Abstract
Study of the struggle of a social movement, the Frente Amplio contra la Supervía, to stop the construction of an urban toll road in the southwestern end of Mexico City reveals that investments in transportation assumed to benefit the larger public are in fact creating new landscapes of infrastructural and democratic exclusion. Examination of the forms of citizen mobilization, alliances among diverse actors, and the role of accountability institutions as spaces for democratic experimentation suggests that struggles against large infrastructure projects allow citizens and the state to redraw the limits of authoritarianism and the meaning of sustainability and democracy in the city.
El movimiento social Frente Amplio contra la Supervía se organizó para detener la construcción de una autopista de peaje urbana en el extremo suroeste de la Ciudad de México. El análisis de las luchas del Frente revela que las inversiones en la transportación que se suponía que beneficiarían a un público amplio en realidad están creando nuevos espacios de exclusión infraestructural y democrática. El análisis de las formas de movilización ciudadana, de las alianzas entre diferentes actores y del rol de las instituciones de rendición de cuentas como espacios de experimentación democrática sugiere que las luchas contra los grandes proyectos de infraestructura les permiten a los ciudadanos y al estado volver a trazar los límites del autoritarismo y el significado de la sostenibilidad y la democracia en la ciudad.
In November 2010, Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico City’s mayor, hosted the World Summit of Local and Regional Leaders and a parallel meeting of the World Mayors’ Council on Climate Change. The conferences were deemed a success: they were attended by important mayors—including Antonio Villaraigosa from Los Angeles and Bertrand Delanoë from Paris—and culminated in the drafting of the Mexico City Pact, an agreement for a carbon emissions platform among participating cities. 1 These conferences were also intended to promote Ebrard as a “green mayor” by showcasing the expansion of Mexico City’s bus rapid transit system, the city’s network of bike lanes, a new bike-share program, and other green policies such as the prohibition of non-biodegradable plastic bags. Outside the conference venue, a group of citizens—the Frente Amplio contra la Supervía—gathered to protest a different set of policies enacted by Ebrard that, its members argued, were not green and sustainable.
The Frente Amplio demanded that the mayor halt the construction of the Supervía Poniente, an elevated toll road that would eventually connect Santa Fe, a wealthy area of the city, with an important business center at the south end of the Periférico (ring road), cutting across an ecological reserve with tunnels and bridges and bypassing several neighborhoods along the way. These protests were just one of several actions taken by the Frente Amplio to challenge the construction of the road. Other actions included the establishment of a permanent camp in the affected neighborhood, protests in front of the mayor’s home, and direct confrontation with construction workers and riot police. Simultaneously with and complementing these actions, the Frente Amplio built alliances with experts, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), scientists, and academics to contest the project via existing legislation and the courts. Despite its efforts, it was unable to stop the project. The controversy surrounding the toll road came to a conclusion in 2013 with the inuguration of the third and final section of the road.
Today, three years after this flawed, illegal, and authoritarian planning process, the landscape of transportation policy in the city is rife with contradictions. On the one hand, the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution—PRD), which has governed Mexico City since 1998, has made mobility policy (sustainable and inclusive transportation) a central objective of its administrations. As a result, Mexico City’s local government has enabled extensive reforms in the provision of sustainable public transportation systems and infrastructure, drafting a new transportation law designed to prioritize pedestrians and transit users and retooling its transportation agency, which is now known as Department of Mobility (Secretaría de Movilidad). Meanwhile, the city government has given the green light for the construction of similar projects in the eastern end of the city.
This article investigates the politics of infrastructure in Mexico City, highlighting the intricate relationship between infrastructure, fragmented urbanization, and urban citizenship. The analysis shows some of the tensions inherent in transportation reform in Mexico City. This reform has been framed broadly as a turn toward mobility policy and portrayed as a set of policies that expand rights and citizenship because of their attention to environmental sustainability and social inclusion. The case of the Supervía, however, shows that investments in transportation assumed to benefit the larger public are in fact creating new landscapes of exclusion, limiting citizen participation in transportation projects in an institutional and political landscape marked by privatization and increased infrastructure inequality.
The Supervía project is presented here as an emblematic case of a new mechanism for infrastructure provision, the concesión (franchise)—permission to build and operate urban infrastructure for profit for 30 years. The franchise and other such public-private partnerships are becoming the mechanisms of choice for the construction and management of roads and other urban infrastructure in Mexico. These mechanisms are increasing the state’s capacity to plan and provide transportation infrastructure but also producing legal gray areas that, while obscuring the planning and contract allocation process, open up opportunities for new forms of collective action and citizen claims making. I illustrate this argument with the case of the Frente Amplio contra la Supervía, which engaged in disruptive contestation and protest and simultaneously allied itself with experts to construct a technical discourse for legal action against the project. My analysis points to the role of autonomous accountability institutions such as the Comisión de Derechos Humanos del Distrito Federal (Mexico City Human Rights Commission—CDHDF) as channels for alternative knowledge production and citizen participation in infrastructure planning.
