Monstrous politics : geography, rights, and the urban revolution in Mexico City

The birth of the world’s great megacities is the surest and starkest harbinger of the “urban age” inaugurated in the twentieth century. As the world’s urban population achieves majority for the first time in recorded history, theories proliferate on the nature of urban politics, including the shape and quality of urban democracy, the role of urban social and political movements, and the prospects for progressive and emancipatory change from the corridors of powerful states to the routinized rhythms of everyday life. At stake are both the ways in which the rapidly changing urban world is understood and the urban futures being negotiated by the governments and populations struggling to contend with these changes and forge a place in contemporary cities. Transdisciplinary by design, Monstrous Politics first moves historically through Mexico City’s turbulent twentieth century, driven centrally by the contentious imbrication of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its capital city. Participant observation, expert interviews, and archival materials demonstrate the shifting strategies and alliances of recent decades, provide the reader with a sense of the texture of contemporary political life in the city during a time of unprecedented change, and locate these dynamics within the history and geography of twentieth-century urbanization and political revolution. Substantive ethnographic chapters trace the emergence and decline of the political language of “the right to the city,” the establishment and contestation of a “postpolitical” governance regime, and the culmination of a century of urban politics in the processes of “political reform” by which Mexico City finally wrested back significant political autonomy and local democracy from the federal state. A four-fold transection of the revolutionary structure of feeling that pervades the city in this historic moment illustrates the complex and contradictory sentiments, appraisals, and motivations through which contemporary politics are understood and enacted. Drawing on theories of social revolution that embrace complexity, and espousing a methodology that foregrounds the everyday nature of politics, Monstrous Politics develops an understanding of revolutionary urban politics at once contextually nuanced and conceptually expansive, and thus better able to address the realities of politics in the “urban age” even beyond Mexico City. Cover Title Page Table of Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction Part I: Urbanizing Revolution 1. A Century of Monsters, Machines, and Megaurbanization 2. Crisis, Conflict, and Cárdenista Revolution Part II: Revolutionary Urbanisms 3. Dreaming Dialectically: The Death and Life of the Right to the City in Mexico City 4. Así No (Not Like This): Resisting Postpolitics on Avenida Chapultepec 5. The Redemptive (Urban) Revolution: Political Reform and the Rebirth of the Capital City-State Conclusion Appendix: An Explanatory Note on Approach and Methods List of Abbreviations Notes References Index "Tracing the evolving relationship between popular politics and the production of space through a fusion of historical geography and ethnography in Mexico City"-- Provided by publisher