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Changes to Mexico's Constitution in the 1990s marked the end of agrarian reform and the Revolutionary land regime which had allowed beneficiaries to work but not to sell their land. New legislation allowed individual parcels of ejido land to be converted into private property. Many observers link this 'privatization' with a transformation of the periurban landscape resulting from private developers' construction of mass 'social housing' developments: a classic example of neoliberal urbanism. We examine evidence for the Mexico City Metropolitan Area, finding that, although some developments do occupy former ejido land, developers mostly prefer private property, including former haciendas. Private sector interests are wary of the ejido for reasons that stem from its place in the corporatist political system that characterized twentieth‐century Mexico, and the patchwork of privatized individual parcels clashes with developers' land acquisition strategies. Ejidatarios often prefer to retain control over their land, selling plots piecemeal. Our findings demonstrate the continuing significance of urban informality—on a scale that exceeds the development of ejido land for formal housing—and the intertwining of formal and informal. We interpret these interrelated processes of housing production as legacies of corporatism, underlining the significance of political influences on Latin American neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on influence of French urban sociologists such as Christian Topalov was widely acknowledged and welcomed in Latin America. It mentions Latin American contributions to theorising from the south, they are too often pigeonholed in terms of dependency theory and translation to increase the likelihood of their speaking to a wider audience. It also mentions access to credit as a strategy to promote small businesses and combat poverty and definitive resolution of tenure.

Hernando de Soto's book The mystery of capital has renewed debate about illegality in low-income housing in Latin America, Asia and Africa. De Soto and others argue that property titles provide the poor with collateral for loans to improve their housing or set up a business. Critics argue that incorporation into the formal market will displace the original inhabitants. In this article I analyse these debates about legalization as expressions of the dualisms that have shaped western thought. The relation between legal and illegal can be understood as a variant of the public/private dichotomy. Challenging the opposition of legal to illegal, I argue that the difference between them is not as great as the proponents of legalization assume. This questions the efficacy of legalization as an engine of change. In Mexico, the beneficiaries of legalization have little interest in formal credit, preferring loans from friends or relatives, and legalization does not lead to displacement. The failure of theories about legalization to predict the outcome is a product of their reliance on dualistic thinking and of the exclusion of the private from their accounts of the process [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the conservation policies for historical centers in Latin America. Contributions of conservation policies to urban development; Necessity of re-assessing the contest for space in the city center; Development and renovation of the city of Puebla, Mexico; Actions and discourses of the Union Popular de Vendedores Ambulantes de Octubre, a group representing the majority of ambulantes.

Many poor families in third world cities live in their own self-help homes and the relative number of such households has risen dramatically through time. If there were relatively few families living in self-help housing in 1940, in many cities the majority lives in such accommodation today. There are, however, important exceptions. In numerous African and Asian cities tenants and sharers constitute a large majority and in Latin America between one-third and one-half of the populations of Bogotá in Columbia, Caracas in Venezuela, Guadalajara in Mexico, La Paz in Bolivia, Lima in Peru and São Paulo in Brazil live in rental accommodation. After years of neglect, housing research is gradually rediscovering the previously invisible tenants and sharers. The paper examines various questions related to tenants and rental accommodation on the basis of research carried out in two large Mexican cities, Guadalajara and Puebla. It examines the family and income differences between owners and tenants on the basis of survey data conducted in three settlements in each city. It considers whether ownership is the declared preference of the interviewed families and it examines the residential trajectories of tenants and owners.