No. 28 (2021): Anuario de Espacios Urbanos, Historia, Cultura y Diseño

Since its detection in Wuhan, China, at the end of 2019 and its naming by the World Health Organization as the new coronavirus Covid-19 on February 11, 2020, the pandemic has become the latest global crisis that keeps the planet at a complex crossroads. National and local governments implemented various restrictive responses to circulation, which had an impact on economic activities and social relations. At the close of the same year, the news about the appearance of vaccines made it possible to imagine a different 2021. Vaccination began and spread throughout the world, reducing the lethality of the pandemic. However, the cases continued to rise and the inequality in the distribution and application of the vaccines was evident on a regional scale. In this crisis, cities, as centers of concentration of population and activities, have faced a tension between prioritizing the care of their inhabitants, addressing the economic crisis or reactivating flows and adjusting physical structures for the so-called new normality. But the structuring inequality of the urban space (fragmentation, overcrowding, segregation, displacements, evictions, etc.) is not a consequence of this situation, although it has become exponential. Thus, the discussions on the urban have come and gone between the conjunctural and the structural, that is, between the need to concentrate the effort in overcoming the moment or, instead, continue with the reading of the impacts as a consequence of the historical condition of production of the city as a materialization of the phases of capitalism. This issue recognizes a position towards the second approach: the structural one. Three dimensions support this approach. The first refers to the permanent dispute between the dynamics of reproduction of urbanization, the aspirations to control and plan it, and the growing needs of a population with a strong popular base. The second has to do with the relationship between the State and real estate capital from the paradigm of modernity or modernization processes. From this dimension, the change of position and prominence of the sectors is of interest, as well as the development of an ideological form of reproduction of the urban space that adapts to the conditions of each territory and that reinvents itself with each crisis. The third is dialectically relevant because it is made up of the social-urban mobilization, its imprints, resistances and transformation projects, as well as its struggle for permanence. Based on these three dimensions, the research articles support the understanding of the preeminence of real estate capital in the adaptation of the institutional public structure, and the distance of the governmental apparatus from the practices of spatial justice and the right to the city. The result is the development of inequality, but also of the dispute over the city from various fronts. The first text offered is “The Mixed Planning Commission. A key organism in the urban planning of Mexico City during the regency of Ernesto P. Uruchurtu, 1952-1966” by Carlota Zenteno Martínez who analyzes the urban transformations of Mexico City during the period of the iron regent from the Perspective of the Mixed Planning Commission. One of the contributions of the text is aimed at demystifying the figure of Uruchurtu as the central character from whom all the initiatives and works emanated to materialize the urban projects carried out in the mentioned period. For this, it analyzes the role that the Mixed Commission had in the management of the projects, all of the above endorsed by a legal and administrative structure. With this, it intends to examine the discussions and oppositions that arose during this period of transformation. Silvia Roca and Micaela López present us with an article called “Real Estate Commodification of Natural Assets: Differentiated Urban Development in North Patagonia. The case of the city of Neuquén, Argentina” where they explore the urbanization patterns carried out by large developer companies in exclusive urban environments. In this text we will find an analysis, from the perspective of environmental justice, of socio-residential segregation from the endowment of green spaces. The authors examine the cases of two areas that account for the different valuation and pattern of urbanization based on environmental distinctions in the city of Neuquén. On the one hand, there is that area with an important and careful endowment of green spaces and, on the other, the area of ​​desert landscape made up of popular neighborhoods that grow without defined patterns, relegated to the periphery and with a deficient endowment of urban services. . In this city, regulations have been drawn up that promote "sustainable, planned, participatory and inclusive urban development", despite this, the reality is contradictory in the framework of resilient cities. As the authors point out, resilience will have to be observed within the framework of power relations. "Territorialization, poverty and the emergence of multiple territorialities in the peri-urban area of ​​Morelia, Mexico" by Ana Isabel Moreno Calles, Yadira Mireya Méndez Lemus and Abelardo Renward Pérez Monroy explore the fragmentation of the La Aldea territory based on the excessive construction of divided rooms and equipment of consumption, which more than benefit the population in general, pay off for large investors. This analysis identifies spatial processes that have to do with the consolidation of a poor peasant territory, industrialization as a palliative of poverty. At the same time, the above reveals the historical-spatial dynamics and the survival of poverty, where the different social actors are configuring their environment based on their own needs, work and their political and socioeconomic context. “The role of the State and real estate activity in the modernization of two Latin American cities: Mexico City and Lima” by Erika Angélica Alcantar García and Jéssica Esquivel Coronado is a comparative analysis of two real estate developments in two different countries during the same period of time. . The text explores the parallels of real estate activity and shows that urban land speculation not only benefits big capital but also certain social groups. On the other hand, 2021 was also resented by the urban studies community due to the departure of some of its references. This number offers a collective text as a tribute to one of them: Rene Coulomb. Finally, the Yearbook ends with Francisco de la Torre Galindo's review of the book El Centro Histórico turistificado by David Navarrete, the text brings us closer to the analysis of gentrification processes.   Francisco Javier de la Torre Galindo María Esther Sánchez Martínez