In showing how contestation in neoliberalizing urban contexts takes place, the case presented here complicates understandings of how “green” discourses are adopted to legitimize large infrastructure projects and how citizens respond to what they perceive as contradictory and authoritarian policies. Ultimately, this paper proposes that though the Frente Amplio failed to stop the construction of the Supervía, its actions illustrate important changes in the relationship between the state and citizens and the role of material infrastructure and autonomous institutions in mediating this relationship. Paying attention to these forms of mobilization allows us to observe how citizens and the state redraw the limits of authoritarianism and the meaning of sustainability and democracy in the city. Thus, what is at stake in this case is not just the construction of infrastructure and its technical justification but also the meaning of democratic planning and the substance of urban citizenship in Mexico City.
This paper is organized as follows: The following section expands on the analytic framework, looking at the relationship between infrastructure and urban citizenship as it has been analyzed in the literature. The next section describes the shift from traditional transportation policy to mobility policy, the background against which the Supervía controversy erupted. It highlights the actors and describes the administrative and legal transformations that enabled this shift. A brief chronological account of the Frente Amplio’s efforts to halt the construction of the Supervía is followed by an analysis that highlights the shifting context of infrastructure planning and political action and the institutions that shaped the outcome of this controversial project. Finally, the paper concludes with a reflection on the relationship between infrastructure planning, sustainability, institutions, and citizenship in Mexico City.
Infrastructure and Citizenship
Urban infrastructure projects are key sites for the analysis of power relations, politics, and inequality, offering critical insights into the conditions of urban citizenship in contemporary metropolises. In recent years important work has focused on problematizing the relationship between material infrastructure and the social (Farías and Bender, 2010; Latour and Porter, 1996; McFarlane and Rutherford, 2008; Monstadt, 2009; Star, 1999; Swyngedouw, 2005). At the core of these analyses is recognition of the socio-technical nature of infrastructure—that it mediates between the technical and the social and shapes relationships among city dwellers. Urban infrastructures from water services to electricity to roads and communication systems have the capacity to connect individuals but also, in their design, may bypass groups because of their geographical location, their socioeconomic profile, ethnic affiliation, or other criteria. Infrastructure planning is thus embedded in processes that produce inequality as planners, managers, and operators grant some the right to enjoy a particular service and exclude others (Graham and Marvin, 2001).
In recent decades, scholars have studied patterns of urbanization related to the economic globalization and neoliberalization of urban governance shared by cities across the globe. Especially relevant to the case discussed here are studies associated with the increased social inequality and urban fragmentation that a post-Fordist and global era has produced (Caldeira, 2000; Davis, 1992; Dear and Flusty, 1998; Sassen, 2001). Dear and Flusty (1998), for instance, highlight the patchwork nature of postmodern urbanization, describing an urban landscape characterized by discontinuity, privatization, and surveillance. Saskia Sassen (2001) has described the relationship between the global mobility of capital, the technological and human resource infrastructures that support it, and the new hierarchies and centralities generated within cities across the globe. Graham and Marvin (2001), similarly, locate global economic processes as concurrent with the demise of modernist and comprehensive planning, in which infrastructure helps sustain a process of “splintering urbanism,” and argue that “urban infrastructures are the driving connecting forces of the processes of globalization” (8). The polarizing and fragmenting patterns of postmodern urbanism also coincide with a period in which city governments have redefined their role. Local governments increasingly prioritize entrepreneurial activities responding to pressures to capture global financial capital, usually in the form of real estate investment tied to the construction of high-profit residential, commercial, and corporate spaces (Harvey, 1989). The rehierarchization of urban centers (Sassen, 2001; Scott, 2001) creates similar hierarchies within cities, where investment is directed toward certain uses, usually those that make “economic sense” such as finance, consumption, tourism, and historical architecture.
The reconfiguration of economic, social, and political borders that has accompanied globalization has repositioned the city as the scale from which to analyze citizenship (Holston and Appadurai, 1996). The notion of urban citizenship allows us to look at the differentiated citizenship regimes, shaped by social class, ethnicity, immigrant status, labor functions, etc., that coexist in particular locales across the globe. AlSayyad and Roy (2006) call this a “medieval modernity,” while Ong (2006) speaks of a “flexible citizenship” to describe the differentiated mutable and fragmented ways in which city dwellers enjoy or are denied rights and access to transnational spaces and territories. Mark Purcell (2003) addresses the multiscalar nature of citizenship, calling attention to Lefebvre’s call for citizens’ right to participate in the construction and enjoyment of the city. These frameworks allow us to look at urban citizenship not as a monolithic concept but as a fluid condition made up of inclusions, exclusions, and exceptions that is reshaped by claims making, insurgency, and contestation.
