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Looking for new orientations to apply to the analysis of the metropolitan complexity, this paper analizes a suburban district of Mexico City from the point of view of the anonimous subject living and making the city, his neighborhood and the urban life, through any everyday life action. This form of analysis will be called as the "social construction of peripherical territory"; "way of life" and the "social subjectivity" are also central concepts in our interpretation of the reality. Therefore, in the first part of the paper, we explain the concept of "social construction of peripherical territory" for the purpose of using it as a way of analysis of the suburbs of large cities. Then, in the second part of the paper, we are re-constructing the concept of "way of life" and finally, we are presenting some results of our research about the practical contents of both concepts --way of life and subjectivity-- in our study area, the Chalco Valley, a large suburb of Mexico City. The way of life only can be understood in its differents configurations, if we introduce a study to the everyday practices of the inhabitants; those are requiring also the analysis of subjectivity as the way of giving sense to the everyday actions of the subject, to its everyday practices. In this relationship between the everyday life of the inhabitants of the periphery and the related imaginary, a social construction of the territory is taking shape as a process including materials expressions and offers from a symbolical type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decades there have been significant changes in Mexico City's urban core. The hegemonic thought has often interpreted these changes as a process of building upgrading and resettlement. At the same time, some scholars are denouncing a gentrification process and the substitution of the poorer dwellers for more affluent ones. This paper develops a historical review of the urban center devaluation and revaluation and its relation to more recent sociodemographic changes by exploring the Mexican census. As a result, the research highlights a series of sectors in the urban core where strong public or private investment coincides with the social upgrade of its population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I propose a reflection on the concepts of urban marginality and Precariat starting from an articulation between empirical data and theoretical concepts. Some theoretical definitions are discussed and linked to the reality of precarious workers who work without any pay in the sector of consumer services known in Mexico as propineros. These workers represent a constituent part of the economic system and an inescapable presence in the metropolitan labor market, although difficult to quantify from official sources. To study the condition of precariousness in regard to work, it must be examined in a broader context, particularly considering certain socio-spatial elements such as family and neighborhood ties, support networks and their location in the metropolis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The agglomeration of cultural / creative industries and specialized retail stores in urban districts marked by a rapid urban transformation process has been identified as "Creative Districts". It has been assumed that these districts are economic clusters in the sense of being an economic system formed by specialized companies and their corresponding labor market. From our point of view these districts are only a visible part of a larger economic cluster operating at the metropolitan scale which includes many different areas, enterprises and jobs. In this paper we discuss the conceptual and methodological problems of bringing the concept of economic cluster or industrial district to the intra-urban geographic scale. In order to confront the idea of 'creative districts' as functional economic areas separable from the rest of the metropolitan economy, we apply the methods commonly used in urban studies on creative industries to identify possible creative districts within Mexico City. The identified districts are contrasted in their economic structures to determine if there are indications that indeed they are differentiable and functional economic clusters from the rest of the metropolitan area. We conclude by arguing that the data found sustain the existence of a single metropolitan economic cluster and no small clusters in urban districts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]