Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century

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Description

Why, Diane Davis asks, has Mexico City, once referred to as the city of palaces, turned into a sea of people, poverty, and pollution? Through historical analysis of Mexico City, Davis identifies political actors responsible for the out of control industrialization of Mexico’s economic and social center, its capital city. This narrative biography takes a perspective rarely found in studies of third-world urban development: Davis demonstrates how and why local politics can run counter to rational politics, yet change into enmeshed, spawning ineffective policies that are detrimental to the city and the nation.

The competing social and economic demand of the working poor and middle classes and the desires of Mexico’s ruling Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI) have led to gravely diminished products and services, exorbitant infrastructural expenditures, and counter-productive use of geographic space. Though Mexico City’s urban transport system has evolved during the last seven decades from trolley to bus to METRO (subway), it fails to meet the needs of the population, regardless of its costliness, and is indicative of the city’s disastrous and sick-directed overdevelopment. Examining the political forces in the back of the thwarted attempts to provide transportation in the downtown and sprawling outer residential areas, Davis analyzes the maneuverings of local and national politicians, foreign investors, middle classes, agency bureaucrats, and quite a lot of factions of the PRI.

Taking a look to Mexico’s future, Davis concludes that growing popular dissatisfaction and frequent urban protests demanding both democratic reform and administrative autonomy in the capital city suggest an unstable future for corporatist politics and the PRI’s centralized one-party government.

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