Sustainability is an emerging paradigm for environmental and development planning. This book links the sustainability paradigm and the urban land question to the politics of human settlements in developing countries. Keith Pezzoli provides us with the theoretical underpinnings and a rich case study of the difficulties in implementing sustainability initiatives at the grassroots level.
The book centers on a case study of Ajusco, a designated ecological preserve in a southwestern sector of the Mexico City metropolitan area. We learn how some of the groups who settle in Ajusco (through a mixture of legal and irregular means) use sustainable principles as a strategy to obtain land and mediate conflict with agencies of the State. The case is complex, thus illustrating in terms of people's everyday lives the contradictions that developing nations have in resolving urban, societal, and environmental problems.
The roles and tactics of the actors (stakeholders) in the case are well developed, which allows for analysis at various spatial and political levels (i.e., neighborhood versus region and social organization versus government agencies). The struggle occurs in a location that, under technical imperatives, would better be left in its natural state (for aquifer regeneration and flora preservation purposes). The inability to preserve Ajusco from settlement stems from the societal needs of large numbers of poor people for whom the market economy has yet to yield benefits.
Collective action at the level of the household unit is described. Pezzoli notes that collective success, especially when focused on urban service issues, dissipates with the provision of State-provided services and the ability of the State to establish effective mechanisms of social control. One of the lessons drawn from this case is that popular groups (involved in struggle) are well advised to distinguish between strategies with some prospects of success and those that stand little chance of yielding positive results.
There is optimism in what Pezzoli presents. Yet, along with optimism there is the recognition of limits to social transformation given the present set of power relations in society. For example, we are told that through resistance, popular movements can help redefine the concepts of development, economic values, and technological efficiency. They can even help create a new economic structure. The case presented, however, illustrates that the struggle for social transformation is constrained by the general level of a movement's organizational capacity and its ability to maintain a collective consciousness over time. This general condition allows the State to devise various means to continue or regain social control. This is what happened to the Ajusco community-based organizations during the PRONOSAL (poverty assistance) program years of the Salinas de Gotari administration.
The book is based on nearly 2 years of fieldwork done over a decade. It has four major sections. Part I presents the argument for why sustainability now deserves a place in the development policy discourse. Coevolution and holism are fundamental tenets of the paradigm put forth. Coevolution prevents the negative aspects of dualistic discourse, while holism allows us to integrate concerns about the environment into development models based on low entropy. Nevertheless, in order to look at societies and environments as coevolving, we must put aside the notion that one must gain at the expense of the other. The underlying premise offered is that human settlements can become viable parts of ecosystems that, of course, are sustainable.
The analytic framework chosen is that of political ecology, through which it is possible to link ecological themes with social struggles. The aim of political ecology is to establish an economic and social system that incorporates a sustainable relationship between society and nature. A good review of the significant literature contributing to the formation of political ecology is presented. The author also establishes the context of the metropolitan area of Mexico City-its size, composition, major problems, and planning challenges.
Part II depicts a useful historical analysis of the Valley of Mexico and how society and nature coevolved for centuries. Unfortunately, this relationship was reversed once Western ideas of dominating nature were put in place by the Spanish conquerors. This historical section forms the basis for examining Mexico's contemporary environmental laws and what Pezzoli identifies as the "politics of containment." These laws are an attempt to incorporate into development planning technical measures that would take ecological factors into account. This section provides the reader with enough information to understand how coevolution functioned for centuries in the Valley of Mexico and how tampering with that model led to the current environmental crisis in the region. There are possible parallels to the southern Florida ecosystem restoration crisis, including the use of Lake Okeechobee.
Part III presents the detailed case of Ajusco. Between 1979 and 1988, at least one third of the forest reserve was transformed through various means of settlement into an urban zone (covering over 12,000 acres) for more than 200,000 people. In some instances, the author presents the material in the first person, sharing his experiences and feelings. This anthropological approach provides a welcome respite from some of the more theoretical chapters. The reader becomes part of the lives of the struggling people. We are introduced to the major actors: the popular organizations, developers, agencies of the State, and the ejidatarios (shareholders of collectively held farm plots). Each of these actors has internal inconsistencies and contradictions. All of them, however, are focused on the conservation, maintenance, or use of the Ajusco reserve area. Thus, they share a common context for the politics of ecology.
Part IV focuses on the grassroots attempts at sustainable settlements (waste processing, food processing, recycling) by community-based organizations in Ajusco. In examining the colonia ecological productive (CEP) movement, insight is gained on the limits of the ecological politics. Here we see that excellent community-- based production and infrastructure solutions are abandoned in order to gain title to land and urban services. Thus, we see that the State does possess powerful means of social control and can use them to achieve its own aims. In this part, the author describes the differences between the goals of a social movement organizer who seeks to use problems as focal points for organizing and a planner who seeks to find either technical or functional solutions to the problems faced by the client groups.
For readers not familiar with Mexico City and its ecological and grassroots problems, Pezzoli does us all a service by providing a very good explanation of the sociocultural perspective. In addition, he explains the way in which the Mexican legal-administrative institutions are organized. He does this in part by using the writing and analysis of the best Mexican academics. In this way, he shares with us a wealth of knowledge and the observations of many leading Mexican urban analysts (Azuela, Leff, Schteingart, Hiernaux, and Ramirez-Saiz, among others). The reader is also introduced to the broader issue of irregular settlements in Latin America and by extension to similar practices in Asia and Africa.
By identifying the contradictions between the legal/administrative structure and actual social practice, Pezzoli allows us to see the difficulties inherent in achieving a coevolutionary approach to human settlements that meets the parameters of the sustainability paradigm. As long as the State (that mix of institutions that mediate between civil society and the economic system) seeks short-term solutions to issues of ecological imbalance, the holistic approach put forth has little chance of becoming mainstream practice.
While this book breaks no new ground related to the urban land question on issues including sustainability and ecological politics, the reader does receive an integrated view of the problems from the grassroots level to the city's metropolitan and national scales. For the reader not familiar with the political ecology approach, the grassroots struggle in developing countries, or the ways contradictions in civil/State relations are played out, this book makes good reading. The analysis of how Mexico City, one of the world's "mega-cities," has addressed these issues is instructive for planners, policy analysts, and environmentalists. While other case studies exist on Mexico City's irregular settlements (e.g., Hiernaux, 1997), no others in English provide the scope of material presented in this book. It certainly deserves a place on planning reading lists covering development and human settlements.