blight

The much publicized “rescue” of the Centro was announced in 2001. The initiative’s supporters spoke of an area that had fast been falling into oblivion and decay, after a long period of systematic neglect and abandonment. The Centro had everything that was wrong with the city: high crime rates, poor conditions of urban infrastructure, hellish traffic jams, informality, etc. To make things worse, some of the most rundown areas, the ones with the crack houses and the infested vecindades, the streets blocked by street vendors and gangs, also had some of the city’s most amazing architecture: buildings running from the XVI to the XVIII centuries, the remnants of palaces, most of them on the verge of collapsing.

The redevelopment program conjured up images of tragic blight. The Centro was depicted as a dangerous, hostile place, that was “taken” (it still wasn’t absolutely clear by whom), that the average citizen couldn’t enjoy because of the perils that abounded in the area. Even more, the actual population loss the area suffered –again, in good measure stimulated by official urban policy, from government-sponsored suburbanization, to deindustrialization, etc– was overblown and transfigured into scenes of an emptied space, an area left to rot and at the mercy of social parasites. They championed the UNESCO’s World Heritage Site declaration Mexico City’s Historic Center earned in 1987 as a call to arms, and began stirring support for what the general consensus defended as a legitimate and beneficial enterprise.
The truth of the matter is, the Centro was never dead or empty. Despite its low population figures, around half a million people kept on working in the area (especially in the service sector, with both local and federal government offices abounding in the area, as well as private commerce, of course, both formal and informal. An estimated over 400,000 people visit the area everyday as consumers or service users. The Centro never really lost its vitality, even if it did change certain functions and attracted different population sectors. In any case, the notion of a ruined, dilapidated area is actually false. It is true that many “architectural jewels” are kept in a sorry state of disrepair, but the fact of the matter is that even in this state of urban fragility the area is absolutely active and functional (many buildings and lots that appear to be “empty” in official records are used as transitory housing or storage).

The Centro’s vitality has proven to be uncomfortable for certain government and social sectors. In terms of current politics and economics, the Centro is a constant reminder of the pitfalls in Mexico’s path to modernization. The imprint of the informal economy and the very organized (not at all informal) political framework generated around it is possibly clearer here than in any other part of the city, aside from informal settlements proper. The Centro is a very tangible product of failed state-run development schemes and urban policies. Degradation of the social and the urban has occurred not from abandonment, not even from incapacity or error, but a consistency of dubious principles, private interests, power games and poor management. The uncomfortable aspects of contemporary life in the Centro are mixed with the soreness of unhappy historic memory, inevitably entangled with politics.