Gentrification and Real Estate Business in Mexico

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to analyze how urban restructuring undertaken by the State and real estate businesses revitalize or rehabilitate urban areas or areas that are part of the city center based on their heritage value of historic buildings renovated or built. These revitalized or restructured urban areas can be carried out, because the native inhabitants of these urban areas are expelled or dispossessed, which forms an inertia and atmosphere of real estate financial businesses that potentiate their income from generating new forms of consumption (purchase or rent of sumptuous apartments and / or generation of conspicuous consumption). These, urban restructuring undertaken, are baptized as a gentrification process. The epistemic and theoretical object of the significance of the gentrification process would be equivalent to a process of residential segregation in peripheral metropolitan areas, due to the high prices of land in the rehabilitated central area and generating population expulsion towards distant peripheries. Likewise, this gentrification is conceived with a “pro-business” role, this functional role being to the high margins of private accumulation of land rent and, to a new housing production market, in central land - historical centers. Through opinion studies and data collection on site, it is confirmed that gentrification would be like a process that interconnects the liberation, privatization, revitalization and dispossession of a large part of the most profitable spaces of the city and demonstrates the interests that exist by elites to control the production of the city. The data obtained show that the expulsions of the populations of the areas to be rehabilitated are often carried out with acts of violent dispossession of their social-cultural values and / or housing flats and then in those same spaces, already free of social pressure. , vertical buildings, shopping centers, restaurants, galleries are built that offer functionality to a new high-income population or tourist visitors to tour and admire, renovated buildings, streets and neighborhoods with another urban imaginary more ad hoc to the commodized fetish, all this It is carried out by the synchronicity of interests between the real estate financiers and a federal and local state that legally legitimizes the dispossession. Preliminary conclusions based on field recordings in situ aim to point out the processes of gentrification, build cities that have become situations of struggle between the globalizing trend and the revitalization of local identities. Observe the intensification of the specialization of urban space in social sectors with different land uses, globalized, special and competitive.