Claims made in relation to urban infrastructure are central to citizenship struggles. This has been extensively studied, from Castells’s (1985) The City and the Grassroots, in which access to infrastructure is the basis for claims to collective consumption, to Holston’s (2008) insurgent strategies for land title and services and the work of Appadurai (2001), Chatterjee (2004), and McFarlane (2008) on the politics of informal settlements. Transportation infrastructure has also received particular attention in works that view these infrastructures not as simply supplying services to users but as a basic component of a city’s metabolism (Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2000) that shapes the experience of all citizens. In the case of transportation in Latin American cities, work by García Canclini, Castellanos, and Mantecón (1996) and Jirón (2007; 2009) has shown the differentiated experience of moving in the city—the imaginaries that are produced and the affective dimensions associated with the movement of people of different genders and socioeconomic backgrounds in various modes of transportation. Similarly, and in light of an increased interest in sustainability and right-to-the-city agendas, scholars have focused on transportation infrastructure as illustrating important intersections between environmental, social, and economic concerns (Burgos and Pulido, 1998; Henderson, 2013; Orcutt, 1997; Pulido, 2006; Sagaris, 2010; 2014; Silva, 2012).
In the particular case of Mexico, scholars have focused on recent citizen mobilizations that have stopped several large transportation infrastructure and urban development projects. A peasant-indigenous movement halted plans for a new Mexico City airport in the Atenco in 2001 (Davis and Rosan, 2004; Moreno Sánchez, 2010; 2014). In 2007 a group of citizens blocked the construction of the Torre Bicentenario, designed by Rem Koolhaas to be Latin America’s tallest skyscraper, on the grounds of corruption and destruction of historic landmarks (Davis, 2009). Similarly, residents of Tepoztlán, a popular weekend destination in Mexico City, were able to impede the construction of an exclusive golf course in 2003 (Rosas, 1997; Velázquez, 2008). And in 2011 a group of activists in Guadalajara managed to stop Via Exprés (Servín, 2013), an urban highway project very similar to the Supervía. Looking at the Supervía against the backdrop of other struggles around large urban projects reveals a complex and discontinuous landscape of privatizing schemes but also successful urban struggles that complicate our understanding of how citizenship claims are made in neoliberal governance contexts.
From Transportation to Sustainable Mobility
The Supervía is a major work of automobile infrastructure conceived amid an ongoing reform of Mexico City’s transportation services and infrastructure sector. This reform has been based on a shift in policy associated with a reconceptualization of the goals and social and environmental effects of urban transportation. “Mobility” or “sustainable mobility” is the term that is used across many cities in Latin America to refer to policies responding to the global call for increased attention to the relationship between infrastructure interventions and climate change (While, Jonas, and Gibbs, 2010). While there is consensus on the need to promote sustainable transportation in cities across the globe, there is no clear idea of what constitutes a sustainable mobility project. Nevertheless, there are several propositions that accompany this policy paradigm: that mobility policy shifts the focus of transportation from efficiency to the quality of the trip (Cervero, Neil, and Paul, 2001), redefining individuals not just as users but as citizens experiencing the city as they move around it (CDHDF, 2013; Jirón, 2007; 2009; Lizárraga, 2006; Montezuma and Amar, 2010); that it produces more sustainable environments by focusing on public transportation, walking, and cycling (Low, 2012); that it improves livability and safety, increases civic engagement, and produces other benefits as public space is prioritized and infrastructure retrofitted for a more harmonious relationship among car drivers, transit users, cyclists, and pedestrians (Herce, 2009); that it is democratic because it is purportedly planned and executed as the result of collaboration between users and planners through citizen participation and transparent finances; and that a more accessible city is a more democratic city (Guasch, Cebollada, and Requena, 2010).
