Introduction

The original European conception of sidewalks makes them a part of the public domain characterized by public uses, which is a matter of public order and whose development and management belong to the public authorities (^{Gehl, 2010}). Within this monopoly, the sidewalk may appear to transport and mobility specialists as an element of the infrastructure for pedestrian circulation and as a support for urban furniture that serves this circulation as well as that of vehicles on the roadway. However, this functionality often seems to be limited or even disrupted by many other uses, especially in cities of the Global South, where the formal order of transit, which dominates the design of streets, competes in particular with the alternative or even informal practices of staying in public space to work, shop, consume, play or rest.

We are moving away from the literature on sidewalks that puts the highlight on defaults of accessibility, on walkability and urban design (^{Boils, 2019}, ²⁰²²; ^{Ingram et al., 2017}; ^{Guío, 2008}) and pedestrian mobility (^{Fernández-Garza & Hernández-Vega, 2019}; ^{Tanikawa & Paz, 2022}) and are following ^{Loukaitou-Sideris & Ehrenfeucht’s (2009}) and ^{Kim’s (2015)} works on conflicts, although with some differences. This situation of heterogeneity of the uses of sidewalks has been studied in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam by ^{Kim (2015)}, who recommends managing the conflicts arising from it by going beyond property rights focused on the public/private dichotomy and considering other types of basic rights, particularly the right to subsistence. Extending Kim’s proposal, we suggest here that the sidewalk has to be seen as the product of a negotiated order in which informality plays an important role and that allows for the coexistence of a variety of often conflicting uses, while at the same time creating an ambivalent place for traffic.

Understanding the production of the negotiated order of the sidewalk means going beyond the dichotomy between public and private space. For this reason, we do not adopt Kim’s notion of “mixed-use public space”, which implies that the sidewalk is administered by public authority. Instead, we follow the hypothesis that it is not only the physical space but also the order that regulates the sidewalk that is hybrid, as it integrates and articulates multiple dichotomies: public vs. private, formal vs. informal, residence vs. work, and especially mobility vs. immobility. The notion of hybrid order that we develop here for the study and interpretation of the sidewalk has theoretical and methodological implications that could be extended to other socio-spatial objects, whether related to mobility or not.

The perspective opened by the notion of hybrid order allows us to analyze how pedestrian mobility practices that use the sidewalk as a travel infrastructure, are inserted into the production of this order in interaction with the other uses of the sidewalk. Our proposal is part of an evolution in urban planning that integrates the plurality of uses by replacing the vocabulary and culture of the roadway with those of the public space. What kind of order then emerges from the hybridization at work?

We have chosen the concept of hybridization, following ^{García (1997)} in his analysis of the evolution of contemporary cultures, where he wants to mark a double distance: on the one hand, from the concept of miscegenation (“mestizaje”), associated with the question of the mixing of races, and on the other, from that of syncretism, used to evoke the fusion of religious influences. However, the notion of “métissage” has been extended in France to dimensions other than biological and has been used in Latin America to conceive the “mestizo thought” (^{Gruzinski, 1999}). ^{Baby-Collin (2000}) has spoken of “mestizo urbanity” to show how the inhabitants of the precarious neighborhoods of El Alto (Bolivia) and Caracas (Venezuela) produce their urbanity and citizenship in a back-and-forth between formality and informality, center and periphery, integration and exclusion. Recently, ^{Runnels (2019)} has studied the “mestizo aesthetic” expressed in real estate development and speculation in El Alto by entrepreneurs of Aymara origin.

It is in this sense of “mestizaje” that we place our choice of the notion of hybridization to qualify the realities we have studied through the sidewalks of the Mexico City area. We follow García (op. cit.) when he draws attention to hybridization as an ongoing process rather than a fixed state. Understanding this process means looking at developments on different time scales and establishing the genealogy of the material and social production of sidewalks as typical of successive or different generations of urban planning and design. For example, the first “European-style” sidewalks were imported to Mexico City by Viceroy Revillagigedo between 1789 and 1794, marking a turning point in the imposition of public authority over residents (^{Sánchez de Tagle, 2007}). This process of public legitimation is consistent with what has been observed elsewhere (^{Loukaitou-Sideris & Ehrenfeucht, 2007}).

