Dreaming dialectically: The death and life of the Mexico City charter for the right to the city

Abstract

Chinese

This article investigates the conceptual and political history of the right to the city in Mexico City from the late 1980s to the present, focusing especially on the Mexico City Charter for the Right to the City completed and endorsed by leading political figures in 2010. By grounding this investigation in the dialectical methods of Henri Lefebvre, the article builds on roughly 12 months of ethnographic and archival fieldwork in Mexico City to argue that all such instantiations of the right to the city are bound to commit a certain violence against the idea. What the Mexico City case also suggests, however, is that such a dialectical concept is also always radically open to revivification and reimagining, as exemplified by the return of the right to the city in Mexico City’s 2017 constitution. Analysing the right to the city and its attendant politics and history from this vantage allows two crucial and underappreciated insights to emerge from this case: that the right to the city can be and sometimes is pursued under alternative auspices, and that any apparent stasis, even political death, is best considered temporary and mutable.

Keywords

dialectics governance inequality politics redevelopment regeneration right to the city social justice

Introduction

In July 2010, nearly 20 years of energy and activism around the right to the city reached a crescendo with the mayoral endorsement of the Mexico City Charter for the Right to the City (La Carta de la Ciudad de México por el Derecho a la Ciudad, hereafter the Charter). This document represents the high-water mark of the politics expressly pursued under this banner in Mexico City. Despite lacking the formality of legislation, the Charter has had a significant impact on the city’s politics, and continues to be a reference point for claims-making and critique, and even, in a more limited way, local jurisprudence and legislative debate. Important though this moment remains, however, the achievement of the Charter also marks the point of tidal retreat from what had been a central political concept, tool and strategy. In the immediately ensuing years, civil society energies shifted to strategies with other nomenclatures as official posts were shuffled, allegiances realigned to keep in step with the unstable political substrata and, most significantly of all, the city itself entered more deeply into a period of political-economic and aesthetic alteration. As Undersecretary of Government Juan José García Ochoa (personal communication, 29 November 2015) explained to me in 2015, the twin dynamics of shifting administrative and civil society priorities and the changing face and economic ‘attractiveness’ of the city conspired to ‘change the equilibrium’, as one mayoral regime gave way to the next and the ‘consensus’ built around this particular vision of urban development collapsed.

This transition away from a politics explicitly labelled ‘right to the city’ in Mexico City coincides with an apparent academic exhaustion with the concept. This latter trend rests on a grave but common misconceptualisation of the right to the city that conflates the dissipation or reconfiguration of movements with failure and reduces the radically malleable, invasive, shape-shifting insurgency of the right to the city to a flat, static and digestible programme. A deeper engagement with inconvenient complexities of the history of the right to the city in Mexico City reveals constructions and activities that militate against such simplification, sometimes to the detriment of the objectives of the differently situated members held tenuously together in a tumultuous web of collaboration. Exploring this history is the focus of this article, with particular attention to the groups, persons, events and processes surrounding the Charter. I will argue that to approach a full understanding of the right to the city as it has been developed in Mexico City, the concept and its history must be assessed according to the dialectical principles by which it was originally conceived and subsequently re-envisioned. Properly contextualised theoretically and examined empirically, the full reach and import of the right to the city become clear, and the idea takes on a different kind of significance as the flexibility of its usage – with all its political and ideological capital and baggage – allows it to be understood as a vision, tool and principle with multiple and shifting valences.

In the following section, I elaborate a reading of the right to the city grounded in Lefebvre’s peculiar practice of dialectics. I then use these insights to analyse the path of the right to the city in Mexico City from its conceptual beginnings in the late 1980s to the aftermath of the Charter’s endorsement, building upon roughly 12 months of ethnographic and archival fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2017. A further section explores the potential for reviving the right to the city in the wake of the Charter. The concluding section distils the foregoing history into two propositions: that fixing a dialectical idea is a violent act with often unappreciated consequences, and that under certain circumstances even deeply ossified or politically abandoned instantiations of such ideas can be revivified. The case presented will demonstrate, in other words, why the right to the city sometimes labours incognito, and how it found life after death in Mexico City.

