Neoliberalism, urban expansion, and political change in Oaxaca, Mexico: The creation of gendered city spaces

Cities throughout the Global South are expanding rapidly due in part to neoliberal policies emphasizing urban development. This in turn has produced increasing rural to urban migration. This research examines this phenomenon in the expanding city of Oaxaca, Mexico. I focus on the large-scale political and economic processes, urban sociospatial forms, and their interconnections with the micro-scale gender and class relationships of the Mexican household. There are three interrelated aspects to my research: (1) a focus on poor women and their daily geographies of survival; (2) the power relationships which structure the socio-spatial urban landscape; and (3) the creation of new forms of governance and social resistance. I utilize a variety of methods including geospatial analysis, household surveys, archival research, and participant observation to understand the multi-scalar effects a changing global political economy has on social reproduction in cities. This research finds that a fundamental restructuring of the relationship between production and social reproduction has increasingly privatized and commodified the goods, services, and resources associated with social reproduction, including water, food, health care, and education. This marketizes social reproduction, subjecting everyday life to the same political economic relationships of power which produce the sociospatial inequalities in the capitalist city. These asymmetrical power relationships have also shaped the "second nature" of the built environment and led to the space-time expansion of everyday life among poor women. City planning, which theoretically works to decrease these spatial rents, is practically nonexistent due to decentralization, and the creative destruction of land tenure institutions under conditions of rapid urbanization. The inability of the Mexican government to soothe the spatial crisis inherent in the core-periphery landscape of the city leads to the creation of new systems of governance and increased authoritarianism. The production of a revanchist city has led to a crisis of democracy and a deep and dangerous erosion of citizenship among Oaxaca's poor, and in particular, among women.