Another well-documented example of hybridization is provided by the sidewalks of popular self-built neighborhoods. The origin of these sidewalks is neither planning nor engineering, but vernacular know-how. In some cases, the order of spatial separation between the sidewalk and the roadway is created by farmers who have informally subdivided their land in order to sell it, while the residents’ associations then create the physical sidewalk with the means at hand and according to their own logic of use. In other cases, the land has been occupied by force and the invaders carry out a basic distribution of plots, on which the layout of the streets and (possibly) the location of the sidewalks will be made later. For these different reasons, due to culture of informality common in Mexico City and its surroundings, but also in other mexican and latin american cities, the sidewalk appears as a hybrid property, because if the residents recognize that it is public, at the same time they also feel that it belongs to them, which explains why they can ensure the daily cleaning in front of their house as we will see later. All this shows us the illusion of making the street a “public space par excellence”, especially if it implies that this space is undifferentiated, homogeneous, and monopolized by the State.

The focus on sidewalks, in a genealogical perspective of the production of urban space, and thus attentive to the different historical forms of production of urban space in different contexts, allows us to highlight the intrinsic heterogeneity of the different places that make up public space. In the street network, formally dominated by the order of traffic, where public rules are nevertheless hybridized with social norms, sidewalks appear as spaces of overlapping public and private logics, where different normative regimes are superimposed, often incoherent with each other. The concept of a hybrid order proves useful in explaining this social and cultural complexity of regulations, practices, and perceptions that fundamentally impact mobility.

This proposal is the result of empirical research developed in 2017-2022 in the metropolitan area of Mexico City and based on systematic observations, interviews with governmental, associative, or economic actors, questionnaires with users, video recordings and mapping of sidewalks at different scales. Our objective was to consider the different modes of social and spatial production of this fundamental urban space, as well as the complexity of the phenomenology associated with it, and the relationships with the different “settlement types” (^{Connolly, 2005}) and “urban orders” (^{Duhau & Giglia, 2008}) existing in the metropolitan area.

For this purpose, we selected a series of test sites that corresponded to some of these types:

Created by: Jerónimo Díaz.

Figure 1: Location of neighborhoods studied, Mexico City agglomeration. 

This paper is structured into five sections. Firstly, we present a typology of sidewalks as a hybrid order, highlighting the specific role of mobility in each type. Secondly, we describe the manifestations of the hybrid order in material space. Thirdly, we analyze the socio-political effects of hybridization. Fourthly, we examine how the hybrid order renews the strategy for analyzing public space. Lastly, we explore comparative uses of the concept of hybrid order.

The sidewalk as a hybrid order: an attempt at typology

Our theoretical proposals and empirical results lead us to suggest the following typology of practical modes of operation based on the hybrid order concept, which encompasses mobility and other uses.

Manifestations of the hybrid order in space

We will use photographs taken during the research project to illustrate these manifestations identified during the in-situ observations.

At the micro-scale of the ground, we observe material hybridizations. For example, in Santa Fe there is a play of continuities and discontinuities in the surface texture of the sidewalks. Photo 1 shows the texture of the sidewalk built by the company that built a tower (left) and the texture of the sidewalk built by the Delegation, the municipal authority (right). However, Photos 2 (sidewalk of the Delegation) and 3 (sidewalk built by the company) show that on the one hand the “private” sidewalk reproduces the design of the public sidewalk, but on the other hand the first one uses materials of better quality than the second one.

Credit: Ruth Pérez López.

Photo 1 Private sidewalk (left) and public sidewalk (right) in Santa Fe. 

Credit: Ruth Pérez López.

Photos 2 (top) and 3 (bottom)  Textures and materials of the public sidewalk (photo 2) and the private sidewalk (photo 3). 

At the intermediate scale of the street, there is a hybridization between the production of the material space (by private or public actors) and the uses (public or private) that are made of it. For example, in a residential street in the Roma Sur neighborhood, a resident has built a bench that leans against the façade, in a style that matches that of the house (Photo 4). This bench is primarily intended for his use, to sit and watch the animation of the street, but it is admitted that it also offers a service to passers-by. This private device built by an individual thus imitates the public bench device for both private and public use.

Credit: Guénola Capron.

Photo 4 The resident’s bench, a service to passers-by. 

Another situation is the support of street signs or cables, trees or bus stops. They are often used to hang advertisements or ropes, to install a kiosk, which often provides food services to people in transit (^{Monnet et al., 2007}). Another example is trees planted by municipal authorities to provide shade and make walking or passing more comfortable. Small and medium-sized trees are cut down by residents due to lack of maintenance by the local government, which tolerates it. Photo 5 shows the difference in treatment between trees maintained by residents and those abandoned by the Delegation (Roma Sur).

Credit: Miguel Ángel Aguilar.

Photo 5 Trees pruned by residents (background on the left) and trees abandoned by the government (center). 

