Design Highs and Policy Lows in the Making of New Public Space in Mexico City

The making of new public space in already crowded urban landscapes involves intricate considerations of design, policy, and politics. This paper examines these considerations in the case of Mexico City's Pocket Park Program, an ambitious project undertaken by a specially created entity called the Public Space Authority. Drawing on close reading of archival documents, field observation, and spatial analysis, we consider the design and policy performance of the program over its short life from 2012 to 2018. To develop a grounded view of the program, we examined three pocket parks in different zones of the city using a modified version of an evaluation instrument developed by urban planning scholar Vikas Mehta. We find that the design of the pocket parks has been largely successful in creating meaningful new public spaces, but that the political and policy apparatus structuring the program faced a range of challenges that prevented it from reaching their goal of 150 new pocket parks. We conclude that good urban design was not enough to effect meaningful change in the public space portfolio of Mexico City; rather, the misalignment between politics, policy, and design frustrated efforts to achieve transformations in public space at the urban scale.