the Gaceta Oficial del Distrito Federal2 a
"Declaration of necessity for the granting of a concession for the use, development and
exploitation of a public property with an area of up to 116,000 square meters and under
the industrial park that includes part of Chapultepec Avenue and the public road
surrounding the Glorieta de los Insurgentes" (URL 2). The document specified that the
works had the objective of "generating a complete street with a cultural vocation that
includes public space, roads, parking lots and underground and surface infrastructure”
(ibid.).
Chapultepec Avenue is one of the historical landmarks of the city. It was originally built in
1532 and there are remains of an aqueduct built by the Tlatoani Nezahualcoyotl of Texcoco
in 1466 to supply water to Tenochtitlan, as the territory which was the capital of the Mexica
Empire at the time and which is now Mexico City, was called. In addition, it is the gateway
to Chapultepec Castle, which today hosts a museum, but in 1847 was the military school
1
Before the Political Reform of 2015, which was enacted on January 29, 2016 by then President of Mexico
Enrique Peña Nieto, the administrative territories into which Mexico City was divided were called
"delegaciones". Today they are called "alcaldías", which is the equivalent of a "municipality" in Brussels. For the
purposes of this paper and for the importance it had for the neighbourhood discourse, it will be called
"delegación Cuauhtémoc."
2 Before the Political Reform of 2015, Mexico City was officially called Distrito Federal.
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where the battle against the American troops seeking to conquer the Mexican capital was
fought. The city's first electric tram ran there from 1900 and in 1969 the first line of the
Mexico City Metro was inaugurated (Sandoval 2016). There, where all this happened,
Mayor Mancera announced, on August 18th, 2015, the concession of a part of this
important avenue to private initiative, through a public-private partnership that would last
40 years with the possibility of doubling that period (Aldaz 2015a). The government's
justification for handing over a public good to private investors, in what is considered the
largest concession ever granted by a local government in Mexico City (ibid.), was that this
area presented a "stagnation due to the scarce connectivity" between the Juarez and
Roma Norte neighbourhoods caused, in turn, by the "abandonment" of the avenue. Thus,
The day before, a statement was published on the Internet rejecting "the simulation of an
elevated park (second floor) on Chapultepec Avenue, in the delegación Cuauhtémoc,
which transforms the public space into a shopping center" (URL 2). The statement was
titled #NoShopultepec #YesChapultepec (a word game between the word "shop" and the
name of the avenue, which would later become one of the slogans of the movement) and
was signed by academics, architects, urban planners, journalists, and historians. Among
them were Alberto Kalach (Mexican architect recognized for his integral project to rescue
the lakes of Mexico City), Miquel Adrià (Spanish architect and editorial director of Arquine,
blogger recognized as one of the 300 most influential Mexican leaders in 2014, 2015 and
2016) and Salvador Camarena (Mexican journalist and winner of the Ortega y Gasset prize
for journalism, awarded in Madrid by the newspaper El País). All of them and approximately
100 other people made it explicit that the new infrastructure intended to be built and the
public-private partnership scheme represented the privatization of the public space, and
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of the city in general, for the benefit of a few: private investors (the financial company
Invex), a shopping center manager (Grupo Acosta Verde), a construction company (Garza
Ponce) and three architecture firms (FR-EE, RVDG and FRENTE; led by architects
Fernando Romero, Ruysdael Vivanco and Juan Pablo Maza, respectively). They also
argued that it would change the lives of the millions of people who use the area for housing,
work and leisure (URL 1). For that reason, they demanded a process of participation to
"decide together" about the use given to public space, especially in the case of a "space
as extensive, central and symbolic as Chapultepec Avenue, which is a public good for all
the inhabitants of Mexico City." Thus, the group called itself “Another Possible
Chapultepec”, since it agreed with the local government on the need to "recover" the
avenue, but not with an "exclusive commercial project", but rather by enhancing the quality
of the spaces that already exist, promoting non-motorized transport and improving public
transport. "In short: to guarantee the right to the city" (ibid).