Recovering the right to the city

Attoh’s (2011) and Marcuse’s (2009) recognition that instantiations of the right to the city inevitably involve compromises and trade-offs has become a basic sticking point for right to the city theory in recent years,¹ and practice has run aground on (quasi)legal instruments the limits of which leave much to be desired.² Worse, the concept’s ease of use leaves it open to appropriation by hegemonic interests in a tragic choreography of the prophecies of generations of rights talk nay-sayers (Rorty, 1996; Tushnet, 1984; Žižek, 2005; see also Brown, 2004; Ignatieff, 2001). Perhaps owing to these developments, there seems to be a growing frustration with and desire to move beyond the right to the city in theory (Gray, 2018; Merrifield, 2011; Middleton, 2018; Uitermark et al., 2012), and a certain ‘sunsetting’ of the idea in practice.

In the gathering tumult of Paris’s 1968, Lefebvre bequeathed the world an inscrutable idea bound to produce such aggravations, and imbued with the sweetest of siren songs. ‘The right to the city’, he famously intoned, ‘is like a cry and a demand’ (Lefebvre, 1996 [1968]: 158). It ‘manifests itself as a superior form of rights: right to freedom, to individualization in socialization, to habitat and to inhabit … to the oeuvre, to participation and appropriation’ (Lefebvre, 1996 [1968]: 173–174, emphasis in original). Speaking with a voice that finds its register in a language of rights then globally ascendant (Moyn, 2010) and simultaneously in an unmelodic anti-harmony that viciously mocks and undermines at every turn this bourgeois programme of hardened legal norms as the desiccated, hollow promises of the state beholden to capital and the expansion of the spatial sway of its crucial abstractions (e.g. man and citizen), Lefebvre’s mystifying rejection/assertion of rights beckons all comers. In the face of and in brazen contradistinction to the grandiloquent declarations of states and sovereigns, The Right to the City and its central concept were touchstones meant to serve as cross-cutting incisions into a world of analysis in which ‘the urban’ did not sufficiently figure, as grist for later work on capitalist urbanisation and as breadcrumbs for those who would later pursue this struggle, or, as Buckley and Strauss (2016: 632) describe his works on ‘the urban’, ‘invitations to revolutionize the day-to-day practice of intellectual knowledge production about it’. At once a frank dismissal of rights and a bold claim for them, Lefebvre’s right to the city abides in contradiction. Its full expression and import can only be appreciated by way of the peculiar Lefebvrian variant of dialectics, a method uniquely capable of appreciating the complex web of material and virtual connections it seeks to inhabit and its perpetual internal motion driven by the forces that stretch, twist, sever and bind these ever-proliferating ties. His right to the city is multivalent, slicing through space and time synchro-spatially in its analysis of urbanisation and its demands for an un-alienated urban future. Asked to function in un-dialectical fashions, however, the right to the city is often found lacking, its seemingly endless efforts to evade fixity frustrating even the most sincere efforts to imbue the concept with the force and duty of law.

Placing the right to the city in a Marxian dialectical lineage is hardly to assign it a predictable form or function, however, given the divisive role dialectical reasoning continues to play in Marxian and non-Marxian thought (Castree, 1996; Dixon et al., 2008; Jameson, 2009; Ollman, 1971, 1993, 2003). Arguing against common misconceptions, Ollman (2003: 15) argues:

Dialectics is not a rock-ribbed triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis that serves as an all-purpose explanation; nor does it provide a formula that enables us to prove or predict anything; nor is it the motor force of history. The dialectic, as such, explains nothing, proves nothing, predicts nothing, and causes nothing to happen. Rather, dialectics is a way of thinking that brings into focus the full range of changes and interactions that occur in the world.

For Ollman, dialectics is a science of movement and change in which mutability, contingency and inconstancy are axiomatic. This ‘epistemological priority’ of instability is rooted in Marx, for whom ‘stability – wherever it is found – is viewed as temporary and/or only apparent, or, as he says on one occasion, as a “paralysis” of movement’ (Ollman, 2003: 66). Dialectics is thus what Dixon et al. (2008: 2549) call a ‘process philosophy’, of a world perpetually in a state of ‘continuous becoming’, in which movement is largely considered synchronic and nonlinear (Castree, 1996) and propelled by ‘contradiction, reinforcement, fragmentation and reconstitution’ (McFarlane and Silver, 2017; see also Harvey, 2015). Apprehending in ways that transcend linear time requires the aid of a memory like that possessed by the Queen of Hearts in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, a memory that ‘works both ways’. Dialectics from this vantage can thus be likened to the fictional language ‘Heptapod’ in Denis Villenueve’s 2016 film Arrival, the translation of which allows the protagonist access to a global set of past and future human knowledges perhaps best approximated by psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s controversial ‘collective unconscious’.

