It all began with Industrial Revolution, Mexico experienced a rapid ans excessive growth. Cities like Mexico, Guadalajara and Monterrey start spreading all around the place, growing larger and larger with no censor.
With Mexico´s land reform, peasant farmers received more than 100 million hectares of land, kind of half Mexico´s territory. They established 30 000 ejidos or village communal holdings in which people could farm in order to grew food. However, this wasn´t the solution, and today many of those farmers live in really poor situations.
Later on, cities began “eating” all of those land used for agriculture. Demographic growth became excessive because of medical advances causing a high demand of housing, a demand cities infrastructure no longer fulfill. The government began giving any type of permission to developers so they could build and build lots of living spaces. As a consequence, cities grew with no urban planning.
We can see two main types of housing in Mexico: informal and formal (legal) urbanization. According to the Mexican Institute of Competition, 67% of housing in Mexico is informal. This constitute a problem because this scenario has no regulation, urban growth cannot be controlled. Poor people build their own houses because their possibilities don´t give them access for more. Therefore, because it has no regulation from the government, they are “out of the map”, they suffer for lack of all public services. Until the government, by pressure, install basic services to their land. It´s not the quality of life any person deserve.
But this is not the only problem. As we usually see in our system, there´s corruption everywhere and the construction industry it´s not the exception. When we travel through federal roads, sometimes we see isolated settlements. How much time do families spend on traveling all the way up there? Even more, family heads who have to go and work too early at the morning. Often, they don´t have time to get back and have a meal in family, so the spend on food. The usually arrived to their houses too late, only to have dinner and sleep. And this their routine everyday. Children go to the closest school of their home, most of the time, these schools don´t have the needed quality but they don´t have any other option. This type of housing carry too many problems like families´ segregation, transportation costs, no social interaction with their neighbors, housing abandonment, services problems, insecurity because houses are alone though the day, no identity between houses, etc. And all of this because developers wanted to earn money in the land cost. You end up making the poor, more poor and the rich, richer. Where´s equality and transparency in all this process?
We think we don´t nothing to do with these problems, but in fact, bad urban planification it´s a vicious circle that causes pollution, traffic, insecurity and many other problems we all complained daily.
Laws and new legislation have to be strong enough to benefit everyone, government, institutions and inhabitants, not just the interests of a few. Urbanization can´t be the only use we give to all existing lands. Creating ways in which cities can coexist, promote social interaction. Make houses more available for everyone so that cities grow in a more planified way.
But we have to be prepared to income all obstacles presented in the way to achieve what sound like an utopia.
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