This began to be a clear example of the conflict and tension that arose from the two types
of value that, according to Logan & Molotch (1987:1) "any given piece of real estate" has:
use and exchange. Use value is given by city dwellers to satisfy their daily needs;
exchange value, on the other hand, is given by entrepreneurs to obtain the highest financial
returns. The authors emphasize that the conflict is triggered on the basis that "[t]he pursuit
of exchange values in the city does not necessarily result in the maximization of use values
for others." (ibid: 2). Moreover, it is a clear example of how decisions made by political and
economic elites, based on their own interests and not on the common interest, shape the
way people live in cities. Molotch already said it since 1976: "A city, and more generally,
any locality, is conceived as the areal expression of the interests of some land-based elite."
(309). This elite use the locality to satisfy their desire for growth, the city is seen as "a growth
machine". But, as the author says, resources are limited. Consequently, government
becomes the arena in which interest groups compete for public money, while government
authority is used to help achieve this growth (309-312).
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In this case, there was no competition between entrepreneurs deciding which of them
would take the public land, since Mayor Mancera gave it up directly. It was more about
what Brenner and Theodore describe: the state provides a relatively stable regulatory
landscape and institutional arena for the locational dynamics of capital (2002: 356). For
this, the government of Mexico City, through ProCDMX, made a direct cession of public
space to private investors, through an investment scheme in which, during the 40 years of
the concession, 95% of the profits would be for Invex and 5% would be for public profit
(Cruz 2015). These details were anticipated by the same city government to the newspaper
La Jornada on August 3rd, 2015. Since then, Simón Levy embarked on the defense of a
narrative to justify this scheme, even dedicating an entire opinion article, published on
August 24th, 2015 in the digital media Animal Político, to describe that the CCC "has come
to change the history of public work development in Mexico". Levy appealed that the
citizenry would not pay for this project, i.e. no public resources would be used, that jobs
would be created during the construction of the project and with the opening of the
commercial stores, that it would be a cultural space to support Mexican arts and crafts,
that profits would be generated at no cost to society. However, no one said that the real
cost for the citizens would be the private appropriation of their public space. Thus, Levy
also began a media strategy with an informative bias and a line oriented to emphasize the
deterioration of the area and to show off the attributes of his flagship project. On September
1st, 2015, in collaboration with the media Reporte Índigo, he published a video where he
can be seen walking around the area, handing out information brochures and talking to
some people. Despite the fact that by then the resistance movements had already
advanced in their actions to stop the project, the director of ProCDMX said that he was
open to dialogue, but that the CCC was already defined (Reporte Índigo 2015: minute
01:58). However, Levy was not the only one who used the media to defend his position.
#AsíNo (#NotLikeThat)
Opinion columns, TV debates, interviews with architects, urban planners and activists
swamped the media – both print and virtual – as well as social networks, from the beginning
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Urban Sociology: Final Paper Viviana Itzel Herrera Silva: 4Cities
of September until December 2015. The aim was to give space to the voices against the
CCC and to inform the citizens why they said that Chapultepec Avenue needed to be
improved, but #NotLikeThat, which was also used as a slogan of the movement. The media
repercussion was so important that even Greenpeace (2015) joined in against the Mancera
and Levy project, considering that it had not been consulted with the city's inhabitants, it
did not solve the mobility problems (since pedestrians would be forced to go up to a
second floor to transit the area) and, on the contrary, it would induce vehicular transit (since
the street level was intended to give way completely to cars), demolishing the "sustainable"
quality that Levy also portrayed the CCC with.
