The CEU Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology
invites you to a public lecture by
Claudia Zamorano
(Graduate Center, City University of New York)
Fortification: Precondition for gentrification in development contexts?
Date and time: December 12, Monday, 5:30 pm
Venue: Gellner room
Claudia Zamorano is an urbanist with a phd from EHESS, Paris, affiliated with the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology in Mexico City and CUNY Graduate Center. She worked on housing strategies among low-income families in Ciudad Juárez, a city on the U.S.-Mexico border; Minimal Housing for Workers in post-revolutionary Mexico (1930s); Privatization of public security and Gentrification; vulnerable populations and spatial justice in metropolitan spaces.
Abstract: Gentrification originally described the process by which working-class areas in London in the 1960s were being resettled and transformed by higher classes. Since then both the term and the process have spread throughout the world as a model of real-estate investment rather than urban planning.
Mexico City has imported the same practice since the mid-1990s, following the two essential steps shown by Smith (1996) in other places. The first of these steps has been a lack of investment in the place for a long time; the second, a sudden arrival of massive investment, expelling the former poor population, and inviting the wealthy to settle there.
The Mexican case presents several peculiarities. This paper focuses on one of these: The tendency to build enclosed defensive places in gentrified zones. I argue that fortification is a precondition for gentrification processes in Mexico and other places with high social inequality. The paper presents a case study of the Historical Center of Mexico City and shows the paradoxical developments that ensue.