The Centralized Planning and Broken Futurity of Mexico City’s Failed Airport

Dimitri Nesbitt UPP 500 - 39795 Case Study The Centralized Planning and Broken Futurity of Mexico City’s Failed Airport In 2014, then Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto unveiled a series of glamorous plans for the construction of world-class national airport in Mexico City (NAICM). The project’s scale and international design reverberated throughout the country, with many perceiving the airport as a critical step in Mexico’s membership into the developed world. It was not only an epitomal chance for planners to participate in an influential long-term project, but, if executed well, it would expand the possibilities for metropolitan planning for years to come. However, resistances relentlessly noted governmental abuse, from negligent accountability by several agencies to lack in procedural transparency. It culminated in a highly controversial 2018 consulta in which the population decidedly voted to condemn the airport project, choosing to fund alternatives.

Yet, revelatory in the process of developing the airport megaproject was the unprecedented level of community abuse that the capital region’s planners accepted, upholding exclusive governance. Illustrated, repeatedly, are corrupt analyses of the public interest, offering select sociopolitical benefit and risking the entire region’s ecological stability. Likewise, the scale of the megaproject fractured the stability of advocacy planning by community organizers.

In essence, Mexico’s history of centralization contributed to a contemporary stranglehold on the country that will require a monumental shift in how it considers modernization.

TEXCOCO: HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF The land for NAICM was nearly identical to a prior federal-level project for a new airport in 2001 under President Vicente Fox on the dry lakebed of Lake Texcoco. Under threat, proletariat campesinos in San Salvador Atenco, Mexico State (Edomex.), formed resistances by citing environmental and subsistence concerns (Dewey and Davis, 2013). Political mismanagement and violence against Atenco proved fatal to the Fox initiative, and NAICM was

2 lauded as a new, communicative approach for a modern age (Grupo Aeroportuario de la Ciudad de México, 2016). The only territorial changes included a more invasive transformation of Texcoco, which had been under federal control since 1971.

For both airports, justification came from the oversaturation of capital’s current airport, Benito Juarez International. Designed for 35 million passengers a year after its 2008 second terminal opened, it had surpassed 42 million passengers in the years since, reaching 450,000 traffic operations annually. NAICM would process a million operations and 125 million passengers a year by its expected completion by mid-century (Grupo Aeroportuario de la Ciudad de México, 2016). Reports noted a staggering 450,000 jobs would be created from 2015-2060 with an extra 26 million visitors supporting all sectors of Mexico’s economy. For both Fox and Peña Nieto, the airports were about cultivating nationalism through modernization and strictly for neoliberal efficiency.

MEGAPROJECT GOVERNANCE IN THE MARGINS As researched by Bent Flyvbjerg, a project like NAICM requires upfront commitment to convince sociopolitical actors, which reduces investigations into alternatives (2014).

Consequently, competing perspectives are marginalized in favor of the state (and all its apparatuses’) position. As a global city, national governance prioritized Mexico City’s urbanization, continuing its policy of favoring market-oriented development (Delgadillo, 2016).

The campesino marginalization within the sociopolitical process not only systemically contributed to NAICM’s uneven distribution of expected benefits, but was engineered to displace its consequences on them, too. Governance buried such consequences that led to inevitable fury upon their discovery.

3 For one, opponents of NAICM noted the supposed transparency of the state’s publication of major contractors. Seemingly diverse, the Proyecto sobre Organización, Desarrollo, Educación e Investigación (PODER) identified the Peña Nieto government had awarded many of its contracts through direct adjudication (2018). These various companies were reduced to only five owners as the sole beneficiaries of 75% of NAICM’s contracts. One such company had even declared bankruptcy in the months before the NAICM announcement.

Likewise, the government was not consistent in total costs. Initially, NAICM came with an $11.4 billion price tag, but ballooned to $14.3 billion. Mexican law states that to approve a modification that large, a new cost-benefit analysis must be resubmitted for review, of which the Secretariat of the Treasury had not solicited from the Secretariat of Communication and Transportation, nor had the airport group presented its own (PODER, 2018). NAICM’s aftermath revealed a that participatory governance was not only a challenge for the Valley of Mexico’s municipal and regional planning organizations, but operating on a dysfunctional federal level where campesino constitutionality was at risk.

RESISTANCE, ACCOUNTABILITY, AND CENTRALIZED PLANNING Participatory planning, as taxonomized by Arnstein (1969), involves a decentralized approach when done inclusively. The upper rungs of her Ladder of Citizen Participation actively call for Participation, Delegated Power, and Citizen Control. Of these, Participation engages marginalized actors transactionally, encouraging them into the planning processes with relative goals and their negotiable priorities. This transactional element of Participation is likely where the three levels of Mexican government, as well as proponents of NAICM, would have argued their planning operated in.

4 Interviews conducted among campesino leaders revealed a fractured resistance against NAICM due to transactional engagement. While not Participatory by any definition, the government had successfully convinced some campesinos to accept compensation for their ejidoallotted parcels if they were close enough to the NAICM site or several resource extraction sites nearby (Atziri Paz, 2018). This effectively justified government abuse by rightfully claiming campesinos directly affected by the airport—those identified by their spatial adjacency to the NAICM megaproject—had agreed to it. A resistance remained that challenged localized actors, pitting families against families and between municipalities that, otherwise, had every reason for solidarity against NAICM developers. In context, even with the best intentions for Arnsteinian Participation, the government had undermined the agency of marginalized actors to effectively participate in citizen planning.

