Revisiting the concept of place-making in Latin America: processes of space consolidation and cocreation of a cooperative community in Mexico City

As urbanisation continues to grow worldwide, social, economic and environmental challenges make cities and their inhabitants vulnerable to crises
and risks. In this context, the idea of place-making as a bottom-up process has attracted attention as part of the effort to improve living conditions, based on the notion of participation and local knowledge of the actors that pre-existed in a place. As an Anglo-western conceptualisation, place-making evolved in the Global North as a rule-guided process that includes many formal actors. It has been suggested that, in this structured environment, place-making processes have lost the originality that non-professional stakeholders bring. On the other hand, place-making practices have been expressed in very spontaneous ways in Latin American cities for decades, prior to the emergence of the term in the vocabulary of design professionals, planning authorities and academics globally. In this context, place-making has primarily been executed by informal means through a rural population migrating in large numbers to urban centres and establishing informal settlements in cities’ peripheries. This essay presents an example of such a place-making process, the case of the Palo Alto community in Mexico City, which is a self-built settlement that began informally and was later organised as a cooperative to protect the land occupied by the residents. The essay argues that place-making practices may occur at a small scale but can have a wider effect in the socio-spatial cohesion of a city. Finally, the essay raises questions on how a revisited approach to place-making can benefit cities in the Global North in building community capacity and resilience.