Urban cultural heritage. Practice and construction of common goods in Mexico City.

Abstract

The city is a space conceived by human beings to satisfy both their basic needs and their enduring aspiration for social coexistence. Over the past five decades, what has been theoretically defined as the neoliberal city has gradually taken shape. Within this urban model, the city and its inhabitants have jointly and inseparably evolved, developing and increasing the complexity of the system in which they coexist, where the economy and the market constitute the central axis of public policy.

Cecilia Barraza’s work, Urban Cultural Heritage: Practice and the Construction of the Commons in Mexico City, takes the Mexican capital as its object of study through the case studies of Xochimilco and La Roma. The author examines cultural heritage as a category that is both constitutive and constituted, overlapping, blurring, and dissolving the boundaries between memory, the social sphere, the public realm, and, ultimately, the market.