Resistors chalked up these abuses to several agencies directly responsible for urban planning and regional resource planning. Campesinos had lobbied in all levels of government but representatives from the Civil Defense for Edomex., the Environmental Protection Attorney’s Office within the Secretariat of the Environment (PROPAEM), The National Center for Prevention of Disasters within the Secretariat of the Interior (CENAPRED), various municipal urban development departments, and the Institute of Administration and Appraisals of National Assets (INDAABIN) did not provide responses, again, despite a federal government selfcongratulating its transparency. Additionally, such agencies began hiring armed escorts when visiting affected municipalities, echoing the actions of state-sponsored violence in the Fox initiative (Atziri Paz, 2018; Dewey and Davis, 2013). Campesinos were beaten, falsely charged, and extorted by state-sponsored actors, as well as facing attacks on their channels of communication.

5 Framing these decisions by agencies and planners is the reproduction of human rights abuses on receptors of Mexico’s structural centralization. Investigators from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) identified correlations between the government’s lack of participatory planning of NAICM and violations to the right to health, right to a good environment, and the right to be consulted in the event of financial exploitation of communal resources (PODER, 2018). These efforts are in line with Mexico City’s development as a global city in which pluralism in planning was categorically ignored (Davidoff, 1965). In both airport initiatives, the opposition viewed the projects as uniformly catering to the needs of international capital and its elites, for whom peripheral development was not a priority as was globalization.

Movements of resistance in the capital formed out of social crises and the right to the city as a mechanism by which neoliberal practices are changed for localized self-determination (Pertopoulou, 2014; Davis and Rosan, 2004). NAICM’s aerotropolis would be developed by and for transnational elites eager to build a national project through means of impoverishing the environment.

NAICM’s environmental impacts spatially exemplify centralized abuse best. 180 open-air mines were opened across the capital’s periphery to supply NAICM with extracted resources, but residually disrupted campesino livelihoods. Dusty roads, deregulated explosive use, and flora and fauna destruction presented themselves in increased respiratory and ocular problems for proximate communities (Atziri Paz, 2018). Farming productivity, water availability, and even kinship networks declined because of fragmented landscapes. Likewise, planners from Tezoyuca Municipality published a narrow environmental impact report that conveniently studied NAICM’s own polygonal territory, omitting the widespread effects of its construction.

6 Even Lake Texcoco’s drainage for NAICM came into the spotlight as a monumental loss.

Independent reports identified 76 avian species would have to redirect migration routes, risking the safety of the same aviation routes developed for NAICM (Atziri Paz, 2018; Pertopoulou, 2014). Furthermore, the capital’s environmental planners had risked the entire megalopolis with Texcoco’s draining, per a UNAM study that revealed the reason behind the city’s destructive September 2017 earthquake was because of water over-drainage and the abandonment of Texcoco’s environmental regeneration (2018). A commission of scientists later published findings that planners had not budgeted for environmental compensation for losses of water resources and their effects on ecological and socioeconomic systems (Grupo de Análisis de Manifestaciones de Impacto Ambiental, 2015).

CONCLUSION: CANCELLATION AND ALTERNATIVES The controversial consulta in October of 2018, organized by a not-yet formalized López Obrador administration and voted on by less than 2% of those eligible, began the process of NAICM’s dissolution (Porras Madero, 2018). Aside from upset transnational and political elites, stakeholders had varying degrees of response. NAICM’s three-year progress had produced 18,000 direct and 30,000 indirect jobs, with workers angered at threatened livelihoods.

Specialists decried a tarnished national image and claimed financial burdens if cancellation were to go through. This referenced the mechanism by which Peña Nieto orchestrated NAICM’s proposals, one in which failed private endeavors would be bailed out using public funds, justified because of the capital’s global city status. Essentially, NAICM’s demise would mean a chokehold for all other federal planning or public works projects in the country, to pay off remaining contracts.

7 But, planners systematically ignored the ethics of pluralism, multiplicity, and equity in favor of statecraft leading to this pause in their local projects. This falls even below Arnstein’s lowest rungs. Planning this abusive is antidemocratic and adopts narrow views of the public interest. The capital’s planning agencies and federal politicking selected an exclusive vision of futurity that benefited elite classes, and exacerbated the region’s main socioecological problems: worsening air quality, flooding, and water supply management.

Centralization had undermined the prior airport system for Central Mexico, where the airports of Toluca, Puebla, Cuernavaca, and Querétaro would manage traffic alongside Mexico City. Revitalizing this network is the basis of the new alternative to NAICM. The consulta approved of funding and expanding the Toluca terminal, as well as converting the military airport of Santa Lucía into a secondary facility for Mexico City. This intervention has shifted planning ability to one that better-balanced efficiency with inclusive expertise, or at least begins to. Campesinos in twenty municipalities still wait for compensation for their abuses, but many responsible officials were replaced with the changing administration.

Yet, the lesson of NAICM is how quickly planning, and planning-like actions, can become an agent of structural violence, particularly on a megaproject administered on a federal scale. Political pressures, dually orchestrated by a transnational class, encourage planning complacency and complicity through all the procedural missteps described. For now, the trifecta of Benito Juarez International, Toluca, and Santa Lucía is even more efficient financially, ecologically, and socio-politically than NAICM, and planning has adopted historical plans as the basis for this very system.

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