Pedestrians in a City Planned for Automobiles. Intersectional Inequalities in Mexico City’s Ciudad Universitaria

Abstract

This article combines autoethnography, history and geography to explain the intersectional discriminatory logics behind the planning of Ciudad Universitaria, the modernist campus of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City, from 1947 to the present. The theoretical tools of intersectionality, Michel Foucault’s concept of disciplinary spaces, the phenomenology of discrimination, and Milton Santos’s concept of rugosidade are deployed to demonstrate how the spaces of CU were designed to accommodate some users and to exclude others, as seen in the organization of its facilities, roads, borders and public transportation network. Therefore, this public space can be relatively functional for some, but is openly dangerous for others, according to their intersectional characteristics: class, gender, and mobility.