A Social Infrastructural Node in Mexico’s City Eastern Periphery

‘MCI’ has served as the point of departure, to acquire a new understanding of the complex urban metabolisms related to the 4th largest urban conglomeration in the world: Mexico City. This understanding is primarily associated with the most pressing water-related urban vulnerabilities that this city faces on a daily basis. Instead of delivering a ‘final product’ we are here to present a work in progress that aspires to something more ambitious. Envisioning it as part of a new urban strategy that aims to mitigate water-related urban vulnerabilities in Mexico City. This project is intended to be a toolbox that disaggregates into three parts: a documentary, a manual or guide in print and finally a prototype that can be tested using the most advanced academic infrastructures in the country. In so many ways Mexico City is the epitome of the urbanisms of injustice, displacement and exclusion that continue to be rolled forward in market fundamentalism cities around the world. Furthermore, due to its geographic location Mexico City is highly exposed to hydro-meteorological (flooding, heat waves, water and air quality, landslides) and geological events (earthquakes, subsidence and faulting), within a context of increasing social inequality and expansion of population below poverty line conditions. Using risk as a leveraging agent, rather than a threat, we envision ourselves producing spaces of open access by transforming the rules of urban governance so as to open up urban spaces to democratic redesign, through an ongoing process of grassroots appropriation and reappropriation. Finally by making visible what is remains invisible to many first and then through strategic implementations of grassrooted projects we would like to see Mexico City as an exporter of good ideas where the Institutional capacity that is able to produce and transform space, is in fact democratized as well.

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