Self-managed urban resistance: dispute over the city from los Pedregales

Abstract

During the last decades of Mexico City history, the contradiction between the democratization process and the advance of capitalist urbanization has reached one of its most intense phases. The elected governments since 1997 have developed a rights platform, at the same time, have delivered the determinations on the city to private capital. The Urban Development Laws of 1996 and 2010, and their instrumentation, have stimulated the capture of the city by a global sale real estate development, to the detriment of the towns, neighborhoods and colonias of the city that face forms of dispossession, fragmentation and segregation. This text states that is in that contradiction that emerge groups, organizations and movements of defense and fight for the city. These collective actors develop combative processes from self-management, with the purpose of becoming an actor in the dispute over the city. Through the approach to the recent experience of the Pedregales de Coyoacán y Tlalpan, the article argues that self-managed urban resistances recognize the deterritorialization processes and generate forms of re-lugarization from the subjective and permanent appropriation of their territories.