2015 Urban Affairs Association Conference

In this panel, we will focus on some important urban projects that are involving the preservation and the revitalization of central areas and/or ancient poor neighborhoods. In recent decades, global process in Mexico City has deeply transformed local urban spaces in particular with the increase to tourism, housing construction, major building projects and infrastructure for transportation, culture, leisure and finance. These phenomena have generated an extraordinary urban growth, irreversible changes in local spaces and the operation of the city, producing powerful impacts on the lives and practices of the inhabitants in all dimensions of everyday life, from the local to the metropolitan experience. The implementation of these urban changes aims to promote a certain vision of the city and his identity. However, at the same time it entails a reduced amount of consensus or a clear opposition of the residents, who have a different vision about how the preservation (or the renewal) of their local urban environment should be. In others words, the new urban projects make evident the existence of different ideas about urban memory and urban identity, and the conflicts between them. Starting from different case studies, this panel aims to point out the complex dynamics of historic preservation of local memory in a metropolis with a vast diversity of memories, many contrasting identities associated with local space, and different form of creation and recreation of local space and local belonging. Our objective is to show how the preservation of urban memory and its concretion in urban space is in fact the result of a struggle between different social groups with different worldviews about the metropolis, his past and his future.


Social movement, territory and memory in “La Malinche” popular neighborhood (Mexico City)
Maria Ana Portal, UAM Iztapalapa

The “Nuevo Polanco” Urban Project in Central Mexico City
Adriana Aguayo, UAM Iztapalapa

Local Belonging and Identity. Spaces of Urban Assemblage in México City
Margarita Pérez Negrete, CIESAS Mexico

Preservation of memory and urban renewal: the Alameda Central Park
Angela Giglia, UAM Iztapalapa