In Mexico, sustainable mobility policy arrives after several decades of large, if insufficient, investment in infrastructure for automobiles, a simultaneous neglect of publicly owned systems, and the chaotic liberalization of bus service. With its emphasis on transit and public space, the policy has been promoted as an effort to guarantee the right to mobility of all the city’s residents and framed as one of the flagship policies of the left-of-center PRD, which has linked mobility to its commitment to a sustainable and democratic city and has framed mobility as a rights-expanding policy field. However, projects such as the Supervía show the limits of the concept of the right to mobility. Clearly, Supervía is a project that does not reflect the principles mentioned above, but it has been framed by the government as a mobility project that will reduce congestion, idling engines, and travel times, facilitate access to Santa Fe for residents and workers, and improve the city’s competitiveness. 2
The turn toward mobility in Mexico City has been evident since 2006 with the development of the first line of the bus rapid transit system, Metrobús, in the last months of Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s tenure. With Metrobús the city government renewed its commitment to improving air quality in the metropolitan area, redefining it as a question of climate change. 3 The project received a great deal of attention from local and international observers and was generally considered very successful. Mobility policy has been consolidated in the two subsequent administrations. During Ebrard’s administration, the city witnessed the creation of a bike-share system (EcoBici) and a complementary network of bike lanes, the smart parking meter system (ecoParq), three more Metrobús lines, a new Metro line, electric taxis, and the restructuring of several bus routes with improved services and more environmentally friendly buses. Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera, who succeeded Ebrard, has not created new services but has expanded the existing Metrobús, ecoParq, and EcoBici systems, introduced a new transportation ordinance, and renamed the transportation department the Department of Mobility.
In Mexico, three distinct types of actors have been involved in the promotion and expansion of mobility policy: international NGOs such as CTS Embarq 4 and the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), groups of local activists such as Bicitekas, and transportation consultants and a small group of progressive city officials. These actors have constructed an agenda for the reform of the transportation sector involving conferences, educational roundtables, the publication of manuals and handbooks, and direct conversations with policy makers and citizens. Dynamic alliances among these actors have been fundamental to the creation of mobility projects. For instance, in the cases of EcoBici and Metrobús, the groups mentioned collaborated with each other and with the city government. In the case of the Supervía, however, the diverging interests and agendas, interpretations of “mobility,” and visions of a sustainable and democratic city came to the surface. ITDP and Bicitekas took a public stance against the project, openly criticizing Ebrard’s administration, and this led to their being excluded from the planning of other projects.
The growth of urban mobility as a public concern and the successful implementation of projects would not have been possible without a series of institutional and legal transformations. These transformations allowed greater participation of the private sector as investors, service providers, and builders and operators of urban infrastructure. Heavy participation of the private sector in urban infrastructure construction projects is common in other Latin American countries (Silva, 2012) but relatively new in Mexico. Franchises have been awarded for decades, for the construction of highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, and other large works under the supervision of the federal communications and transport ministry, but local-level, private road infrastructure was nonexistent. However, in the early 2000s changes in local legislation allowed the awarding of projects to private companies and the creation of new forms of public-private partnerships. For example, the bus rapid transit system Metrobús was created as public-private partnership in which independent bus operators established a company that purchased the buses and operated and maintained the system while the city provided the necessary infrastructure and institutional and legal framework to operate a profitable company. Similarly, the concesión (a form of franchise) has become a common mechanism for the construction of road infrastructure. Concesión contracts have been central to the recent and rapid expansion of automobile infrastructure in Mexico City’s metropolitan area. For example, they were awarded for the expansion of the second level of the Periférico, a toll road awarded to the Spanish-owned company OHL México, one of the companies that participated in the Supervía project and several other controversial large infrastructure projects across the country. These franchises have also been used for the Circuito Interior Mexiquense, a network of urban highways that serves the North and Northeast of the Mexico City metropolitan area.
The Struggle against the Supervía
The Supervía brings together many of the contradictions inherent in the construction of a twenty-first-century global Mexico City and is a watershed moment in urban politics, environmental politics, and urban megaprojects in Mexico. 5 The Supervia is often thought of as the culmination of a project envisioned over 20 years ago in the context of the development of the business and residential district of Santa Fe. Attempts to build viaducts and highways in the area known as Tarango, located between Magadalena Contreras, in the South of the city, and Santa Fe, in the West, had been made since the 1990s without success (Dolutskaya, n.d.). Some think of the Supervía as part of an old project to build a network of urban and suburban highways that eventually would connect all the municipalities in the metropolitan area. Others identify it as a project promised by the city to real estate developers and engineering firms heavily invested in Santa Fe. Most observers tend to agree that the Supervia is a quick fix for the extreme congestion that characterizes the commute to Santa Fe, where drivers on any given weekday take up to 80 minutes to travel the 10 kilometers that connect the district with central Mexico City (Figure 1).
Mexico City, showing the location of the Supervía Poniente.