The space regulated by the hybrid order of sidewalk is thus the result of a negotiation between public and private actors, which is part of the inhabitants’ and government’s culture throughout the city. A very common case is that of street vending, both in Mexico City and in Ho Chi Minh City (^{Kim, 2015}) and Nanjing (^{Guan, 2015}). One of our previous research studies showed the arrangements made between street vendors, establishments, and local authorities, in particular to allow stalls to follow each other throughout the day, creating a changing geography of the sidewalk (^{Monnet, Giglia, and Capron 2007}).

The effects of hybridization: mobility, safety, livability, democracy, integration-exclusion

The hybrid character of the order that reigns on the sidewalks and their uses implies a series of consequences for the mobility, security, habitability, integration and exclusion of the various actors that interact in these spaces.

Hybridization creates insecurity that threatens the proletarians, but their leaders manage to become part of the political order and allow the negotiation of tolerance for certain popular uses of space, in particular the informal trade on the sidewalks, which lives on the pedestrian traffic that provides it with its customers while often constituting an obstacle to it. In fact, pedestrians who are in a hurry but who have nothing to buy often have to walk on the roadway, at the risk of an accident.

The forms of appropriation of sidewalks that occur in working-class neighborhoods are also found in other types of cities/urban orders. Thus, in the “disputed city” which corresponds to the central city, as in the case of the Roma neighborhood, the coexistence of residential, service, and commercial uses generates numerous conflicts, for example over parking, as we have seen above. Our findings confirm previous research showing that the “negotiated” order is the dominant type in the agglomeration (see chapter “Los usos de las reglas” in: ^{Duhau & Giglia, 2008}).

The constant negotiation of rules and the resulting intrinsic uncertainty can be seen as the archetypal form of sidewalk governance in Mexico City. In this context, everyone tries to take charge of the sidewalk in their own way, either as a resident or as an occupier. In this context, the formal order struggles to impose itself.

Nevertheless, there is a hierarchy between uses that hybridizes “de jure” and “de facto” legitimations: while in law traffic imposes itself on socialization, which in turn imposes itself on commerce, in fact this hierarchy is sometimes exactly reversed. This could provide clues for the elaboration of a “well-made” legal order. The hierarchy could then answer several questions. Which order is more inclusive, the one that allows homeless people to stay at the expense of pedestrian traffic, the one where a kiosk at a crosswalk forces sidewalk users to walk on the road, or the one that excludes all subsistence or convivial uses to impose traffic? When one actor imposes itself on all the others, can the hybrid order be democratic and just? How the most legitimate uses are defined and by who? In the case of the sidewalks of Santa Fe and the Gustavo Madero Delegation, we observe the predominance of privatization by real estate actors who try to make it the legitimate order, limiting or repressing other uses that build on other legitimacies.

In Ho Chi Minh City, Kim (op. cit.) also raised the question of the (de-)legitimization of the uses of the sidewalks and of the street shops. She studied the opposing discourses on the latter where their high social acceptability is evident, especially on the part of the residents, the police officers in charge of the daily regulation of the sidewalks as well as the civil servants who manage them. Examples of this kind can be found elsewhere (^{Blomley, 2011}; ^{Valverde, 2012}), including in an authoritarian context such as China, where the hybrid order of sidewalks maintains the appearance of a hegemony of the formal order (^{Guan, 2015}). In Mexico City, ^{Ugalde (2016)} showed the hybridization of different legitimacies in the management of a tree planted in front of the door of a particular building, whose growth prevented residents from getting their cars out of their garages and which they wanted to cut down.

In this city, if there is strong discrimination against street vending by the middle and upper classes, it is counterbalanced by the tolerance of the working classes, who are the main beneficiaries of these activities, both as workers and as customers. Thus, according to their own moral values, as Guan (op. cit.) also observed in Nanjing, but also because they belong to these social categories, public officials turn a blind eye to these activities, depending on the place and/or time.

In the case of Latin American cultures, according to ^{García (1997)}, hybridization integrates more than it separates, especially in the case of indigenous tactics in the face of the dominant colonial culture. But hybridization creates a state of permanent uncertainty that makes the use of space precarious, diminishing its intelligibility and the exercise of certain rights, including the right to mobility. The democratic quality of the hybrid order thus depends on the situations and orders. The hybrid order is dynamic, because different uses prevail one after the other. Beyond the observation of the heterogeneity of uses, hybridity shows the importance of the interplay of actors interacting in the de facto and de jure management of sidewalks.

Renewing the strategy of analysis of public space

The significance of the hybrid order for the comparison of urban spaces

The concept of hybrid order has a theoretical-methodological importance because, beyond the need for an internal comparison of sidewalks in the metropolitan area of Mexico City, it allows a comparative analysis of different spatial management situations in different urban contexts, considering their complexity, while avoiding the confinement in dichotomies such as public-private, formal-informal, traffic-parking or residential-work, among others.

