The Politics of Immediacy: Citizenship, Infrastructure and Sustainable Mobility in Mexico City

The dissertation examines the development of sustainable transportation policy in Mexico City. It argues that while sustainable transportation interventions have been defined as examples of a commitment to democratic planning and redistribution of infrastructure investment, in practice these projects have been implemented in a top-down fashion, legitimized by a handful of experts and have targeted only a handful of central districts. The implementation of these reforms are enabling the re-valorization of central neighborhoods and generating new forms of privatization and spatial inequality. The inequality produced is not only spatial. Sustainable transportation initiatives also produce differentiated publics, reducing participation to a handful of non-state actors, namely, experts and international NGOs.I develop these claims through the analysis of Metrobus, the city’s BRT system, the bikeshare system Ecobici, and a street parking management program called Ecoparq. I draw on ethnographic evidence collected in Mexico City over 16 months in 2012 and 2013 consisting of extensive in- depth interviews with over 60 city officials, transportation experts, NGO staff members, social movements activists and citizens. I use this data to analyze política de movilidad as a policy space in which multiple actors within and outside the state have come together to redefine the goals, mechanisms and technologies used to plan and implement transportation infrastructure.I draw on the metaphor of immediacy to analyze the practices that make possible these sustainable transportation projects and bring attention to three important policymaking practices and their effects. First, I argue that the need for an immediate response to environmental crises is generative of new policies that must be implemented quickly by bypassing existing bureaucratic and political structures. Second, I show how first-hand, immediate, experience is as an important temporal- spatial dimension of policymaking. By building pilot projects that appear successful and can make sense to any resident, city officials minimize conflict and bring legitimacy to controversial interventions. And third, I propose that the metaphor of immediacy complicates understandings of the role that infrastructures play in shaping public debates around green futures. Movilidad projects postpone inclusive planning processes in which planners could mediate debates in which citizens, experts and officials co-decide how to make the city more sustainable and democratic