The Supervía effectively became a project “in the making” on December 11, 2009. It was on this date that Ebrard made an official request (declaración de necesidad) for the construction of a road system in the southwestern part of the city to connect the Santa Fe district with the Periférico. This system of roads, tunnels, and bridges, as the official announcement in Gaceta de la Asamblea Legislativa del Distrito Federal (ALDF, 2009) described it, was to be offered as a franchise to a private firm. Twelve days later, on December 23, the contract was awarded to Compañia Controladora Via Rápida Poetas, S.A. de C.V., a consortium made up of the Spanish construction firm OHL and the local real estate developer COPRI. 6
The period of time in which the contract was allocated might seem very short for such a large project, but it is more or less the norm in present-day public-private partnerships for transportation projects in Mexico. The assumption is that a prior evaluation of feasibility and public need has been conducted, and once the announcement is made official the authorities must only verify that the awardee is legally constituted as a company and meets some administrative requirements. In this case, the contract awarded Controladora the right to build and then operate and manage the Supervía as a toll road for 30 years while paying a small percentage of the toll revenues to the city.
A few months later, in March 2010, the Diario Oficial de la Federación, the official congressional newsletter, announced the creation of the Supervía Poniente, a public utility project by federal decree that allowed for the expropriation of land and buildings necessary for its construction. The federal decree also stipulated the plots of land to be expropriated and the amount of money to be awarded as compensation. It was at this point that the citizens of Magdalena Contreras, the area where the Supervía connects with Periférico Sur, and especially those living along the proposed route of the new highway took action.
The first protests against the project took place in June and July 2010, when La Malinche residents set up a camp in an area known as La Loma, where some of the homes slated for demolition were located. La Malinche, located in the area where urbanization meets the natural reserve (Figure 2), began as an informal settlement several decades ago and today is a completely urbanized neighborhood. The camp was an attempt to block the clearing of the plots and homes and to draw media attention. At first not much more than a tent with tables and chairs, over time it evolved into a semipermanent space for meetings (which took place at least once a week), a communal kitchen, and a place to monitor the media and communicate information about the struggle.
La Malinche.
By summer 2010 a large group of Magdalena Contreras neighbors had organized under the leadership of Cristina Barros and Mónica Tapia, an academic and an NGO professional, respectively. Barrios and Tapia lived down the road in the wealthier area of Magdalena Contreras, known for its mix of high-income residences and working-class homes. The residents of La Malinche were represented by active neighbors, some of them lawyers and others with experience in urban social movements or involved in the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) workers’ union. 7 By July the residents of Magdalena Contreras had organized and built alliances with other local and international organizations (such as Greenpeace, Bicitekas, and the urban social movement Frente Francisco Villa), academics, and human rights lawyers. At this point the group took the name Frente Amplio contra la Supervía.
The Frente Amplio operated on two fronts, one made up of neighbors that mobilized and openly confronted the government with disruptive actions and another that deployed technical and legal arguments aided by legal rights NGOs and researchers from the UNAM, the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, and the think tank Centro Mario Molina, who had reviewed the environmental impact assessment produced by the city government and Controladora Supervía. The assessment, mandatory for major construction works, became a central element in the struggle. Several experts concluded that it did not provide an accurate assessment of the potential impacts on water collection systems and, perhaps more important, that it failed to comply with the requirement of citizen participation. These opinions were publicized in various outlets through media coverage of public roundtables and assemblies (Alfie, 2013; Ramírez Flores, 2010; Virgen, 2011; Zambrano, 2010).
In November 2010, during the Conference of Mayors against Climate Change, the Frente Amplio staged a protest outside the event’s venue, publicly accusing Ebrard of promoting unsustainable policies such as the construction of more urban highways (El Universal, November 21, 2010). In the same month the city government, fearing the escalation of the controversy, promoted the creation of a committee to mediate between it and the Frente Amplio. Almost simultaneously, as if to make sure that this controversy would not spread beyond the local, the federal environmental agency declared that all the environmental impact mitigation charges had already been paid by Controladora Supervía. Shortly after this statement, on January 1, 2011, city police moved into 50 properties that were slated for demolition (Figures 3 and 4). 8
Partially demolished houses and vegetation clearing in La Malinche. (Photo Aarón Borrás)
A demolished house between two still-occupied properties. Fences and metal plates such as the one pictured here divided the neighborhood during the construction. (Photo Aarón Borrás)
January 2011 turned into a month filled with delays and obstacles for the construction project. After the city government moved into the expropriated properties, the CDHDF recommended that the project be halted on the grounds of a faulty process, lack of transparency, and violation of citizens’ environmental and economic rights. The federal water commision, Conagua, declared that it had not granted permits for the project. At the local level, InfoDF, the recently created agency that monitors the city government’s transparency, demanded that the contracts be made public. The Frente Amplio saw this as an opportunity because the documents proved that the city government had unfairly favored Controladora Supervía.
In the following months both of the Frente Amplio’s fronts seemed to be operating effectively. On March 11 its lawyers, along with other organizations such as the Centro Mexicano de Derecho Ambiental and Litigia OLE, filed a complaint with the federal environmental protection agency. In April it engaged in open and physical confrontations with city workers cutting down trees along the route. The same month, in response to the Frente Amplio’s request, the environmental protection agency ordered a temporary halt to the work being done in protected areas (PROFEPA, 2011).
