Showcase politics: The production and distribution of new public space in Mexico City

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes the work of the Public Space Authority (AEP) in Mexico City to explore the politics of site selection in public space infrastructure investment. By focusing on a pocket parks program as a case study, we explore how governments and agencies make efforts to configure their distributional criteria for urban public goods. We develop an explanatory framework around showcase politics, where agencies favor high-profile locations to create rapid demonstrations of their programs and their effectiveness for an audience of governmental and social actors. Through showcase politics, agencies deploy their limited resources for maximum exhibitionary effects with the aim of justifying the existence of the agency and its programs as a legitimate solution to urban problems, and to support the overall political agenda of the party in power. While this decisional logic makes sense for the maintenance of a newly created agency within a bureaucracy, it contradicted the agency’s own stated policy goals to distribute public space amenities broadly throughout the Mexican capital.

KEYWORDS:

• Public space
• infrastructure
• public goods
• site selection
• urban politics

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the editor of the JUA and the anonymous reviewers whose feedback was very helpful in shaping the article into its final form.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David López-García

David López-García is Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Urban Planning and Policy in the University of Illinois Chicago. Prior to joining UPP-UIC he was Visiting Lecturer in the Urban Studies Department at Queens College-CUNY and Visiting Research Scholar in the Observatory on Latin America (OLA) at The New School. His research spans urban accessibility, urban structure, spatial inequalities, and policy mobilities. He holds a PhD in Public and Urban Policy from The New School and a Masters in Comparative Public Policy from FLACSO-Mexico.

Joseph Heathcott

Joseph Heathcott is Associate Professor and Chair of Urban and Environmental Studies at The New School. Professor Heathcott studies the metropolis and its diverse cultures, institutions, and environments within a comparative and global perspective. He currently serves as associate editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association, and on the editorial boards of the Journal of the Society for Architectural Historians, Planning Perspectives, and the International Journal of Architectural Research.