After weeks of dialogue and pressure by the citizens' committees of Roma Norte, Juárez
and Condesa neighbourhoods against the Mexico City government, on November 6th,
2015, the General Council of the Electoral Institute of Distrito Federal agreed to hold the
public consultation on Sunday, December 6th, 2015, to decide on a basic question: " The
CCC project should be built or not". The electoral authority decided that only citizens
registered in delegación Cuauhtémoc could participate (Notimex 2015). This opened
another debate on who should vote. On the one hand, the inhabitants of Roma Norte,
Juárez and Condesa defended that either only the inhabitants of these three
neighbourhoods should vote because they were the most affected, or all the citizens of
Mexico City; but not only the inhabitants of delegación Cuauhtémoc, as in the opinion of
Lucero Rincón, a member of the Roma Norte Zone Citizens Committee:
"The basis of the public consultation is wrong. The inhabitants of Cuauhtémoc are
not necessarily affected in the same way as we are, for example, Tlatelolco
neighbourhood is very far from here and probably the people who live there do not
come to this area. However, the inhabitants of other delegaciones may also be
affected. We said that the Escandón and San Miguel Chapultepec neighbourhoods
(located on the side of the disputed area but part of the Miguel Hidalgo delegación)
could also participate. There are people from Xochimilco (delegación located in the
south of the city and more than 20 kilometers away from Chapultepec) who pass by
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here. In that case, let the election be inclusive." (Interview by the author on December
6th, 2015)
In addition, the resistance of the inhabitants of the three affected neighbourhoods to open
the election to the entire delegación Cuauhtémoc was caused by the fear of a possible
electoral fraud induced by the same Mexico City government: "There have been a lot of
acarreados3. They are buying votes. We don't have those resources. We are neighbours
who are here because of the love we have for our neighbourhoods. They are setting a price
on our streets. With the concession of 80 years, none of us here are going to know what's
going on with this space," (ibid.) said Alberto de la Cruz, 80, a retired head of surgery at
the General Hospital of Mexico City, who went to vote that day at the polling station on
Cozumel Street in Roma Norte neighbourhood. At his side was Margarita Villalba
Camacho, 45, who had attended the last television debate three days before to speak out
“Mancera and Levy have behaved fraudulently. They're pushing acarreados and the
local government syndicate. The information process is null and void, false
information has been given. There is a lack of total transparency as, even today,
people did not know where to vote. There are people in Condesa who have wanted
to vote and do not appear on the nominal lists. The Comptroller's Office of Mexico
City came up with a banner promoting the project, of which we took a photograph
and posted it on social media. Mr. Levy did not want to answer who is behind this
This debate is a reminder that any urban space always has multiple stakes, since it is
possible that a person who lives near some public space may not use it as much as a
person who lives kilometres away from that space but perhaps works near from it. But as
Molotch says: “The weight of research evidence is that growth often costs existing
residents more money.” (1976: 319). The CCC was no exception and the inhabitants of the
3A colloquial term used in Mexico to refer to a person who is taken by bus to a place to participate in a
demonstration or to vote.
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three neighbourhoods also feared that by building it, in addition to the despoliation of
public space, they would get more trouble than the benefits falsely promised by Levy. In
an interview with the author of this paper, the residents complained about the problems of
potholes, garbage in the streets, insecurity, poor quality transportation, street vendors,
noise pollution and even drug dealing, especially since the area has had a boom in the
establishment of restaurants, bars and nightclubs.
“I've been living in this neighbourhood for 48 years. In 2013 the local government
installed parking meters and promised to give part of the income to improve the
neighbourhood. Now the streets are worse than before: the branches of the trees in
España and México Parks are falling due to heavy rains. The only thing they did was
to put in more illumination because there was a lot of delinquency. With the CCC they
are going to bring more people and with them more problems." (Interview by the
This phrase is by Elia Rios, 55, a basic education teacher interviewed in the Cozumel street
polling station in Roma neighbourhood. Neither Mancera nor Levy had any interest in
solving the problems that not only the inhabitants of the three neighbourhoods pointed to,
but which they themselves referred to in order to justify the "need" to build the CCC.