In December 2011 the local administrative court declared the authorization of the project invalid because it lacked citizen participation (Greenpeace, 2011). This and the CDHDF’s recommendation gave the Frente Amplio all the legal elements it needed to contest the project, and several autonomous accountability institutions and courts agreed, but there were no legal mechanisms to link these resolutions to legal action. A few months later, on April 5, 2012, the first section of the connecting interchange system was inaugurated in Magdalena Contreras, and on October 5 the first section of the Supervía was inaugurated. The opening of this section was followed by the forced removal of the Frente Amplio’s camp on November 23 and later by the opening of the second section. The final section was inaugurated on June 15, 2013, followed by an increase in the tolls that had been projected.
Analysis
The Supervía struggle is a landmark case that shows how the relationship between infrastructure and citizenship in Mexico City is being reconfigured. My analysis emphasizes the paradoxical ways in which contested notions of sustainability and democracy intersect in this project. I treat this controversy not solely as an example of infrastructure privatization but also as revealing how opportunities for alternative planning knowledge and democratic experimentation may be opened in response to exclusionary development schemes. In the following pages I will analyze this case along three interrelated lines: the relationship between infrastructure privatization and the reinforcement of landscapes of exclusion, the repertoires of citizen contestation and political action produced in response to infrastructure projects, and the role of autonomous accountability institutions as potential channels for the democratization of planning in the city.
Privatized Infrastructure and Landscapes of Exclusion
The Supervía embodies several of the forms of privatized and fragmented urbanization that have been increasingly prevalent in Mexico City since the 1990s (Hiernaux, 1999). The district of Santa Fe, which benefits from this road, is an iconic local manifestation of the patterns associated with urban restructuring, entrepreneurial urbanism, and urban fragmentation (Aguilar, Ward, and Smith, 2003; Bayón and Saraví, 2013; Hiernaux, 1999; Jones and Moreno-Carranco, 2007; Moreno-Carranco, 2007; Pérez, 2010). The Supervía is an exemplary case of the current ethos of development in México City and other metropolises of Latin America and elsewhere (Angotti, 2013; de Mattos, 2008; Graham and Marvin, 2001; Irazábal, 2006; Moreno-Carranco, 2007).
If privatized infrastructure represents a vision of progress and city building with implications for the everyday life of all city dwellers, the processes by which infrastructure is planned and constructed also affect citizenship landscapes (Irazábal, 2008b). The granting of the franchise for the Supervía required a declaration, ratified by the city’s legislative assembly, of a citywide need. Although the issuance of such a declaration would suggest that the required preliminary engineering and environmental feasibility studies had been made, there is very little information about these studies and about the selection process that led to the designation of Controladora Supervía as the contract awardee. The fact that the contract was awarded only 12 days after the publication of the declaration of need without any open bidding process suggests that the project was conceived with the intention of assigning it to OHL and COPRI. While this might be interpreted as a clear violation of planning law, there is in fact no legislation to prevent it. The opacity of the processes and the exploitation of gray areas of legislation, regulation, and monitoring characteristic of these of public-private partnerships have other implications. Major infrastructure and construction works financed with private funds are subject to fewer accountability mechanisms than those supported with public funds, and the planning and design of privately funded infrastructure projects may take place without public participation or monitoring. Furthermore, in projects such as the Supervía, the city government’s role is limited to facilitating the retrofitting necessary to make the project possible. For example, the city’s public works agency, SOBSE, is responsible only for the street layout redesign necessary for traffic to enter and exit the Supervía, and most of the requirements to which public works are subject do not apply to a privately constructed project. According to a supervising engineer, the agency’s sole job was monitoring the construction company’s compliance with the contract rules.
The fact that residents of La Malinche and Magdalena Contreras not only had no input into the design of a project that radically changed their neighborhood but were denied access to the new infrastructure also speaks to the multidimensional landscapes of exclusion that private infrastructure generates: The road will primarily benefit automobile commuters from wealthy areas in the South and Southwest of the city and is considered one of the most expensive toll roads in the world, with a fee cost of US$1.25 per kilometer (NOTIMEX, 2013). Interviews with residents of the area, especially low-income residents who do not own automobiles, found them critical of the project, which they felt did nothing to serve their needs. The city government eventually deployed a bus route along the Supervía, but this was not planned in response to a study of travel needs of area residents. In fact, several residents declared that they never went to Santa Fe and would have been better served by many other transportation and infrastructure improvements. In sum, as several La Malinche residents put it, their not having access to the Supervía’s tunnels and viaducts was evidence that the city government saw their needs as secondary to other interests in the city.
