Where Policy, Planning & Everyday Practices Meet: Governmentality & Facility Provision in Ciudad Satélite

Social housing policy in Mexico addresses a pressing housing need and has thus followed a model that allows for the accelerated construction of massive developments of identical single-family houses at the outskirts of cities where land is cheaper. However, many of these developments are only partia...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor principal: López Mares, Lourdes Marcela (autora)
Formato: RE
Idioma:inglés
Publicado: Chicago, Illinois La Autora 2016
Colección:Premio Internacional de Tesis de Investigación sobre Vivienda y Desarrollo Sustentable 2016. La Vivienda Social Innovación y Tecnología
Temas:
Acceso en línea:https://infonavit.smart-ed.mx/cgi-bin/koha/opac-retrieve-file.pl?id=738f1beefc79d9427a7689cacd9deb1f
Descripción
Sumario:Social housing policy in Mexico addresses a pressing housing need and has thus followed a model that allows for the accelerated construction of massive developments of identical single-family houses at the outskirts of cities where land is cheaper. However, many of these developments are only partially completed resulting in a scarce offer of services and equipamiento and in problems such as large percentage of vacancies, vandalism and quick deterioration, affecting residents' quality of life. As a result, this housing model reflects a policy paradox, by which satellite cities may be actually perpetuating a range of social problems. In contexts of low incomes, lack of services, increased costs and lack of job opportunities, access to equipamiento is central. These provide residents with local services and facilitate access to opportunities for under-privileged groups. Therefore, creating opportunities to access adequate services has been fundamental for residents who have had to adapt, transform and produce space according with their needs and meager resources. Further, facilities are key elements in the marketing of these projects on the part of governmental agents such as local authorities and developers and are used to increase housing sales. Analyzing the means through which power is exerted by different actors to advance particular strategies and shape the space of facility provision in Ciudad Satélite, this research's case study, is central to empirically understand the gaps between policy, planning, the will to govern and on-the-ground implementation. Therefore, one of the central aims of this research is to understand how actors produce and seize those gaps to assert their strategies and tactics and impact the production of equipamiento. Based on Foucault's governmentality concept, the theoretical framework of my research knits an analytical thread to understand de interplay between neoliberal governmental programs and rationality, subjectification, spatial governmentality and everyday practices. Under the logic of assemblages, this research seeks to bring to light the multiplicity of technologies used from above and below, by state and non-tate actorsto govern the provision of equipamiento in massive social housing developments in Mexico. From a mixed methods approach, the research resorts to different methods of data collection such as interviews with key actors, a residents' survey, base mapping and archival research. The research is qualitatively driven, this is to say that the main objective of my analyses is to provide a nuanced account of the processes through which actors seek to govern and exert power. At the aid of these methods, findings from this research suggest that the actors involved in the provision of equipamiento in the case studied assemble technologies to control both the territory and the population through urban planning, as a tool to produce reality and justify an ambitious project; through urban design and architecture, as tools to produce environments conducive to desired behaviors and through community as the preferred 'territory of government' to imbue governmental agents'values. Residents, on the other hand, reproduce governmental discourses that use individual responsibility and community values as banners to maintain developments, increase housing sales and raise land values, they familiarize space, as a way to define the terms of their own subjection, and employ different tactics to exert power and strive for equipamiento. Namely, residents adapt and appropriate space, and openly claim the right to produce it. Ciudad Satélite reproduces the housing model it was intended to counter, providing residents with poor living conditions. Paradoxically, most of the Garden City's open spaces are abandoned, oversized facilities are partly used and lack ongoing funds to function, Urbi ́s private equipamiento is not used and residents hold restrained power to decide over the management of facilities but are the main contributors to their maintenance. Finally, developers' aim to control the image of developments results in prohibiting commercial uses very much needed by residents.
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