Infrastructure & Environment in Mexico City

October 15, 2019 - 4:00 pm

Segal Theatre
The Graduate Center, CUNY

This panel will discuss cases of infrastructural projects in Mexico City whose political dispute centered around its environmental implications. The panel aims at finding commonalities across the cases that could point out to new directions in urban politics research and theorization. Through their presentations, participants in the panel will be asked to answer the following questions: What has been the role of the environment in the policy process around each infrastructural project? What were the different environmental arguments used by the different actors and coalitions within the policy subsystem? What are the sources of knowledge about the environment used for political dispute and how do these sources win legitimacy among the policy subsystem actors? In what ways did the knowledge about the environment help to gain support for or hindered the infrastructural projects? And ultimately, what new linkages between the environment, urban politics and infrastructure development can be drawn from the cases presented?

David López is a Mexican Ph.D. student in the Public and Urban Policy program at The New School. His research focuses on the political economy of infrastructure in capitalist societies, socio-spatial patterns of infrastructural inequality, the infrastructural lived experience of city dwellers, and the role of the state in infrastructure redistribution.

Oscar Sosa is Visiting Assistant Professor of Policy and Social Justice at the New School. His research examines the politics of urban and regional governance and asks how innovation can produce more sustainable and democratic cities and regions. His current book project, “The Politics of Immediacy: Citizenship, Infrastructure and Sustainable Mobility in Mexico City,” examines how the politics of climate change, international development and urban democracy intersect in the transformation of Mexico City’s planning and transportation governance structures.

Araceli Tinajero (Ph.D., Rutgers University) is Professor of Spanish at the Graduate Center and City College of New York, CUNY. Her research interests are Orientalisms, Modernismo, reading history, travel writing and biography, transoceanic studies, Mexican, Caribbean and Latino literatures in comparative perspective.

 
Co-Organizer and Moderator: Araceli Tinajero, The Graduate Center/City College, CUNY 

TO REGISTER send email to bildner@gc.cuny.edu.