Mapping the Megalopolis: An Urban Atlas of Mexico City
An atlas is a collection of versions of a place, a compendium of perspectives, a snatching out of the infinite ether of potential versions a few that will be made concrete and visible
--Rebecca Solnit, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas
Project Leader: Dan Rogers Films are a product of the complex interplay between actors and the geographic spaces they inhabit. This summer, I’ll be identifying and documenting sites in Mexico City that served as locations for some of the most important films from the Golden Age to the present. This information will help me map the cognitive geography of the DF’s political mythologies and hierarchies that reinforce social norms of inclusion and exclusion.
Lead Researcher: Alejandro Puga These novels form an intertextual palimpsest, in which consistent and divergent sites of encounter are shared by multiple narrative voices. By mapping these works, a process of monumentalizing and de-monumentalizing the city as a literary image emerges. Works by Gonzalo Celorio, Ana Clavel, José Emilio Pacheco, and others are compared and layered with regard to plotted and imaginary trajectories.
Project Leader: Karen Velasquez Explores the production of linguistic landscapes in Mexico City and the ways Asian immigrants have introduced their languages and cultures into the city. Focuses on how the Korean language has transformed city landscapes, and how it is produced, disseminated, taught, and made visible in the city. She also investigates how Korean, Chinese, and Mexican vendors communicate and create informal business/transnational trade arrangements with each other.
Lead researcher: Glen Kuecker Project explores the urban imaginary of Carlos Slim through a case study of Plaza Carso. It explores how slim orders urban space through the privatization of public space. Mapping aims to capture this imaginary, especially how it is performed through daily acts of usage. Mapping the performance aims to unpack the "right to the city" as public contestation to the privatization of public space.
Lead researcher: Glen Kuecker This project explores how neoliberal visions of urban space are made a reality through consideration of Carlos Slim’s master project, the urban renewal of Mexico City’s Centro Histórico. Covering a space of over 600 city blocks, the Centro Histórico has overcome decades of neglect to become one of Mexico City’s most vibrant neighborhoods. Guided by Slim’s Fundación Centro Historórico nearly $500 million have been invested in restoring the neighborhood.
Project leader: Patricia Tovar