Abstract

ZAMORANO VILLARREAL, Claudia Carolina. Making safe landscapes in gentrifying contexts: danger dissimulation and appearance maintenance. Alteridades [online]. 2022, vol.32, n.63, pp.51-63.  Epub Sep 19, 2022. ISSN 2448-850X.  https://doi.org/10.24275/uam/izt/dcsh/alteridades/2022v32n63/zamorano.

Within the framework of a study on what I call the triad “urban renewal, gentrification and securitization”, I analyze the production of a cosmopolitan, ascetic and apparently safe aesthetic that governments and planners have tried to establish in Mexico City’s central Alameda and its surroundings. I first look at the urbanistic strategies that -following the theory of defensible spaces of Oscar Newman (1972)- challenge the so-called architecture of fear and that trigger techniques of danger dissimulation. Secondly, I analyze the daily works of exclusion and the intensive use of bodies who work everyday in precarious conditions to render such an aesthetic possible. Thus, putting in tension the inclusion-exclusion binomial that has dominated the debate on gentrification, the analysis also destabilizes other dichotomies that frequently intervene in this debate: formality and informality; modernity and archaism.

Keywords : Mexico City; urban renewal; securing; gentrification; uses of the body; techniques of invisibility; inclusion; exclusion.

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