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As a result of a deep research regarding the sense, practices, use, perception and public intervention in public space in Cuernavaca, Morelos, México, theoretical reflections were issued answering the call of papers of the 2nd Seminar of the red Lationamericana sobre Teoría Urbana in relation to the concept of public space and the function it has within the city. A criticism is made considering public space as a tool for the construction of citizenship and control of exclusion as fundamental parts of the questioning done to the called 'right to the city'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a reflection on the current status of democracy in Mexico. For this purpose, it has been based on an analytical reading of interpretations to the Mexican transition. They highlight the sui generis and unfinished nature of such transition, whose completion has not entailed a clear discontinuity between the authoritarian phase and the democratic consolidation phase. Our approach consists in showing that the current limitations of Mexican democracy, which are in part identifiable as consolidation issues, leave doubts about the arrival of democracy to Mexico. This is illustrated around the supposed plurality of the party system, to which the actors and power structures have adapted, and around the weak consolidation of the constitutional state and the institutions, threatened by the dramatic escalation of organized crime. The combination of authoritarian recomposition and such new threats is not a mere authoritarian inheritance, in what is a supposed democratic context, nor does it agree with the hypothesis of an unconcluded transition. It rather implies fleeing forwards, which in itself oscillates between democracy and its denial as well as between past legacies and a badly assimilated change, thus forcing us to review the analytical model for transitions to democracy which is relevant in part, but far too linear and minimizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]