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An Urban Humanities Initiative

Urban Palisades: Technology in the Making of Santa Fe, Mexico City

Diana Montaño, David Pretel

“Urban Palisades” examines the development of the district of Santa Fe to interrogate the role of technologies in cementing socioeconomic segregation in contemporary Mexico City –one of the world’s most unequal megalopolis. Long identified as an urban kaleidoscope, Mexico City extended its footprint since the 1950s, absorbing smaller surrounding communities. With the onslaught of the 1980s and 1990s neoliberal reforms and aggressive land privatization, expert planners (engineers, architects, economists) and building contractors developed new infrastructures that, consciously or not, ultimately recreated material divides. Some of these agents embedded classism and racism in planning and executing infrastructural projects, materializing new privatized forms of urbanization that have coexisted with illegal slums.

Nestled in the city’s western fringe, Santa Fe was mostly built in the last thirty years for the stern resolve of protecting housing and consumption habits of the nouveau riche. Santa Fe took inhabited land contaminated by decades of mining and garbage activities, rising over a mountain of trash, violence, and the pillars of spatial segregation. On the shadows of the district’s skyscrapers lies the old Santa Fe, a working-class and peripheral neighborhood dating to the sixteenth century shared space with areas offering leisure activities for middle and upper classes and lodging for trips to the nearby city of Toluca. Contrasts between the two are palpable. Precarious residences on ravines, murals on walls, and pedestrians on the streets are left behind, as luxury condominiums, commercial billboards, and streets designed for cars and devoid of sidewalks and pedestrians signal our entrance to a new territory.

This interdisciplinary research project contends that any critical analysis of urban inequality in the Global South requires attention to the historical construction of a built environment that functions as barriers and boundaries between the rich and the poor. This project examines “technological palisades” to explain how infrastructural systems and technological artifacts simultaneously embody and work to draw new geographies of urban inequality and social fragmentation. Four research questions drive the project: 1) How have technologies shaped the geography of urban inequality in the development of Santa Fe? 2) Who have been the main actors behind the material deployment of both Santa Fes? 3) How do technological palisades chart gendered spatial topographies? 4) To what extent are urban fragmentations created by infrastructures and other technologies reversible?

“Urban Palisades” makes a crucial distinction between infrastructures of mobility and technologies of fencing. It examines how the development of roads, bridges, and railways physically and symbolically divides the Santa Fe district, which serves to confine communities of distinct socioeconomic status. Second, it studies fencing technologies, such as barbed wire, broken glass, razor spikes, walls, and gates across poor, middle-class, and wealthy areas. The development of these infrastructures of mobility and technologies of fencing, in turn, prevent the construction of sidewalks and bikeways, engendering new immobilities and inequality. Granting attention to walking as a mode of asserting rights within urban space, we also ask what is the socioeconomic, gendered, and even generational dimension of the absence of sidewalks?  Sidewalks will allow us to piece together the power topographies of urban space by grounding our perspective on the embodied experience of ordinary practitioners, those who walk the district. In doing so, we underline the importance of space and spatial design in providing women, the disabled, domestic workers, and carless individuals with equal access to the city.

The project ‘Urban Palisades’ is directed by Diana Montaño (Washington University in St. Louis) and David Pretel (Pompeu Fabra University), with Robert Jordan (Colorado State University) and Matthew Bernstine (Washington University in St. Louis) as invited research scholars.  Brodwyn Fischer (University of Chicago), acting in an advisory capacity, will assess project results. Clara Cuevas and Reynaldo Reyes, both doctoral students at El Colegio de México, have joined the project as research assistants.