Contenu du sommaire : Mexico, regards sur la plus grande ville du monde

Two years after the earthquake, the social-results-analysis displays a paradoxe. Lost of human-lifes and destruction have been relatively limited but the society seems to be suddenly aware of hidden problems : ineffecacity of a too centralized bureaucracy, pollution... Even if it is not yet possible to draw up the balance- sheet, we can think that the brutal trauma which permitted to discover how is acting the society has operated definitive modification.

In the Metropolitan Zone of Mexico City (ZMCM) the part of rent housing is decreasing quickly since I960. In absolute values, the whole number of rent housing is increasing, but differently between town center, first transition zone and outskirsts.

During the 20th century, Mexico City has growed, both as the largest town in the world, and as an important industrial centre. Inside the growing space of the city, no less than three industrial generations can be identified, each of them occupying and shaping different places, from the town to the outskirsts. But many difficulties lead to the hard problem of the industrial decentralization.

Since its beginnings, on the ruins of Tenochtitlán, in the 16th century, the expansion shape of the Mexico City has been in most cases the result of habits and of planning concepts we only begin to study the evolution of which. Except the president L. Cardena's efforts for planning , a liberal policy has prevailed until now. The result is a lack of both homogeneity and continuity, owing to the contradictions between lobbies and corporations ( for instance engeeners and towm aggravated the to control a town, the wild expansion of which is feared and in the same time brought about.

The size of the agglomeration, the absence of a river and its situation in a basin situated at more than 2000 m. of altitude make the water supply one of the problems of Mexico. Thanks to considerables investments Mexico city has important quantités of water but must solve the problems of the decentralization of the industries which consume a lot of water in the same way the inegality between Federal District and the outskirts and between the rich and the poor.

The recent evolution of the central areas in Mexico City lead us to wonder about the part played by the historic legacy and by the more or less opposed interventions of social actors. A concept of socio-spatial stratégie is useful to understand the way these areas has been shaped until 1910 and mostly their restructuration since that time.

The localised industries (jiba sangyo) are the descendants of the output system which had predominated until the Meiji. They managed to survive thanks to the domestic system and the mainly handmade tradition, and with the domination of the wholesaler over the sub-contractor because these industries were not financed by central banks. The author analyses the various types according to their first localization (capital, castle-towns and villages). He sets the problem of their future, connectid to the competition of newly developed industrial countries, either the production is focused on exports, essentially to the United States, or it is absorbed by the home market where the rise of the standard of living strengthenes the demands for luxuary and high quality goods. He steadilty maintains his assumptiun that the capacity of flexity of this system, which combines the know-how and modern technologies, is the only alternative to the crisis - extremely accute - in the country side.