Few places have changed as much as Mexico City in recent years. The growing international interest in the Latin-American capital, especially in matters of architecture and design, is linked to the arrival en masse of digital and creative nomads who have chosen to settle there since the pandemic. While this phenomenon – which some have described as a ‘New Berlin’ – is in reality limited to certain, specific districts, gentrification has had a profound effect on the overall urban balance. It has in fact contributed to fuelling the private real-estate market, stirring discontent on the part of many locals, sometimes expelled in a high-handed manner to make room for Airbnb rentals and fashionable cafés. In order to deal with these problems, the city’s progressive authorities have invested heavily in public infrastructure and social initiatives, which has led to the construction of new buildings at the service of the community. Among them, the programme called PILARES (an acronym of Puntos de Innovación, Libertad, Arte, Educación y Saberes*), launched in 2018 by the city’s mayor at the time, Claudia Sheinbaum (today president of Mexico), has led over the years to the creation of a network of community centres in the more disadvantaged neighbourhoods of the metropolitan area. Many have been entrusted to studios of international repute, such as WORKac, which in collaboration with Estudio Ignacio Urquiza Ana Paula de Alba has designed two of them, at Lomas de Becerra and Azcapotzalco. Both buildings are prisms of pigmented concrete, porous towards public space and flexible in their use. The* PILARES at Iztapalapa, designed by Fernanda Canales, is of a different nature: an introverted building, separated from the street by a perforated wall and laid out around four circular courtyards, conceived as a system of protection in a setting notorious for its high levels of insecurity. Another line of action has concerned the regeneration of open spaces in the large, and often decaying, complexes of social housing. Into this area can be fitted the projects of AMASA, like the UH Infonavit Santa Fe community park where playgrounds and sports fields are arranged around a circular pavilion. Above and beyond these programmes, other public investments have been made in new centres of activity. In the northern industrial suburb of Tultitlán, for example, the Taller and Departamento del Distrito studios have reinterpreted the volume of the factory with a shed roof typical of the urban landscape in order to create a public complex that includes a community hub and a library, while in the more central Chapultepec Park, the architecture studios Erre Q Erre and A001 have designed a centre for the raising of awareness on environmental matters and a refreshment area for the adjoining zoological garden respectively. The first takes the form of a semicircular pavilion surrounded by gardens that conjure up the different ecosystems of the Valley of Mexico, while the second is a roof of laminated timber that protects a series of vaulted volumes.

The private sector has also been contributing to the creation of semi-public spaces. Many have sprung from the initiative of the architects themselves, as in the case of La Laguna and La Fábrica del Hielo, two former factories in areas still barely touched by the processes of gentrification underway, turned – the first by the Productora studio, the second by JSa – into creative hubs, with offices, cafés and common spaces. On the cultural front, new interventions are seeking to redress the balance between what is on offer in the centre and on the periphery. The Museo Anahuacalli has been enlarged with an extension by Taller Mauricio Rocha, integrated into the volcanic landscape, while in the east a new public museum designed by the Bax practice of Barcelona tackles the themes of science and climate change. In a city too long divided into sealed compartments, we are seeing the emergence of spaces devoted to the community. In part thanks to the direct participation – something that can in no way be taken for granted – of architects and designers.

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