To illustrate this point, let us consider the case of cities where, in principle, the formal order seems to be more present and better respected, such as in France or Canada. The concept of hybrid order seems to contribute to a better understanding of the de jure and de facto management of sidewalks.

In Paris, the local government usually assumes responsibility for sweeping the streets from one facade to another. On the rare occasions when snow accumulates, an exceptional formal order is implemented, reserving the authority to clear the roadway for vehicles, while in principle the residents are responsible for removing the snow from the sidewalks. Two phenomena hybridize this formal rule: on the one hand, the technique used to clear the roadway causes the municipal services to push the snow back onto the sidewalks; on the other hand, the residents completely ignore their responsibility to clear the sidewalks, following the habit of considering that cleaning is the responsibility of the municipal services.

In Canada, snow is commonplace and municipal decrees require residents to remove snow from sidewalks, a well-known and practiced rule. The regulation dictates that residents must ensure the continuous passage on sidewalks to avoid liability for any accidents caused to pedestrians. However, this responsibility can shift to the municipality in the absence of a decree or in streets where the authority uses machines adapted for snow removal on the sidewalks.

The cases of Canada and Paris thus allow us to hypothesize that, even in contexts in which all actors are convinced that the formal order is hegemonic, with a transparent and predictable application, there are circumstances in which a degree of hybridization of rules and practices appears that an in-depth study could reveal.

Beyond the archetypal public space of the street, the concept of hybrid order can also be applied to spaces whose “public” character is not always obvious, such as the internal pedestrian circulation spaces of large residential or office complexes of functionalist architecture. In what is known in France as “urbanisme de dalle” (^{Picon-Lefebvre, 2001}), the level of pedestrian circulation “above the street” is the subject of many conflicts (between users and between managers) and poses major challenges. Similarly, the feet of social housing buildings, long used as public spaces when they were privately owned, are subject to contradictory trends to resolve conflicts of use: the strong trend is towards “residentialization” by fencing them off to make them private spaces, but there is also the opposite trend of transferring ownership, development and maintenance to the local government (^{Lelévrier & Guigou, 2005}).

The range of hybrid orders is therefore very wide. In Mexico City, we could also cite the case of parks opened to the public by the local government on private land (example of Reforma Social Park) or of shopping centers that are public-private spaces (^{Capron, 1998}).

Conclusions

Each case deserves an in-depth study of the hybridization processes at work locally, but the theoretical-methodological dimension of the concept of hybrid order makes it possible to envisage robust comparisons by making visible uses other than pedestrian transit on sidewalks.

In the Mexico City metropolitan area, the accumulation of local micro-orders with varying degrees of hybridity makes the governance of sidewalks extremely complex and unstable. This seems a far cry from the situation in New York City studied by ^{Jane Jacobs (1961, 1989)} in the 1950s. In Mexico City, uncertainty dominates, making the sidewalk a flexible space, the product of a permanent negotiation between actors, in which users are a more active part than in other contexts.

This is probably due to the socio-cultural particularities of the urbanization process in Latin America. In this region, during times of deep urbanization, there was few planning and development regulations or they were not complied with (for example, lots were sold in places that did not have infrastructure or services), so that inhabitants were forced not only to build their own homes, but also to build facilities and infrastructure and manage urban services (^{Pírez, 2013}). Unlike other highly regulated contexts, in the metropolitan area of Mexico City there is strong citizen participation (formal and informal) in the design, construction and modification/rehabilitation of sidewalks, as well as in their management. According to us, this informal urbanization, and above all, the place that informality occupies even in other urban contexts that are more formal, contribute to explain the processes of hybridization in the production and management of sidewalks. In other words, hybridization is closely linked to the informality present in urban planning and development processes.

The hybrid order leads to unstable processes of exclusion or inclusion, but also allows the city to continue to function. We therefore echo ^{Kim’s (2015)} call for local governments to create “laboratories” that bring together actors (passersby, merchants, residents, police, activists, academics, etc.) to explore sidewalk governance that balances the need for stable and consistent legal protection with the flexibility of local functioning.

We have applied the concept of hybrid order to sidewalks, and it would be interesting for future research to explore its application to other objects, including real estate speculation, transportation management, and waste administration. Examples of such applications can be found in ^{Boltvinik (2018)} about garbage and they encompass the intersection of formal urbanism, technocracy, and social accommodation. Even in contexts as the European ones, where publicity and formality are higher, hybrid order can be a productive issue to analyze blurred situations between public and private or formal and informal.