scholarly journals Real Estate Industry as an Urban Growth Machine: A Review of the Political Economy and Political Ecology of Urban Space Production in Mexico City

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 1980 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gian Delgado Ramos
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Growth ◽  
Distribution Analysis ◽  
Real Estate Industry ◽  
Growth Machine

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.

Space Making as Artistic Practice: The Relationship between Grassroots Art Organizations and the Political Economy of Urban Development

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 1142-1161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shira Zilberstein
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Social And Cultural Capital ◽  
Art Organizations ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
The Relationship

Standard narratives on the relationship between art and urban development detail art networks as connected to sources of dominant economic, social, and cultural capital and complicit in gentrification trends. This research challenges the conventional model by investigating the relationship between grassroots art spaces, tied to marginal and local groups, and the political economy of development in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen. Using mixed methods, I investigate Do–It–Yourself and Latinx artists to understand the construction and goals of grassroots art organizations. Through their engagements with cultural representations, space and time, grassroots artists represent and amplify the interests of marginal actors. By allying with residents, community organizations and other art spaces, grassroots artists form a social movement to redefine the goals and usages of urban space. My findings indicate that heterogeneous art networks exist and grassroots art networks can influence urban space in opposition to top–down development.

From shrinkage to regrowth: changes, impacts and challenges for Leipzig, ‘city of extremes'

TERRITORIO ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 107-112
Author(s):  
Annegret Haase
Keyword(s):  
Real Estate ◽  
Inner City ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Large City ◽  
Real Estate Market ◽  
Green Spaces ◽  
Market Development ◽  
Residential Change

This investigation focuses on Leipzig, one of the most prominent examples of a large city in eastern Germany that shrank during the 1990s and began growing again in the 2010s. What happened in those old, inner-city neighbourhoods especially affected by shrinkage, outmigration, abandonment and vacancy, as Leipzig's inner east and inner west were? The focus here will be on the field of housing, real estate market development and residential change; the new role of green spaces and greening strategies in a context of contested urban space; and the ‘fate' of spaces for interim uses and experimentation that had been established during the period of shrinkage. How and why did Leipzig shift from shrinkage towards new growth? What are the impacts of this change for different fields of urban development and policy? What can be learnt from Leipzig for a broader perspective?

scholarly journals Ladeira Sacopã, 250: um parque, um quilombo, um conflito socioambiental na lagoa

2012 ◽  
pp. 251
Author(s):  
Patrícia Mendonça Castro Maia
Keyword(s):  
Real Estate ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Protected Area ◽  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Environmental Preservation ◽  
Cultural Rights ◽  
Estate Property

O artigo trata do quilombo Sacopã, que se localiza na Ladeira Sacopã, 250, no bairro da Lagoa, Rio de Janeiro. Sobre parte da área de 6404,17 m² delimitada pelo INCRA como imóvel destinado a uma comunidade afrodescendente, nos termos do art. 68 dos ADCT da CRFB/88 e do Dec. 4887/93, ainda em fase de processo administrativo, encontra-se uma unidade de conservação, o Parque Natural Municipal José Guilherme Merchior. Essa situação fática caracteriza-se por um conflito que envolve a seara dos Direitos Culturais constitucionalmente reconhecidos e a do Direito Ambiental. O artigo objetiva analisar as alternativas apresentadas pelo Direito para a efetivação de uma concepção de desenvolvimento urbano capaz de conciliar a preservação da tradição e do meio ambiente. Palavras-chave: quilombo, preservação ambiental, espaço urbanoThe paper deals with the quilombo Sacopã, which is located on Sacopã Hill, 250, in the district of Lagoa, Rio de Janeiro. On part of the area delimited by INCRA 6404.17 m² real estate property as a community of African descent, according to art. 68 from the ADCT and Dec. 4887/93, is a protected area, Parque Natural Municipal José Guilherme Merchior. This factual situation is characterized by a conflict that involves the harvest of the constitutionally recognized and Cultural Rights Environmental Law. The article aims to analyze the alternatives presented by the Law for the realization of a concept on urban development able to reconcile the preservation of tradition and the environment. Keywords: quilombo, environmental preservation, urban space 

scholarly journals Water and the political ecology of urban metabolism: the case of Mexico City

2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gian Carlo Delgado-Ramos
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Current Trend ◽  
Urban Metabolism ◽  
General Description ◽  
Urban Political Ecology ◽  
Ecological Features ◽  
Water Energy Nexus

Today, 52% of the world's population live in urban areas and this number is expected to rise to 64-69% by 2050. Cities consume most of the world's energy and materials, and are responsible of about three quarters of direct and indirect GHG emissions. Consumption patterns, however, are asymmetrical among cities and citizens. Urban metabolism, or the analysis of energy and material flows and stocks (infrastructure) that shape settlements, allows the identification not only of the dimensions of these flows and stocks, but also their main technical and socio-ecological features. These can also be evaluated from an urban political ecology perspective, that is, in terms of power relationships that define who gets access to, or control over, natural resources and other components of urban space. This article opens with a general introduction to urbanization trends, followed by a presentation of urban metabolism and urban political ecology approaches as useful analytical tools for assessing the access, management and usufruct of water in Mexico City's Metropolitan Area. A general description of the hydropolitan region of study is then offered in order to analyze urban water flows and their socioecological implications for the water-energy nexus and climate. The article concludes with a call for a paradigm change in order to transform urban settlements towards more livable, sustainable and equitable ones; a process that demands not only paying attention to the form but also to the function of urban territories within capitalist productive relationships. In this context the design and execution of public policies needed for transforming the current trend of constructing, operating, managing, and living in cities must be proactive, imaginative, and based on an integral metabolic planning that allows the adjustment of planning and policy tools to overarching contextual changes and to historical trends and socially desirable futures. Specific recommendations include the bottom-up management of water infrastructure and the guarantee of human rights to water, sanitation and a healthy environment; these are components of the 'right to the city.'Key words: urban metabolism, water, water-energy nexus, climate change, urban political ecology, Mexico City

Life in Ruins: Materiality, the City, and the Production of Critique in the Art of Naiza Khan

2015 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-346
Author(s):  
Karin Zitzewitz
Keyword(s):  
Real Estate ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Small Island ◽  
Real Estate Development ◽  
Bodily Experience ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

Naiza Khan'sThe Manora Archive(2007–), the product of her long-term engagement with a small island in Karachi's harbor, is exemplary of both Pakistan's vibrant contemporary art and its burgeoning discourse of urban space. Dominated by a naval base and port rejuvenation project, nearly all of Manora's civilian population was bought out by investors in 2006 for a now-abandoned real estate development. Khan has recorded the island's abandoned architecture in photographs and video, documenting its descent into ruins. Her visual archive, which also includes drawings, prints, and paintings based on the photographs, presents Manora's ruins as metonymic of Karachi's colonial and postcolonial histories. This article makes two interlocking claims: first, that Khan's artistic work supplements scholarship on the relationship between violence and urban development by highlighting issues of temporality and bodily experience, and, second, that her work productively exploits the tension between the documentary mode and more traditional artistic media.

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