Even the most creative of dialectical investigations, however, often fail to fully realise the methodological utility of dialectics for addressing the future. Though Ollman (2003: 17) insists that ‘the future finds its way into this focus as the likely and possible outcomes of the interaction of … opposing tendencies in the present’, it is the ‘likely’ rather than the ‘possible’ outcomes that receive the bulk of the attention even in his own work. A common and understandable tendency, such preference runs the risk of casting anaemic abstractions by virtue of static projections of the future, resigning the future itself to the approaches of Carroll’s Queen of Hearts or Arrival protagonist Louise Banks, for both of whom it is a domain of only memories.³ This tendency, too, is rooted in a reading of Marx (1970 [1859]: 21), who infamously stated:

Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.

Read simply, this statement captures dialectical synchronicity in only its most mechanistic, nomothetic expression, wherein forecasting focuses on ‘probable’ solutions already at least partially extant. As McCormack (2012: 729) argues, however, ‘[t]o experiment with abstraction is not to move thinking away from the material: it is to do something with material effects’. Abstraction, as a process that ‘has as its object the unknown unknowns of potential futures’ (McCormack, 2012: 728), can and does play a significant role in shaping present and future realities not only by illustrating but also, more importantly, by creating virtual realities. In Marx’s (1967 [1867]: 174) likewise infamous statement on the fundamental distinction between the ‘worst architect’ and the ‘best of bees’, such creative abstraction is highly prized. The dialectical imagination is thus a powerful tool not only for speculation on the future but also for the production of the future (Patomäki, 2017), as a generative agent constantly populating the realm of the possible and urging select possibilities towards the preferential status of the probable.

This is the inconstant morphology upon which Lefebvre built his Right to the City. Shifting modes within the text, he moves from incisive critique of past and present to virtual abstraction of negated-negation, from un-alienated oeuvres to re-ordered centralities of un-segregated encounter. The Lefebvrian dialectical variation is thus unusually creative, deviating from the Marxian mean in its assertion of a third energy, a creative actant forever disrupting bipolarities and forging new paths in virtual and material space. It is tempting to read in Lefebvre’s triadic movement a re-articulation of Marx’s problematic, as he himself sometimes explained his approach.⁴ As Kofman and Lebas (1996: 9–10) argue, however, ‘Lefebvre’s dialectic is not that of Hegel, thesis-antithesis-synthesis, nor one of affirmation-negation-negation found in Marx, but a much more open, ended [sic] movement, bringing together the conflictual and contradictory, and linking theory and practice’, which ‘dissolves stable morphologies to such an extent that stability becomes a problem’. A dialectics of ‘praxis’ and ‘becoming’ (Lefebvre, 2003 [1986]), Lefebvre’s right to the city is a special kind of abstraction. It appears as a materialisation or ‘moment’ of the third energy of his dialectical triad, his three-headed methodological hydra. It is in one sense an abstraction cast from the patterns of capitalist urbanisation he investigated, a valence in which it operates as both explanation and critique. In another valence, however, it functions in ‘abstract virtuality’ (McCormack, 2012), a mode in which it can be used not only to develop and test new potentials and powers, but also to work towards their realisation. The phrase morphs and slides between these modes, blending the work of critique, explication, creation and practice, and refusing any clean separation between them. This is how and why the right to the city is both ‘a cry and a demand’, both screamed into the virtual void and fought for and practised in the possible/present.

