Geopolitics and Volumetry: Urban Restructuring and Neoliberal Governability. Notes for a Theoretical and Methodological Approach for the Study of Mexico City

Abstract

This article analyzes the transformation in the praxis of urban government since the consolidation of neoliberalism. To do this, we make a discussion on verticality and volumetry as theoretical-methodological references that allow us to elucidate a form of production of urban space that transcends the traditional analytical approach –focused on the horizontal dimension, the representation in the plane and the ‘area’ as measure of assurance and control– to inaugurate new practices and conceptions that integrate and produce a three-dimensional space, highly fragmented, with strong territorial segmentations that define hierarchical forms of articulation and regulation of urban reproduction processes, and with it, a whole new form of urban-neoliberal government that relies on both fragmentation and complex infrastructural developments. In the specific case of Mexico City, in the last three decades it has been observed a production of volumetric space destined to produce and interconnect the new dispersed centralities –among them and with those produced in the previous stage– with infrastructural articulations that at the same time serves as technologies for the administration and government of spatialities and subjects in a subordinate condition. We have called this: geopolitics of urban volumetry.