Event—Mexico City at a Crossroads: Urban Challenges of the 21st Century – Keynote Address*

Miguel Angel Mancera, Mayor of Mexico City, will discuss current challenges for Mexico’s capital city, recently named World Design Capital for 2018 by ICSID. The Mayor will share lessons learned so far and engage in dialogue about the built environmental future of CDMX going forward. Emerging from a complex history to take a role as a leading global metropolis, Mexico City is in flux. Renowned for its architecture and design aesthetics, the city also faces major infrastructural scarcities in transportation, water, and affordable housing. Its enormous scale poses environmental, energy, and public health problems associated with pollution, carbon emissions, and sprawl. Recent efforts to write a new urban constitution have amplified conflicts over how to build, govern, and finance the city’s future. TThis event serves as a kick-off for a day-long conference on Harvard’s campus organized by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies that will include participation from governing officials, activists, and leading researchers on CDMX. The larger aims of the conference are to highlight on Mexico City’s tripartite identity as global leader, national powerhouse, and sovereign urban authority confronting the multi-scalar territorial and environmental challenges of the twenty-first century.

 

Mr. Mancera is a Mexican lawyer and politician who works with the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). Mancera graduated from the Faculty of Law of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1989, and he was awarded the Gabino Barreda Medal two years later for being the best student of his class. He has a master’s degree from the University of Barcelona and the Metropolitan Autonomous University and a Juris Doctor from the UNAM. Mancera has been a professor at several universities, including the UNAM, Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico and University of the Valley of Mexico. In 2002, he began working as bureaucrat when Marcelo Ebrard, the Secretary of Public Security of Mexico City, invited him to be his adviser. In 2006, Mancera became Assistant Attorney General, and from 2008 to 2012, he worked as Attorney General of the city. According to official reports, from 2010 to 2011, crime in Mexico City decreased by up to 12%. Mancera received several awards during his management as Attorney General.

 

Co-sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Urbanism Initiative, Department of Urban Planning and Design, Harvard Graduate School of Design.

 

Friday, March 31, 2017, 6:30pm
Urban Challenges in an Era of Climate Change
Keynote address
Piper Auditorium, Gund Hall, Harvard Graduate School of Design, 48 Quincy Street
Speaker: Miguel Angel Mancera, Mayor of Mexico City
Moderator: Diane Davis, Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism; Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design

Saturday, April 1, 2017, 9:00am
Urban Challenges in an Age of Shifting Sovereignties
Fong Auditorium, Boylston Hall