Lefebvre’s triadic musings⁵ on the crucial site for this right –‘the urban’ as the level of mediation, as the seat and site of centrality, and as ‘the place where difference lives’ (Mitchell, 2003: 18) – owe much to his experience of both Paris and Navarrenx, the medieval town of his birth in the French Pyrenees (Merrifield, 2006). While the Parisian expulsion of the underclasses propelled his insistence on the right to centrality and the primacy of what the great modellers of the ‘second city’ were already labelling the ‘CBD’ as the centre of urban industrial power and the privileged place of encounter, haunting memories of the provincial harvest festival surreptitiously waged an insurgent campaign of free play, experimentation and unproductive consumption. ‘Meandering’ along both currents, his right to the city is able to make demands of a legal and political order (a capitalist, liberal-democratic state) it simultaneously decries as destructive to the human species and its environs, sowing and tending the landscape for moments of emancipation from this very political economy. In practice, this has led to the aforementioned definitional and operational difficulties. There are those who would see it more carefully specified in law (Fernandes, 2007; Parnell and Pieterse, 2010), those for whom its ‘capaciousness’ or ‘strategic fuzziness’ remains a strength (Attoh, 2011; Mitchell and Heynan, 2009), those who consider its potential compromised (Holston, 2009; Merrifield, 2011; Uitermark et al., 2012; Vradis, 2012) and those who continue to see in it a potentially transformative politics (Fisher et al., 2013; Harvey, 2008; Leontidou, 2010; Marcuse, 2009; Purcell, 2013, 2014). A dialectical vantage reveals both the legitimacy and limitations of all such perspectives. Considering the right to the city as an analytical tool, debating its political utility and seeking to implement it in practice will inevitably desiccate or imprison an inherently fluid abstraction, ‘freezing’ the motion of a dialectical process into what can most aptly be described as a ‘dialectical image’ (Wright, 1999). Attoh’s (2011) well-argued claim that scholarship on the right to the city ought to begin with the recognition of Waldron’s (1993: 33, cited in Attoh, 2011: 679) proclamation that ‘the institutionalization of any right … poses tradeoffs’ thus misses the mark by half, as does Mitchell’s (2003) emphasis on Marx’s formative attitude towards rights.⁶ While the necessity of difficult choices is a point well taken, this obligation is rooted not only in the nature of the right to the city as a right inevitably in conflict with other rights and shackled to the structures of political economy, but also fundamentally in the nature of any dialectical abstraction.

Building on these insights, my analysis departs from the common and mistaken analytical thrust to ‘figure out’ or uncover the truest hard kernel of the right to the city.⁷ Beginning from principles of plurality, contingency and inconstancy, in the following sections I examine the complicated political life of the right to the city in Mexico City, including its appearances, disappearances and reappearances in recent decades. Understanding why and how the right to the city rose to political prominence in Mexico City, its shifting valences and purported political demise and the significance of its recent re-emergence requires an analysis attentive to its dialectical nature and heritage, an analysis capable of appreciating its morphology and movement through regimes, coalitions, moments, forms and functions. As the following sections will show, proponents of the right to the city in Mexico City have made admirable attempts to craft a radically malleable vision through the modifiers ‘complex’ and ‘collective’, but even this careful praxis has run afoul of the violences of abstraction as the rapacious forces of (re)development remake the city to which they address their critiques and demands. Understanding the right to the city dialectically, however, will also illustrate the mutability of even the most dire states of stasis, putting into proper perspective both the consequences of these urban politics and the revolutionary potential the idea still holds in Mexico City and beyond.

Life and death: Realising the right to Mexico City

At the close of the 1980s, enormous changes were afoot in Mexico City. The long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was beginning to lose its grip on the city, in the wake of growing social unrest and the party’s violent responses beginning especially in the late 1960s; tensions between the party’s old guard (políticos) and neoliberal (técnicos) factions; impending crises rooted in part in explosive 20th-century growth (and decades of Import Substitution Industrialization); and the devastating earthquake of 1985, the state response to which was widely considered grossly inadequate, and the political unrest and wave of local social movements organised in its aftermath. The fragile coalition that nearly carried Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas to the presidency in 1988 was splintering, and staggered to find new footing as some factions coalesced into Cárdenas’ Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which would soon take control of the capital city. The most significant of the independent movements is the Urban Popular Movement (MUP), organised in the late 1960s but with swelled ranks and influence after the 1985 earthquake.⁸ In partnership with other groups and influential individuals – notably Habitat International Coalition-Latin America (HIC-AL) – it was MUP leaders and their allies that would bring the right to the city to the fore. The idea presented the opportunity to elaborate connections they had long seen between the burgeoning crises conventionally considered in isolation within the atomistic ambits of the Federal District’s enormous bureaucracy. Like the MUP itself, the right to the city promised to integrate disparate issues and voices, to illustrate the links between, for example, two decades of turbulence in regional political economy and the ravages wrought on the city’s air quality, transit system and water and waste infrastructures. As future HIC-AL President Lorena Zárate (2011: 269) would later put it:

[A] complex right focused on a highly populated territory of multiple relevance for the country and with severe pressures on environmental conditions, the right to the city must propose a vision that surpasses the specialized approaches of distinct disciplines, professional practices, and the structure of public administration, as well as the individualistic and consumerist attitude prevailing among a large proportion of inhabitants.

