Overview

When Growing Up in Cities was initiated in the 1970s, it included two Mexican sites. One, Toluca, was the provincial capital of the State of Mexico. A second, Ecatepec, was a largely self-built settlement 16 kilometers north of Mexico City. Thirty years later, Ecatepec now lies within the city’s middle ring. Tridib Bannerjee, an urban planner, carried out the study of these two locations with the help of student assistants and in cooperation with Kevin Lynch, the planner who initiated Growing Up in Cities under the sponsorship of UNESCO.

Here is how Lynch, at that time, described the study’s location in Ecatepec:

It would be difficult to illustrate pictorially the squatter settlement in Ecatepec, outside of Mexico City, so desolate is it. It is built on a dry lake bed around which are the salt flats, pot-holes, and littered paper. House types range from the first temporary shacks of the roughest kind of construction to much more solid buildings using masonry and plaster, for example; some of these latter have several rooms. Residents are the poorest of the poor, many of them casual labourers if they have any work at all, many of them travelling three hours a day to get to work in the centre of the city. Interestingly enough, the children there, although they are well aware of the environmental hazards and the difficulties of the area in which they live, nevertheless speak of it as a place of hope, a place of growing and changing. ‘It’s getting better,’ they say. ‘The streets are being paved, better houses being built, we’ve got a good school. Maybe things will be better in the future.’ In fact, the children from this area were the only ones in our study who spoke with love of their school. For them, the school was a centre of their hope, the place from which they could rise out of their position, where they could learn about the world. We could see the houses beginning to develop, the brick gradually being laid, a window temporarily closed. It is a place where everything is growing. However, these children are inadequately fed, and they live a life of great economic uncertainty.

from “The Spatial World of the Child,” pp. 108-109

The second project site, Colonia Universidad in Toluca, was a newly developing residential section of the city in the 1970s, with utilities and paving recently installed and some apartment buildings added among the single-family houses. While many families still lived on the lower end of the income scale, others were approaching lower middle class. Here, traffic had already taken over the streets, so that the children turned to the formal parks and playgrounds of the city for gathering places. In their drawings, they made vivid representations of the central plaza and other major city parks, as well as the hills and volcano outside the city, in contrast to the relatively featureless corridors of the streets. Most children in Toluca had witnessed changes in their lifetimes, which they considered to be for the better: more schools and playgrounds, paved streets, sidewalks, telephone lines, lights, water, drainage, more houses, more people, more stores. Their recommendations to improve the city included more parks and playgrounds, a cleaner and more beautiful environment, and traffic control.

For further information about the Mexican study, see Growing Up in Cities and “The Spatial World of the Child” by Kevin Lynch in Growing Up in Cities - General under the Publications link on the project homepage.