Introduction

Methods of urban development involve many struggles and compromises between its affected network actors. Among the most important groups involved in these processes of development are the political organizations, (potential) residents, and the financial institutions that fund these developments. Mexico, and more specifically the Federal District of Mexico, further complicates these relationships through its difficult and complicated history with land division and rights to land ownership. Land control, division, and property rights have played an extremely important role in the development of Mexico City’s peripheral municipalities. These factors provide a structure with which to explore the problems that arise when a city uses agrarian dominated principles of land division and ownership to inform the organizations of new settlements.

Land ownership in Mexico has represented a group’s political and financial control of a territory dating back as far as the organization of its indigenous tribes’ towns. Through practices of communal land ownership, rulers of villages could separate the village’s residents from the lands that they worked. Although they lived on small plots of land, residents’ families were sustained by the village’s communal lands. This land provided all of their required resources – ranging from woods for fuel, to quarries for building, pastures and stables for animals, and the agricultural lands that they worked to provide food for their families. It was rare for individuals to own their own lands, forcing them to depend on the ruler of the town to provide necessary services and support. The totalizing ownership of land – through the control of communal land – by larger organizations (leaders, rulers, empires, governments, etc.) had survived in some form until the mid-20th century.

Although land ownership distantiation has been an important component to the successes of past rulers of Mexico ranging from the various stages of the Aztec Empire to the Spanish conquest and populist leaders, it has also led to the downfall of the Aztecs as well as the downfall of the Spanish colonizers. Land distantiation gives the local government great power, but it also gives governments a large responsibility to provide for residents while protecting them and their land. Throughout Mexico’s history, as corruption and bureaucracy spread rulers, towns, and municipalities have become less effective in this protection. The most recent of Mexico’s many revolutions over land ownership has seen social organizations rise to fill the place that towns and municipalities have failed. In some instances they have provided services that the government has promised but never fulfilled. In others, they have created conflicts as organizations claim lands for peasants and others who have never had a voice in the Mexican governments. Communal lands provide the basis of power for social organizations and governments of Mexico because in many instances it is the only land left for development.

This research explores the various types of land development in Mexico City’s peripheral municipalities. With the introduction of informal settlements and social organizations, a few typologies of land division and development have emerged as municipal governments attempt to transition their inefficient agricultural lands into urban organizations. We have limited the extents of our study to the municipality of Chicoloapan. It sits within a currently developing ring at the periphery of Mexico City that missed the first rounds of mass development. This is one of the main reasons we chose to study Chicoloapan. Many municipalities adjacent to the Federal District are at the tail end of their transition from agriculture to urban development – that is not to say that these municipalities are fully developed, but instead that their land is no longer agriculturally dependent – and are therefore less heterogeneous in their typologies of land use. The ring of development that includes Chicoloapan, on the other hand, is in the middle of this transition. It represents a microcosm of the rapid acceleration of development that has been occurring throughout Mexico since the mid-20th century. In Chicoloapan informal settlements, government subsidized formal settlements, agricultural land, an historical center existing since the Aztec Empire, an uninhabited forest, and a mountain range all converge. The existing ejidal agricultural lands provide a window into the distribution and organization of land throughout its history. Some lands have been developed by social organizations with the primary goal of gaining political control while others are government subsidized developments. These have been developed and driven by the private profits of developers and builders. Each of the different typologies of urban development in Chicoloapan provide different qualities of urban life as well as infrastructural, residential, and commercial distribution.

Aztec

Many of the methods of population control, land/territory division, and political systems of present-day Mexico can be traced back as far as the Aztec Empire. The Empire was formed when three rulers united to form the triple alliance and take over the Valley of Mexico from...

When it began, the Triple alliance evenly distributed the lands of the valley. However, due to the efficiency of running that land and the following systems decided who prospered and who did not. One of the key methods of control as the empire’s territory grew was to make the outer provinces and city-states reliant on the central capital. If individual city-states were reliant on the empire then they were much less likely to revolt against it. They also controlled two main systems that worked independently of one another, both in the people put in charge of them and the locations that the systems worked in. These two systems were the tribute network and the political network.

The tribute system was the Empire’s way of collecting money, goods, military supplies and men, and services from the city states. It also allowed the Aztecs to force specialization within each city state so that they could not remain self-reliant. Through a network of varying levels of collection nodes, they could give each city-state varying ranks of importance along the supply chain and economic network. Smaller city-states and those less stable were given less influence in collection, while the stronger, loyal ones managed the collection of tribute from many city-states that all led back to the center. Since the tribute system was specialized and tribute was generally due at regular intervals of time, it could be run autonomously. Therefore, the hierarchical structure of the tribute system runs vertically. Noble persons also were given land in exchange for their services to the Empire. To control the amount of power that they ultimately gained, rulers would often register this land in a different town or city-state than the nobleman lived. In this manner, the rulers could mediate the collection of tribute, the owner’s money, the owner’s labor supply, and ultimately the actual ownership of the land.

The political systems of the empire were also highly controlled. However, control did not necessarily mean that they created new government bodies everywhere they conquered. The Aztecs understood that it was much easier to adjust an existing system rather than create entirely new political systems in their conquered city-states. They recentralized or decentralized governments depending on their stability, level of development, and potential of revolt. Often, the Aztecs would introduce new positions within the bureaucracy of powerful dangerous city-states to slow down decision making and increase vertical hierarchy. To strengthen or develop other cities, they removed positions to help decisions be made more quickly. Rulers were often placed into power who were related to current rulers at the center of the Empire. They also allowed city-states to battle and fight each other for minimal gains. It was better for the centralized empire if groups of city-states were unstable at smaller scales so they stayed out of the conflicts.

The systems that allowed the empire to expand and gain so much power also allowed it to become conquered. Cortes manipulated the alliances and revolutions of city-states. The current state of Mexico and the ruling parties have taken similar roles in allowing lower level politicians to fight each other and in the process negate their potential threats later on.