Neoliberalism and parks: the urban political ecology of green public space in Mexico City
Year: 2012
Type: article
Abstract: "This paper presents Urban Political Ecology as a timely emerging suit of theoretical and methodological approaches useful to understand the socioecological production of uneven environments in Mexico City. Using four case studies of parks within the metropolitan area of Mexico City, this paper argues for a deeper and long-term commitment to understand the historical contexts in which social and environmental conflicts emerged. Following the work of Marxist urban political ecologists, the following work presents an analysis of green public space using GIS generated maps and archival public documents as means to disentangle and critic the effects of local and global political economy in the production of inequitable socioenvironmental relations in the Mexican Distrito Federal. The analysis shows that green public space in Mexico City is overall insufficient and unevenly distributed among boroughs; parks in particular have been disappearing as a result of increasingly common “development strategies” influenced by a urban neoliberal political economy that favors capital accumulation rather than social needs. The driving forces responsible of the current deficit and uneven distribution of green public space in Mexico City are historically linked to early “processes of modernization” in the first decade of the twentieth century and perpetuated trough time by deficient local decision making processes induced by institutional negligence and corruption."
Author: Rafael Fernández Álvarez
Institution: University of Concepción
Language: English
Subfield: Urban Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W1873290006