Category Archives: Events

Challenges of Urban Planning in an Imperfect Democracy: Making What We Plan Happen: 50 Years of Experience from Roque González Roque González will share how his experience at Harvard shaped his professional practice and reflect on the real-world challenges he encountered—challenges that Harvard never warned him about. Drawing from five decades in the field, he will outline the principles and strategies he has used to overcome these obstacles. Through the lens of three of Mexico’s most significant urban planning projects, he will demonstrate how these principles have been applied to turn ambitious plans into reality. Date: Wednesday, April 9, 2024. […]

Each year, MCI funds a select number of students to carry out innovative research over the summer to investigate the transformation of Mexico’s complex urban landscapes over the next decades. In this year’s symposium, the 2024 summer fellows shared their findings on evolving urban publics in the face of the climate crisis and environmental disruption. MCI Fellows presented the following projects: With reviewers:

Though the newly elected presidents of Mexico and the United States started their terms mere months apart, both signaled the importance of the border to their agenda. As Mexico’s first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum has voiced longstanding concerns about the border and U.S. overreach, as well as a range of issues and treaties — from NAFTA to water sharing to nearshoring and energy challenges. In the first weeks of his second term, Donald Trump’s swift imposition of tariffs, building of a holding camp for migrants at the border, and targeting Latin Americans for deportation seem to have set an agenda […]

Transportation │ Fall 2021 │ Volume XXI, Number 1   On December 7, 2021, DRCLAS’ ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America launched its Fall 2021 magazine issue on transportation. The publication can be accessed here. Dr. Diane Davis moderated the event’s opening conversation between the magazine’s authors. The issue features several pieces on transportation in Mexico written by scholars and practitioners that collaborate with the Mexican Cities Initiative. It includes, among others, articles from: Roberto Aguerrebere, former Managing Director, Mexican Transportation Institute;  Carolyn Angius, Urban planner based in Los Angeles, California and GSD Graduate; Bernardo Baranda Sepúlveda, Professor, Master Program […]

The Mexican Cities Initiative is co-hosting a conversation with a group of designers working to re-conceive global migratory structures. The event’s organizers share more information below.  —   Beyond Encampment is a series of conversations reflecting on design professionals’ efforts who work to change the paradigm of enclosure, and who practice models of urban integration and refugee resettlement through design activism. Rather than replicating large-scale encampment failures and the reactionary method of policing migration, we must proactively re-conceive forms of settlement at the terminus of forced migration and redesign the spatial plan and frameworks of refuge.   For the third […]

Seth Denizen, GSD Daniel Urban Kiley Teaching Fellows in Landscape Architecture  Seth Denizen is a GSD Kiley Fellow and design practitioner trained in landscape architecture and human geography. In his lecture “Thinking Through Soil: Case Study from the Mezquital Valley”, which took place on September 21, 2020, Denizen explores the relationship between land politics in the Mezquital Valley and Mexico City. He discusses both his research and the work that GSD students produced in conjunction with UNAM students in a studio course focused on the region. Watch the lecture here