The Making of Mexico City’s Historic Center: National Patrimony in the Age of Urban Renewal

This article focuses on the origins of Mexico’s Federal District Planning Commission (1950–1953) and the consequences of its failure to implement a major urban renewal project in downtown Mexico City. In the 1950s, Mexico’s leading urbanists hoped to resolve the city’s severe traffic congestion through a new grid design and, in the process, transform it into a mecca for Mexican modernity. These efforts were thwarted by an independent coalition of residents and historic preservations in a movement that reflected the uneasy tensions between urban modernity and national patrimony in mid-century Mexico.