THE PLATTING OF POWER

Mexico City was destroyed in the Sixteenth Century and in its place was erected a colonial city that had a slow expansion until the half of the Nineteenth Century. Was then when its uncontrolled process of territorial expansion began. Mexico's capital urban history has registered in its subdivisions' names "fraccionamientos" and "colonias" the complex origin of its tribulations. The modern real estate business in Mexico City was initiated by the beneficiaries of the subdivision and commercialization of Catholic church's properties as well as by the promoters of land developments for foreign colonizers. Since the beginning the history of the land development process of the City registered also the intimate relationship between real estate business and politics.

The urban evolution of Mexico’s Federal District involved the participation of individual land lords, important land development companies as well as modest family's businesses that established very complex relationships between technical, financial and social issues as well as established deep relationships with the representatives of the political power. Those relationships fixed the rules of the modern real estate business in Mexico city. During the porfirian era, most of Mexico city's land developers were functionaries of local and national political power as well as were proprietors of banks, construction companies and similares.

The real estate business in Mexico City was overlooked by the revolutionaries as well as by local democratic governments created by the Constitution of 1917. With their properties unaffected by the revolutionary movement, new and old land developers continued business as usual until 1928 when the Mexico City’s democratic government was eliminated. Since then Mexico City’s urban evolution has been characterized as an anarchical process uncontrolled by the local government.

But in fact, Mexico city's urban development has been an outcome of unwritten precepts that were introduced in the half of the Nineteenth Century by the first land developers. Its growing expansion is consequence of complex relationships between political and economic power and the technical crafts to make it feasible.

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