Though the common story in Mexico City civil society has the right to the city emerging from conversations and meetings convened between the 1992 Rio de Janeiro ‘Earth Summit’ and the 1996 ‘Habitat II’ conference in Istanbul,⁹ the concept first began to emerge at HIC-AL and elsewhere as early as 1989 (Ortíz Flores, 1990), especially in the work of Enrique Ortíz Flores. An architect by training and long-time leader of civil society organisations, Ortíz’s work has earned him considerable credibility and political capital in the city and beyond.¹⁰ Ortíz has worked for decades on autoconstruction and ‘the social production of habitat’ at the city’s sprawling peripheries, and his approach to rights talk is expansive. He has long advocated for rights guaranteed by the state, even while also pursuing a politics of rights inestimably larger than, in most juridical senses, the term ‘right’ would convey.¹¹ His right to the city is both ‘collective’ and ‘complex’, asserting at once a universal application and a practical composition requiring negotiation (Ortíz Flores, 2008). Its complexity finds expression in its contingency, malleability and practically limitless synthetic capacities. This complexity is apparent in the deep entanglements the concept enjoys with others in Ortíz’s corpus, such as ‘the right to housing’ (vivienda) and ‘the right to habitat’ (hábitat), along with urbanites’ rights to ‘improve their quality of life’ and ‘participate in the planning and development of their habitat’. Ortíz’s influence and that of his colleagues at HIC-AL and elsewhere on the conceptual development of the right to the city in Mexico City over the next several decades can hardly be overstated, and the Charter bears significant resemblance to documents he drafted or helped draft in the 1990s, including a ‘charter of citizen rights’ and a ‘charter of rights to the city and to housing’ (Ortíz Flores, 1995).

Much of the credit for advancing the right to the city politically is typically given to the MUP (especially its National Democratic Congress, MUP-CND), and in particular to Jaime Rello Gómez, leader of the Revolutionary Popular Union of Emiliano Zapata (UPREZ). The influence of Rello and the MUP was important for bringing local government to the table in 2007–2008, and the MUP has been credited with much of the organising work leading to the Charter (Adler, 2015a, 2015b; Wigle and Zárate, 2010). At the 2010 endorsement ceremony, Rello Gómez (2010) called it:

possibly the clearest instrument for continuing a long-awaited dream: converting this piece of land, with so much history, into a [political] entity. A state with its own constitution. Our great city must receive that which corresponds to it: a city of rights for all. There is no going back.

While the first of these agendas is a familiar refrain for right to the city advocates, the second provided a crucial political linkage to the lynchpin for transforming the right to the city into a robust political agenda and instrument, the city’s fifth consecutive PRD mayor Marcelo Ebrard Casaubón. Casaubón cultivated strong relationships with civil society, and was seen by many as being open even to ideas and proposals untethered to office or party. Collegial relations and progressivism were not the primary reasons for his interest in the right to the city, however. As he stated at several public events (Casaubón, 2008, 2010), he saw the idea as a vehicle for realising ‘political reform’, demands for which were nearing a fever pitch at the close of the millennium’s first decade. A first important step had been the 1996 return of the municipal franchise revoked in 1928. As mayor, Casaubón called for further democratisation and local autonomy, including federal constitutional recognition as an independent state (and thus an end to federal management) and a constitution. In consultation with MUP-CND leaders and others in 2007, Casaubón began to consider the right to the city a viable means for pursing such ends.

