Project: "Landscapes of (In)Security and Planning of Possible Spaces. Perception of the Security Patrols in the Middle-Class Districts of the 'Xola corridor'"

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Supervisor:
Prof. Dr. Claudia Carolina Zamorano Villareal (CIESAS)

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In recent years, Mexico City has experienced an increase in devices, infrastructures, policies, public and private financing in terms of citizen security. This process, which we call securitization, is based on a global logic with local experiences; mainly in the upper and upper-middle class. Gates or other physical barriers, CCTV surveillance, digital technologies, social networks and a high number of public and private police are part of the devices that involve securitization.

Many studies have focused on gated communities, their high walls and class segregation. In this case, I analyze through a digital ethnography (based on virtual tours, analysis of social networks and interviews), the securitization process in a public space of heterogeneous middle classes; a group of neighborhoods that surround an avenue called "Xola" in the central zone of Mexico City.

This project tries to understand how the security landscapes are configured physically and symbolically in this middle-class area. I will first analyze the composition of the landscapes; second, how citizens, the government and some private capital participate in the production of these spaces; then, how the perception of the security landscapes of the inhabitants of the Xola corridor intervenes in their daily life and their social relationships with "other spaces". The future is linked in two ways: analyzing the role of security devices, in the future of planning public spaces for the middle classes and their interference in the dynamics of anticipation of danger by citizens.