Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Paulina Reyes
In Mexico City, a robust network of grass-roots civil society organizations (CSOs) have all but transformed the shape of housing development within the last forty years. Since their inception from student-led activism during the late 1960’s, CSOs have emerged as leading advocates in housing reform on behalf of citizens who are otherwise invisible in the top-down project of city-building. CSO-led development has left an indelible mark on the urban fabric; that of irregular settlements, urban improvement projects, and numerous subsidized housing projects. By their principles, CSOs are radical, empowering, and crucial to the welfare of Mexico City’s poor. However, in the single-minded pursuit of formal housing through the state, these same groups have become complicit in producing a mode of urbanism which completely contradicts their stated ideological purpose, that of economic fairness, egalitarianism, and political autonomy through solidarity. Realized low-income housing developments divide, indebt, and individual residents through a coordinated set of “aesthetic, economic, social, and political strategies” which enshrine ownership to the benefit and control of elite financial stakeholders. Even if they produce material gains, CSOhousing development does little to challenge, and perhaps deepens the impediments towards an equitable urban environment — that of socio-spatial exclusion, marginalization, and homogenization. Based on my ongoing involvement with the civil society group, el Frente Popular Francisco Villa Independiente(FPFVI), this paper attempts to explain the transformation of civil society’s legitimate democratic demand for vivienda digna through an ideological logic of ownership which undermines that very idea.
Volume Editors
Luis Francisco Rico-Gutierrez & Martha Thorne
ISBN
978-1-944214-08-1
