THIS PRESENTS A carefully woven description and longitudinal analysis of a case of community mobilization to occupy land designated as an ecological reserve on the south-western fringe of Mexico City – considered from the local, metropolitan, regional and global perspectives. It is illustrated with photographs and schematic diagrams throughout and there is an extensive bibliography. The main task of the book is to gauge the potential of activism such as the mobilization of multi-class alliances to facilitate empowerment, social learning and social experimentation, and to apply the principles of political ecology to these issues.

The key lessons for urban development concern social struggles over sustainable land use; opportunities for community groups to deal with Mexico City’s urban ecological problems; and an understanding of the dynamics of irregular settlement. “Building healthy human settlements at the dawn of the twenty-first century calls for a mobilized citizenry willing and able to engage in social experimentation…” asserts the author and this, it is argued, depends on the premises of co-evolution and holism; empowerment and community; social justice and equity; and sustainable production and reproduction – the four pillars of political ecology.

An explanation of the basis and practice of political ecology as a critical discourse provides the context for the analysis of the impact of globalization on the development of Mexico City in the first section of the book. Politically, Mexico is a global leader of non-aligned nations on environmental issues, and has one of the highest levels of per capita investment on the environment in real terms in the world, but the currency devaluation of 1994 fragmented development and environmental investment in real terms. “Official” national and international agendas, which prioritize an increase in the productive capacity of the informal sector and popular organization and public participation in the provision of urban infrastructure and services to combat urban poverty, strengthen local government administrative capacity and improve the urban environment, often contrast markedly with local practice.

With a population of 15 million, increasing at 2 per cent per year, some see Mexico City as a metaphor encompassing the whole spectrum of urban woes in the South. The first part of the book describes and explains housing deficits and the various means by which people get access to land for housing. The second considers the urban-ecological co-evolution of the valley of Mexico from Teotihuacan, the first planned city of North America (within what is now the north-eastern fringe of Mexico City) through a path of sustained urban development based, from the outset, on ecological irrigation and agricultural systems which were destroyed by the Spanish in the sixteenth century. Land management in the contexts of history and changing political structures are analyzed up to the present. The politics and effectiveness of containment as a means of managing the growth of Mexico City, and of urban growth worldwide, are critically analyzed from the perspective of political ecology. The need for containment is fundamental to sustainable growth – in order to limit the encroachment of cities onto land of ecological, cultural, recreational or agricultural value. But containment in practice is politically and socially contentious.

The case study that is the basis for the arguments put forward draws on 20 months of fieldwork spanning a decade of irregular settlement in a contested eco-reserve. The Adjusco Reserve has been encroached upon by the legal extension of the city limits four times since 1980, and was being used to accommodate villas for the rich as well as a paper and pulp mill and municipal and private waste prior to any of the irregular settlements taking shape. Much of the encroachment has been on common land – ejido – and the complexities of these circumstances are explored. The ke