In January 2008, the World Social Forum¹² convened in Mexico City’s Zócalo (central plaza), and included a space devoted to ‘the right to the city and to habitat’ (Zárate, 2011). Influenced by these activities, Casaubón agreed that a Mexico City Charter for the Right to the City was warranted (anonymous, personal communication, 24 June 2014). Along with MUP-CND leadership, Casaubón established the Promotional Committee of the Mexico City Charter for the Right to the City (CPCCMDC) in April 2008, including both Rello and Ortíz. Along with the MUP-CND (officially credited with its integration), the CPCCMDC also included the Federal District’s Secretary of Government, HIC-AL, the Human Rights Commission of the Federal District (CDHDF), the Coalition of Civil Society Organisations for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Espacio DESC) and the Attorney General for Social Affairs. The CPCCMDC conducted over 35 meetings throughout 2008–2009, ‘to coordinate, discuss, systematize, and draft the contents of the charter and to monitor and evaluate the process’, and created ‘pamphlets, a blog, leaflets, and a video specifically oriented to animate the process’ (Zárate, 2011: 264). Members also offered interviews to media outlets and participated in roundtables, workshops and conferences. By January 2010, CPCCMDC members reported that over 3000 people had participated in the Charter’s elaboration, including members of the public. The CPCCMDC also drew on the work of the World Assembly of Inhabitants, the Global Charter for the Right to the City, the 2008 Program of City Education and Knowledge, the 2009 Program of Human Rights of the Federal District and the 2008 Diagnostic, a report on the state of human rights in the city produced by the CDHDF (CPCCMDC, 2011).

The resultant Charter spans some 57 pages exclusive of signatories,¹³ divided into four sections: a Preamble; Chapter One, which defines the right to the city;¹⁴ Chapter Two, which explicates six ‘strategic foundations’ and nine ‘guidelines for implementation’; and Chapter Three, which includes standards for judging successful implementation and violation. The six foundations occupy the bulk of the text (CPCCMDC, 2011; Wigle and Zárate, 2010):

Full exercise of human rights in the city; for a city of human rights

The social function of the city, of land and of property; for a city for all: inclusive, solidary, equitable

Democratic management of the city; for a politically active and socially responsible city

Democratic production of the city and in the city; for a socially productive city

Sustainable and responsible management of environmental, cultural and energy resources as common goods in the city; for a viable and environmentally sustainable city

Democratic and equitable enjoyment of the city; for an open, free, critical and enjoyable city.

This breadth of issues is reflective both of the makeup of its makers and also, importantly, of the growing environmental, political and other problems then (and still) confronting the capital. A utopian wish list, according to some, is precisely how the Charter is supposed to function; as the highest aspirations that can be imagined, the perfection of Mexico City as ‘the city we dream of’, as the first musings christened this vision (Zárate, 2011).

The Charter, however, lacked any force of law. As soon as the public pomp and circumstance subsided, the CPCCMDC’s energy and support evaporated. Casaubón soon left office, his reputation and influence diminished by controversial decisions and many of his deputies swept from power. With the election of Miguel Ángel Mancera and the appointment of a reportedly less-than-friendly head of the CDHDF, the right to the city all but vanished from these once-ardent sources of support. Several arguments about how to proceed emerged. Some emphasised the Charter’s role in ‘political reform’, suggesting a reorientation towards future politics. Others suggested attempting to grant the Charter legal force, perhaps through the Legislative Assembly. Still others argued for a more local orientation, wherein boroughs would develop their own charters and priorities. Undersecretary of Government Juan JoséGarcía Ochoa (2014: 12) advocated a three-pronged, synthetic approach: the promotion of ‘a culture of the right to the city’, ‘the modification of the legal framework’ and the development of a constitution to ‘integrate and substantiate this new right’. Seven years later, the city would indeed have a constitution, though this advance would travel a different path from that which many in this coalition intended. Sub-municipal organising was also pursued, especially in the borough of Iztacalco. In the main, however, pursuance of the right to the city after the Charter drew on relationships built through the CPCCMDC rather than through legislation. And though there were notable attempts to use the Charter politically (resistance to the Supervía Poniente expressway and the successful development of Parque Cuitláhuac are two oft-cited examples), the moment in which the right to the city enjoyed a privileged position as a discursive trump or powerful tool was all too fleeting, perhaps already fading as it began to be realised.