Molotch also says that the priorities of those above the local power structure set the limits
of the decisions that affect not only land use, but also the public budget and even urban
social life (1976: 309). For this reason, Gabriela Hernández, a 38-year-old architect who
voted against the project in the polling station located in Juan de la Barrera Street in
Condesa, demanded that "they should remove the term 'cultural', since culture is not
something that the state should dictate”. Hernández also referred to the commercial quality
of the project which was disguised as cultural and suggested this: “If they want to offer a
billion dollars in investment, they should offer it in Tláhuac or Iztapalapa where it is needed,
and not in Cuauhtémoc where we have centralized museums, galleries, theatres, and
cinemas” (Interview by the author on December 6th, 2015). This is one of the five premises
on which the approach to the "politics of really existing neoliberalism" is based, according
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to Brenner & Theodore: “uneven spatial development”, for “[e]ach round of capitalist
development is associated with a distinctive, historically specific geographical landscape
in which some places, territories, and scales are systematically privileged over and against
others as sites for capital accumulation” (2002: 354 - 355).
Levy and Mancera chose to build a project in that part of Chapultepec Avenue and not in
Iztapalapa because the first area has a land value up to five times higher than the second.
According to a study by Mexican economist Marco Antonio Gomez Lovera (2017), the
average monthly rent for an apartment located in the area where the CCC would have been
built is $26,237 Mexican pesos ($1,267.5 €), while the average amount for delegación
Iztapalapa is $5,500 Mexican pesos ($265.7 €). This was also pointed out by Lucero
Rincón who, after months of research, found that only a portion of the entire land on which
the CCC was intended to be built had a market value of $1,700,000,000 Mexican pesos
(8,2125,603 €). Among her findings, she also noted that since 2010 the Mexico City Urban
Development Law has an instrument called “Action by Cooperation Systems” (from
hereon: ACS), which is a trust that involves the owners of the properties in an area so they
can also invest in any urban improvement project. Thus, the CCC and the mechanism of
public-private partnership promoted by Levy is part of the "creative destruction" caused
by the neoliberal projects, i.e., the “(partial) destruction of extant institutional arrangements
and political compromises through market-oriented reform initiative” (Brenner & Theodore
2002: 362). And Levy said it wouldn't cost the citizenry a single peso...
Conclusions
Mexico City: 14,201 voted against the CCC, 7,893 voted in favour (Aldaz 2015b). Despite
the debate that took place on which group of inhabitants should participate in the public
consultation according to their place of residence, the exercise was representative,
especially in a city with such a young democracy. It was not until 1997 that the citizens of
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the Mexican capital were able to vote on a public issue – the election of its first mayor –
because since 1928, political participation in Mexico City was limited: it was the president
of Mexico who directly elected the head of the department of Distrito Federal, popularly
known as "regent" (Puga 1991: 34).
“Less than a meter so that people can walk with the [street vendors] invading, the
sidewalks are in totally ruined, these are the only zebras to cross” were some of the needs
that angrily and worried, Levy pointed out in his 2015 video (Reporte Índigo, 2:17 – 3:42)
and also the inhabitants of the three affected neighbourhoods. To date they remain
unattended and in 2018, ProCDMX was criticized for functioning as a "white elephant"
(Sarabia 2018). During the years Levy was in charge (2012 to 2018), it was granted with
more than 128,000,000 Mexican pesos of public resources for its operation and it could
only carry out two of the three projects to which it committed.
The CCC was an example of a "socio-spatial transformation driven by the market" process
(Brenner & Theodore 2002: 353), but it is necessary to emphasize that there are faces
behind it: real people who make decisions that shape the geographies of the "actually
existing neoliberalism" of Brenner and Theodore, which, in turn, restructures the city. In the
end the "[c]onditions of community life are largely a consequence of the social, economic
and political forces embodied in this growth machine” (Molotch 1976: 309).
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