Producir paisajes seguros en contexto de gentrificación: disimular el peligro y mantener la apariencia

Abstract

Within the framework of a study on what I call the tri-ad “urban renewal, gentrification and securitization”, I analyze the production of a cosmopolitan, ascetic and apparently safe aesthetic that governments and planners have tried to establish in Mexico City’s central Alameda and its surroundings. I first look at the urban-istic strategies that –following the theory of defensible spaces of Oscar Newman (1972)– challenge the so-called architecture of fear and that trigger techniques of danger dissimulation. Secondly, I analyze the daily works of exclusion and the intensive use of bodies who work everyday in precarious conditions to render such an aesthetic possible. Thus, putting in tension the inclu-sion-exclusion binomial that has dominated the debate on gentrification, the analysis also destabilizes other dichotomies that frequently intervene in this debate: formality and informality; modernity and archaism

Keywords

• mexico city
• urban renewal
• securing
• gen-trification
• uses of the body
• techniques of invisibility
• inclusion
• exclusion