Mayor Mancera’s lack of interest in the right to the city was a crucial nail in the Charter’s political coffin. García Ochoa, the lone member of the Casaubón regime to retain significant authority, disputes common characterisations of Mancera as ‘disinterested’, however (personal communication, 26 November 2015): ‘So it’s not that it’s less important, what happened is that the consensus that existed about instruments like this one … it collapsed.’ Mancera, he claims, simply felt he had to build a new ‘consensus’ if the concept was to find any relevance in his administration. Rather than an ideological break, Mancera’s stance in García’s interpretation in one sense points to the common executive practice of disassociation from previous administrations. Mancera thus appears as an executive eager to forge his own path and avoid the pitfalls and unforced errors of Casaubón’s final months in office, which not only tarnished Casaubón’s local reputation but reportedly thwarted any serious national aspirations (anonymous, personal communication, 26 May 2017). From a different vantage, however, García’s explanation reveals again the dangers of dialectical inconstancy for instruments like the Charter. As elaborated in the previous section, any and all attempts to stabilise it as an operational concept, to ‘fix’ its tentacles in place and secure from it a set of solid and dependable meanings, do a certain violence to its web of possibilities. In this case, the Charter addressed itself to a city that ‘no longer exists’, a city whose government has drastically changed; whose neighbourhoods have witnessed demographic, aesthetic and other transformations; whose daily rhythms no longer sync as tightly with the afternoon rains that come like clockwork in the summer, or with the sleepy melodies of the organ grinders once found on every corner of the historic district; and whose place within the federation of Mexican states has now been constitutionally realigned.

Life after death: Reviving theright to Mexico City

For all concepts born of dialectical reasoning, stasis is at most a fleeting thing, a momentary expression. Such is the case with the right to the city in Mexico City, even after the kind of political death suffered by the Charter. Remaining coalition stalwarts continue to promote the right to the city, forging connections wherever possible. As new struggles emerge, those involved must decide whether or not to engage with the concept and the complex entanglements it now entails. While its use may connote uncomfortable alliances, evoke the scars of bygone campaigns or provoke certain foreclosures, it may just as easily create institutional access points or secure legal footholds. As a leading coalition member put it in 2015, ‘We offer this idea of right to the city to all of them. Some of them, [like] the Supervía, decide to use it sometimes … and other times they didn’t … If they like, the concept is there. But for sure it’s right to the city from our point of view’ (anonymous, personal communication, 27 November 2015). The matrix of conditions in which this choice must be made are in constant motion, as political figures and factions move in and out of spotlights, as alliances are forged, broken and re-forged and as dynamics that unfold at scales ranging from the neighbourhood to the global economy push and pull on political priorities. Some of these conditions change slowly, as with the uneven but steady ‘democratisation’ of the capital city. Others shift at break-neck pace, as when the once-promising political star of Mayor Casaubón took an unexpected dive, and his seal of approval moved into an uncomfortable purgatory between blessing and curse. Amidst the maelstrom of changes now swirling around the citizens and militants of the Mexican capital, the right to the city is often made to travel and labour incognito, under any number of assumed names. Choices as to whether, when and how this language is taken up are therefore not ideological so much as they are logistical and political.

Arguably the most significant sign of life after the Charter is the central position the right to the city now occupies in the city’s 2017 constitution, something long hoped for by many in the CPCCMDC. Rello, Casaubón and García Ochoa, among many others, publicly extolled the Charter’s capacity to pave the way for such a constitution, and leading daily La Jornada announced the Charter’s 2010 mayoral endorsement as ‘another step toward the Federal District having a constitution’ (Romero and Cruz, 2010). In his endorsement speech, Casaubón made no attempt to hide this intent, using the notion of a collective right not to claim a set of rights for the city’s various communities, but rather to act as the claimant of collective rights that he argued ought properly to accrue to the city vis-a-vis the federal state. ‘The objective for this year’, Casaubón intoned, ‘is that the Federal District will at last achieve its own constitution … Two hundred years is sufficient time for the restitution of the city’s rights’ (Casaubón, 2010). CPCCMDC leaders likewise hoped that the Charter would form the basis of the city’s new constitution, and for some the priority was clearly understood: the Charter was a means to a constitutional end.

