The Land Conflict Impact of Large-Scale Infrastructure Development: Siting a New Globall Airport in Mexico City
Galland, Daniel
Current times of neoliberalism and globalization have witnessed an upsurge of large-scale urban development projects, which are generally regarded as key infrastructure interventions in pursuit of the sustained economic competitiveness of cities. In this respect, airports and their surrounding developments seem to become strategically significant for the global competition of places, cities and regions within both developing and developed nations. However, the siting of new airports is filled with controversy as the character of such mega-projects makes manifest the tensions that occur between various local, regional, national and global interests. In particular, the generation of land-use conflicts is deemed critical as planning processes often lead to controversial outcomes, most notoriously in cases where land is scarce. The case of siting a new globall airport for Mexico City is illustrative of the above, where a siting decision that required the expropriation of over 5000 hectares of community-owned ejido land, failed to acknowledge local and regional impacts inflicted upon an array of stakeholders (namely ejidatarios) who were excluded from the process. In light of the sustained land conflict and controversy, the federal government eventually cancelled the proposed airport project.
Event: Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty 2015
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