Repertoires of Contestation: Disruption and Technical Expertise
The Frente Amplio was made up of a wide spectrum of civil society groups and organizations, and the framing of the controversy allowed actors with diverse interests to mobilize against a megaproject. Opposition to the Supervía was articulated around four main arguments: degradation of the adjacent natural preserve areas, degradation of the metropolitan area because of increased traffic and air pollution, the undemocratic planning process and lack of participation, and the privatization of urban space and exclusion of low-income communities.
At the core of the movement was an alliance between residents of two neighborhoods in a socioeconomically mixed area. One group was made up of progressive citizens, intellectuals, and academics residing in the lower sections of Magdalena Contreras near the Periférico. Many of them had a close relationship with the UNAM and sympathized ideologically with the left. They had actively participated in the founding of the PRD and the construction of a leftist agenda in Mexico City, and they felt that Ebrard’s government was acting in an authoritarian way similar to that of the old Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party—PRI) regentes 9 whom they had helped to defeat only a couple of decades ago. One of them described the mayor as politically obligated (comprometido) to the long-term development of Santa Fe despite his public pronouncements to the contrary. The other group consisted of residents of La Malinche and its environs. These low-income neighborhoods had experienced rapid expansion during the 1980s and 1990s as the southern part of the city grew. They had become urbanized through informal processes in the 1970s and, while today they are fully serviced, are a patchwork of high-income residences, condominiums, and low-income houses typical of Mexico City’s socially fragmented peripheral urbanization (Bayón and Saraví, 2013; Duhau, 2003; Saraví, 2008). The informal origins and remote location of a large portion of the area are reflected in its irregular street layout and its close contact with nature. Moreover, the area is surrounded by Los Dinámos, a natural reserve through which runs the only remaining exposed river in the city, the Río Magdalena. In addition, in the upper sections of Magdalena Contreras there is a strong sense of a self-made community’s taking pride in being a small town in the middle of the metropolitan area. For the residents of these areas, mobilization against the Supervía was yet another chapter in a long history of collective action and confrontation with the city government over neighborhood services and important quality-of-life issues.
The Frente Amplio also included local and international organizations. Locally, residents aligned themselves with organizations such as El Poder del Consumidor (a consumers’ rights NGO) and Bicitekas (a cycling activist group), that saw in the Supervía a contradiction with policies that portrayed Mexico City as a green city. Bicitekas had collaborated and continues to collaborate with the city government but was strongly opposed to the the Supervía not only because of its environmental impact but also because, as a highly active civil society organization, it saw the planning process as flawed and the project as detrimental to citizens’ right to mobility. For Bicitekas and El Poder del Consumidor, the project ignored the low-income residents of a district that required better public transportation, not toll roads. Bicitekas argued that the project affected the city’s cyclists by creating more traffic and pollution and was very active in several media outlets in addition to participating in public protests. Several Magdalena Contreras residents were members of Bicitekas or became members through their involvement with the Frente Amplio. The shifting alliances between actors around mobility policy also become evident in the response of the ITDP. While it had collaborated with the city government in the planning of bicycle infrastructure in the city, in this case it took a public stance against the Supervía project and distanced itself from the city government in subsequent transportation infrastructure projects.
The other important bloc of the Frente Amplio was made up of academics, lawyers, scientists, and transportation experts who opposed the project and provided a technical counternarrative to the environment impact assessment prepared by the city government. A group of UNAM scientists produced information, some stemming from their own research projects, showing the impact on native flora and fauna (Zambrano, 2010). They contested the environmental impact assessment and the expropriation process, published articles critical of the project, and participated in public forums and related events. Academics from other disciplines also participated, notable among them social scientists and urban experts who followed the events and voiced their opinions of what they saw as an authoritarian project that, far from providing a solution to congestion and mobility, generated more problems for the city.
In sum, the Frente Amplio responded to different concerns and motivations that converged in a project that was perceived as authoritarian, illegal, and unsustainable. The multiple strategies and repertoires it used against the Supervía illustrate the necessary convergence of disruptive strategies and technical discourses in a context of urban privatization (Roberts and Portes, 2006).
The Role of Autonomous Accountability Institutions: The Possibility of New Channels for Citizenship
Contestation against the Supervía also unfolded within autonomous accountability institutions and human rights organizations. Autonomous institutions such as CDHDF, the local environmental prosecutor, the local administrative courts, and the transparency agency InfoDF advocated and monitored social, economic, and judicial rights and governmental transparency. These institutions are relatively recent in Mexico, dating back only to the 1990s. They are considered fundamental to the democratic transformation and consolidation of civil society in that they help to institutionalize accountability and guarantee the rule of law (Ackerman, 2007; Monsiváis and Ríos, 2011; O’Donnell, 2004). In the Supervía case the CDHDF, the environmental and land use prosecutor, and the courts emerged as the only places in which direct participation in the planning process could take place (if only retroactively). In fact, the lack of citizen participation throughout the planning and construction process was a fundamental component of their resolutions against Controladora Supervía.
