Telluric Struggles and Territorial Reclassification in Mexico City’s Conservation Zone

Abstract (English)

This paper examines recent conflicts over land (re) classification in Mexico City through the lens of telluric politics. In 2022, the Mexico City government introduced a city-wide land-use plan (Programa General de Ordenamiento Territorial-PGOT) that proposed a new territorial category: “rural lands.” This classification, positioned between “urban” and “conservation” land, was met with immediate and widespread resistance from conservationists and some residents of the city’s conservation zone (suelo de conservación). Opponents argued that this ambiguous category would open pathways for private developers to encroach upon conservation areas, enabling the expansion of urban infrastructure and real estate speculation under the guise of regularization and development.

The conservation zone is a socially and politically complex landscape where urban pressures collide with ecological necessity. Spanning over half of the capital's territory, this zone is crucial for biodiversity, water recharge, and climate regulation, yet it is home to many rural and peri-urban communities whose livelihoods often depend on small-scale agriculture, informal urbanization, or land-use practices at odds with strict conservation. The area is thus a site of contention between environmental authorities, urban planners, real estate interests, indigenous and campesino groups, and illegal settlers.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in public hearings and protests against the PGOT, as well as interviews with activists, planners, and government officials, I explore how different groups mobilized contrasting understandings of land and territory. I particularly focus on the clash between, on the one hand, conservationists and communities self-identified as Indigenous, who framed the land in the conservation zone not as an abstract space to be commodified but as a living assemblage of human and more-than-human beings and thus as crucial for the city’s environmental future, and, on the other hand, government officials and informal settlers who maintained the need to regularize and provide basic infrastructure to already existing settlements, thus preventing further illegal urbanization.

By analyzing these conflicts as telluric—that is, as struggles over competing configurations of land, life, and territory—, I argue that the debates over territorial reclassification in Mexico City’s conservation zone expose deeper tensions over what land is, what it should sustain, who holds the right to shape its future, and the broader stakes of sustainability and justice in envisioning urban futures.