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Whither the Public Sphere

Local, National, and International Influences on the Planning of Downtown Mexico City, 1910-1950

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This article examines the practices of urban planners in the early decades of this century as a basis for thinking about the public sphere in Mexico. It offers a general description of downtown Mexico City, its physical and social character, and the foreign and domestic reference points used to build the city in the period of revolutionary transition when competing views about downtown changed the profession of planning and the city itself. The article suggests that the existence of conflictive views of the city advanced by different planning elites impeded any real consensus on government efforts to develop downtown. This owed in no small part to the fact that the low-income, market, and trading-centered activities of downtown residents did not figure into modernist views of city planners, conservative and progressive alike. As downtown areas fell out of the urban planning picture, its populations were neglected, its physical spaces deteriorated, its social composition narrowed, and its so-called publicity became ever more circumscribed.

Key Words: public sphere • public space • downtown development • planning • Mexico

Space and Culture, Vol. 7, No. 2, 193-222 (2004)
DOI: 10.1177/1206331204263364


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