The influence and limitations of these organizations complicate understanding of the way accountability institutions affect contestation and mobilization around the right to the city. On the one hand, the CDHDF’s actions extended beyond those of an arbitrator. Following its goals to promote economic, social, and cultural rights, it became an institutional platform for debates and public education about the issues at stake in the project. It hosted educational events and debates on three occasions in addition to preparing an extensive report that recommended stopping the project, extending reparations, and providing guarantees of transparency and increased oversight of environmental restrictions. 10 On the other hand, the environmental and land use prosecutor could act only after the illicit process had begun and only when the Frente Amplio had filed a claim. Although it also requested the cancellation of the project, it lacked the authority to make any substantial modifications.
The role of these accountability institutions is an example of what have been called “invented spaces” (Miraftab, 2004) in which citizens can effectively influence planning. The Frente Amplio, by allying itself with NGOs such as the ITDP and El Poder del Consumidor and institutions such as the CDHDF, actively participated in the construction of an alternative planning discourse to that put forward by the city government and Controladora Supervía. Although it did not stop the construction of the Supervía, it called attention to the pervasiveness of authoritarianism in local planning and set a precedent for the opening of new channels for political action in future struggles.
Conclusion
Infrastructure projects are rich sites for the analysis of the multiple dimensions of contemporary urban politics (McFarlane, 2011; MacLeod and Jones, 2011; Roy and Ong, 2011). Through an analysis of the mobilization against the Supervía, this paper illuminates the contradictory ways in which sustainable transportation reforms, democracy, and exclusion intersect in Mexico City. Mobility policy is a field that can bring the city government international recognition for its efforts in sustainable urbanism, but it relies on institutional and legal loopholes that privilege private developers and automobile users to the detriment of the environmental quality of the region and the rights of a significant group of citizens.
Struggles over transportation projects across Latin America help us understand how different regimes deal with infrastructure modernization and the forms of contestation that such projects bring about (Moreno Sánchez, 2010; Sagaris, 2014; Silva, 2012). Analysis of the opposition to the Supervía shows that mobility policy, while opening policy making to a variety of actors from civil society (citizens, experts, NGOs, autonomous accountability institutions) and forms of political engagement (participation, disruptive mobilization, alternative knowledge production), strengthens the role of private entities and obscures the inner workings of planning and the provision of services in the city. The controversy over the Supervía thus reveals the varied forms of citizenship that accompany a growing concern with the environment and the quality of public space (Irazábal, 2008a) in a context of increased urban privatization.
The practices of the activists and experts who created a counternarrative to the official discourse of infrastructural needs and modernization are illustrative of the forms of citizen mobilization present in neoliberal urban contexts in Latin America and therefore an important episode in the struggle to expand citizenship in Mexico City. In the face of a perceived imposition and violation of the right to the city, the Frente Amplio presented strong evidence supporting its case to autonomous accountability institutions, transforming them into spaces for citizen participation in urban planning. However, the arbitrary and selective enforcement of codes and regulations is fundamental to the management of global cities (Ong, 2006; Silva, 2012; Vainer, 2013). Nevertheless, while the Frente Amplio’s actions ultimately failed to stop the project, they point us to new alliances and repertoires of contestation against neoliberal urban governance schemes, authoritarianism, and infrastructural exclusions.
Finally, the case presented here provides important insights into some of the conflicts inherent in the construction of sustainable urban infrastructure. In Mexico City, state and nonstate actors have reconceived transportation policy and promoted certain interventions as beneficial to the larger public and thus inherently democratizing. However, in practice mobility is ambiguous and may include projects such as a privately constructed and managed toll road for automobiles planned with no citizen input. The Supervía thus illuminates the pervasiveness of urban fragmentation and the contradiction between the legitimizing discourse of green transportation and the material and political exclusions that these projects bring about. Nevertheless, these landscapes of infrastructural and democratic exclusion are not rigid. On the contrary, they remain fluid and are constantly reshaped by new forms of contestation consisting of direct opposition to the government but also, as this case shows, collaboration with autonomous institutions in which citizens advance demands for inclusive planning.
Footnotes
Notes
Oscar Sosa López is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of City and Regional Planning of the University of California, Berkeley. He thanks LAP’s anonymous referees and Clara Irazábal, Tom Angotti, and Faranak Miraftab for comments and input that vastly improved this article.