Clara's Utopias

They rose to executive office together in 2018, both under the umbrella of the Fourth Transformation. Claudia Sheinbaum and Clara Brugada adhered to the urban improvement program devised by Román Meyer Falcón to fulfill the presidential instruction: to contribute to access to and exercise of the right to the city.

From then on, Sedatu implemented "comprehensive interventions" in the 31 states. In Mexico City, the Mayor—who had served as Secretary of the Environment during AMLO's six-year term as the capital's governor—launched the "Planting Parks" and "Pillars" programs, which proposed expanding public spaces and social infrastructure in the most marginalized neighborhoods.

For Iztapalapa, the first Morena-backed mayor, Clara Brugada, opted for a territorial approach. The Utopías (Transformation and Organization Units for Inclusion and Social Harmony) were born as "a major social urban planning project that reclaims public spaces," clearly inspired by the Articulated Living Units (UVAS) implemented by the mayor's office of Medellín in the most troubled neighborhoods of that Colombian city.

The pandemic slowed both projects. Although in Iztapalapa, by the time Brugada's first three-year term was coming to an end in 2021, they had already invested 1.4 billion pesos to build 14 Utopías.

By the end of the 2019-2020 period, only five units had been built, totaling 698,524 square meters of "equipped public space." These included six new semi-Olympic pools, three 400-seat auditoriums, two outdoor forums, four social centers for vulnerable groups, three new boxing schools, a professional ice rink, a multi-purpose gym, and a professional BMX track.

After six years, the Pillars remain in modest service. And the Antioquia model will now be present in all 16 municipalities of Mexico City, albeit with a distinctive feature: to meet the minimum requirements for new social, cultural, and recreational spaces, 10 sports facilities and three parks managed by the city government will be converted. The rest will be installed on federal property.

Five months after the announcement of the Utopías' deployment, construction work is already underway in six municipalities. However, progress has not been made at the SCOP Center, the former headquarters of the Ministry of Communications and Transportation located in the Narvarte neighborhood, which had to be evacuated after the 2017 earthquake.

In addition to the former headquarters of the Ministry of Education and the Telecommunications Tower, this architectural complex housed a literal treasure: the mosaic murals, dismantled piece by piece from the structurally damaged buildings, were on the verge of collapse. A compilation of historical, technical, and critical research conducted by Renato González Mello, Rebeca Barquera, Zyanya Ortega, and Francisco Esteban Alvarado Carrasco of the UNAM Institute of Aesthetic Research has just been presented at the Colegio Nacional.

"A gesture of intellectual and academic resistance," summed up the institution's director, Angélica Velázquez Guadarrama. A desperate cry for the capital's authorities to undertake a reconstruction that disregards the careful order of the murals by Juan O'Gorman and José Chávez Morado, their symbolic subtlety, and their considerable compositional ambition.

A reconstruction that is also conditioned by an insurance policy that—to be valid—requires the murals to remain in the same location where the buildings were located, in the original project, which also included a housing unit and medical offices. Another emerging player in the defense of the murals will be Luis Mendoza, the PAN mayor of Benito Juárez, who opposes the murals' relocation.

Side effects

Somersaults . Although his appointment as executive director of security and protection for the FIFA World Cup is not recent, ITA lawyer Rodrigo Sigfrid Martínez-Celis Wogau remains a key figure—for better or worse—in the State of Mexico, where he served as head of the state police during Alfredo Del Mazo's last three-year term. "He's going to end up in jail," predicted then-Morena deputy Ariel Juárez, now director of the state highway board. Delfina Gómez's administration had him in its sights, removing his bodyguards, just as it did the former PRI president.