Challenges and opportunities of the new secretariat
The Secretariat of Planning and Territorial Management could provide an answer to the problem of lack of coordination between departments in charge of dealing with intertwined problems, which, however, over the years have tended to work separately, he points out. Javier Delgado Camposdirector of the University Program of Studies on the City (PUEC) of UNAM.
An example of this is the situation faced daily by thousands of people who travel from the outskirts to the center of Mexico City to work, study or do other activities, an issue that involves access to housing, mobility and employment opportunities.
“It turns out that those in charge of the housing problem in the city are different from the mobility department, and those in charge of employment are also different.
“The sectoral response is no longer sufficient. It is a problem similar to the one we have in academia, where there are several specialties, architects, engineers, biologists, who are each working on their own and we work together very conjuncturally,” says the UNAM academic.
It will also be able to move towards addressing these problems from a metropolitan perspective.
“Mexico City is only half of the Metropolitan Zone, the other half is in the State of Mexico. I think that this metropolitan coordination is one of the biggest problems that the next administration will have,” adds the director of the PUEC.
Salvador Herreraurban planner and professor at UNAM and Tec de Monterrey, sees finding resources to solve problems at the city and metropolitan level as one of the biggest obstacles to overcome.
“The real challenge is not sectoral, it is not only water or housing – which also creates a secretariat for that – but the main challenge is to finance under an equitable scheme the extraction infrastructure and the environmental and social regeneration infrastructure that the city urgently needs in all aspects, in water, in housing, etc.
“I would move from making proposals for large projects to understanding how Ms. Brugada and her administration are going to deal with the enormous challenges facing Mexico City, for example, in the area of solid waste, which has not been fully addressed by this last administration. We can think of large projects, but we are not getting on the subject of how they are going to be financed,” he explains.
In contrast, Herrera believes that the new Secretariat is not just a name change for a department, it represents a possible paradigm shift focused on the social function of the city.
“The social function of the city is to ensure that any person who lives in it can fully develop his or her life as a human being. Before the private function of a property, there is the social function of that property,” he explains.