The constitution’s second chapter (Articles 4–14) is organised as a ‘Charter of Rights’. Beginning with Article 6, it assures:

a ‘city of rights and liberties’ (Article 6)

a ‘democratic city’ (Article 7)

a ‘city of knowledge and education’ (Article 8)

a ‘city of solidarity’ (Article 9)

a ‘productive city’ (Article 10)

an ‘inclusive city’ (Article 11)

a ‘habitable city’ (Article 13)

a ‘secure city’ (Article 14)

Many of these same phrases appeared in the Charter’s six ‘strategic foundations’. The right to the city is also discretely enshrined in Article 12. One of the briefest articles, its first section states: ‘Mexico City guarantees the right to the city which consists of the use and full and equitable utilization of the city, founded on principles of social justice, democracy, participation, equality, sustainability, with respect for cultural diversity, nature, and environment.’ Given its brevity and the vague and expansive nature of its language, Article 12 initially appears redundant, as its guarantees are all covered in greater detail by other dedicated articles. It might also suggest the kind of conceptual vacuity decried in the literature on the right to the city. Its latter half, however, makes a more significant statement:

The right to the city is a collective right that guarantees the full exercise of human rights, the social function of the city, its democratic management, and ensures territorial justice, social inclusion, and the equitable distribution of public goods with the participation of the citizenry.

Building on the twin pillars of complexity and collectivity that guided the production of the Charter, the constitution distinguishes the right to the city from the other rights by virtue of its pertaining not to an individual, atomistic citizen but rather to the citizenry as a collective. It also makes the important claim of democratic management, paving the way for a radical, transformative politics to transcend the bounds of liberal-democratic rights and the state–citizen compact by which they are traditionally guaranteed. It is an opening salvo, buried in a globally celebrated declaration and achievement of progressive liberal democracy.¹⁵

During the time of constitutional negotiation, many attributed Article 12 and the obvious influence of the Charter’s strategic foundations on the ‘Charter of Rights’ to the participation of Enrique Ortíz Flores. The place of the right to the city in the constitution was in no way a sure outcome, and was considered unlikely by some in the wake of the Charter’s diminished political significance. The reappearance of the right to the city in this guise, however, also speaks to both the shape-shifting nature of the right to the city and the ability of its pursuers to give it voice as part of an initiative that did capture Mancera’s attention. Yet even after this document came into force in September 2018, there was – and still is – no telling how Article 12 and the rest of the ‘Charter of Rights’ might be interpreted and enforced, uncertainties all the more profound after the 2018 elections. Questions abound regarding the potential utility of this new instantiation of the right to the city, which may be far less shackled to particular personalities, regimes or coalitions than was the Charter, and which is set to carry the full force of constitutional authority. What is clear, however, is that the concept has been given new life, and that an exciting new political tool has been forged in the Charter’s wake.

Conclusion

Building on the work of Walter Benjamin, Wright (1999) calls the Mexican woman in the border town of Ciudad Juárez a ‘dialectical image’, a set of material processes in a state of suspension, frozen in place and captured in only momentary expression, as in a still life. Though the image at the centre of this case is incredibly different, the fetishisation of such ‘stilled life’ is no less instructive. Despite the efforts of CPCCMDC members to imbue the Charter with freedom of movement and to give it more than the narrow life the law often compels, its crystallisation imposed limits on the creative process of ‘becoming’ by which it was originally conceived. More importantly, the document itself and the political process that gave rise to it cemented a history with which the concept of the right to the city is now burdened. Citation by the CDHDF, public affirmation by political figures and broad popularity among social movements and the academic left also endow this language with a certain political capital. The point is not so much that the Charter froze forever the amorphous and fluctuating capacities of the right to the city in Mexico City, but rather that the fixity it imposed solidified conditions with which users must now contend. Though the CPCCMDC could not have foreseen the Charter’s precipitous decline, neither could they have anticipated the unholy alliance of PRD mayor and PRI president in the Pacto por México which at long last paved the way for the abdication of the last vestiges of Federal control of the capital in 2016–2017. That the right to the city should find a renewed relevance and radical potential at the heart of this urban revolution suggests not only its continuing value, but also that the permanence of a death such as it suffered in Mexico City may have always been, as the saying goes, greatly exaggerated.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Bob Lake, Asher Ghertner, Don Mitchell and Kathe Newman for invaluable feedback on an earlier draft of this article. I am thankful also to many anonymous interviewees and research participants, and to HIC-AL in particular for archival access. Thanks also to Ronan Paddison and three anonymous reviewers for their careful scrutiny, insightful critiques and generative suggestions. All mistakes, omissions and other issues remain my own.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Ben Gerlofs

Notes

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