Urban Sensation and Segregation: Understanding Mexico City's Programa de Rescate and Its Reproduction of Urban Othering

Yazhuo Wang

doi:10.54097/wp7wzs33

Authors

Yazhuo Wang

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.54097/wp7wzs33

Keywords:

Sensory Urbanism, Urban Sensory Experience, Multi-Sensory Urban Governance, Urban Segregation

Abstract

Reflecting a form of entrepreneurial urban governance in the neoliberal context, the Rescue Programme (Programa de Rescate) launched in Mexico City contained a series of renewal policies that intended to redevelop the urban centre. Research has been conducted to either critique this programme from its embedded neoliberal ideology and the urban inequalities it has caused or analyse local residents’ agency in resisting this urban planning. Rather than simply viewing the Rescue Programme as a form of entrepreneurial urban governance, this research adopts sensory urbanism as a theoretical framework and concerns this programme as an attempt to implicate sensory governance in Mexico City. From a sensory perspective, this research seeks to explore how the renewal policies of the Rescue Programme have become a source of reproducing urban segregation in everyday-life practices and further generate othering in intimate socio-spatial contestations. Drawing on the concepts of ‘urban sensorium’ and urban ‘othering,’ the Rescue Programme has reproduced urban exclusion and segregation by reinforcing the division between different sensory landscapes in the city. Based on such a division, the sensory experiences in inner-city neighbourhoods, which have been excluded from the ‘revitalised’ process of the urban centre under the Rescue Programme’s promotion, have been marketed as a cultural consumption that allows tourists to experience the alternative image of the city. In contrast to the beautification of the urban centre, such so-called ‘slum tourism’ within the inner-city neighbourhoods has further reproduced urban othering. To improve sensory governance in Mexico City on the basis of the Rescue Programme, the participation of local residents and street vendors is recommended to be involved in the urban planning process in terms of insurgent planning.

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