Mexico City borrows ideas from Paris

A new mayor installs 'urban beaches' and removes 15,000 street vendors to make city more livable.

from the October 18, 2007 edition

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The eco-friendly mayor also recently brought Al Gore to the city to talk about global climate change and is demanding that city officials bike to work once a month in order to reduce emissions. He bikes to work on the first Monday of every month – with his bodyguards following on bicycles closely behind.

Drawing from a variety quality of life and anticrime initiatives in Paris, New York, Amsterdam, and other cities, the newly elected mayor brings a unique blend of progressive ideas for the first time to one of the largest, most densely populated cities in the world.

"For us, it's important to continue promoting healthy living, and that means taking back public spaces to create a safe, better city," Ebrard told the Associated Press. "If there's no public spaces, there's no citizenship and no way to truly live side by side. What we are trying to stop is a phenomenon that tends to segregate us socially," he explained at an August speech.

These relatively inexpensive measures have been hugely popular with low-income residents. It is estimated that Mexico's urban beaches, which are modeled after the Paris Plage on the banks of the River Seine, attracted more than 100,000 visitors when they opened last March. Of the 100,000 visitors, 60 percent had never stepped onto a beach before, according to a Mexico City government poll.

But critics say that in a city where 40 percent of the population lacks basic services such as water and electricity, the money could be better spent elsewhere. In an interview with Mexican newspaper La Jornada, the director of the National Water Commission, Jorge Luis Luege of the conservative PAN party, accused the Mexico City government of misusing resources. He warned that the city's drainage system is badly in need of repairs. If not tended to "the results could be catastrophic; we're talking about inundations like the ones in 1920. A megainundation."

Some Mexicans sneer at the urban beaches. Susana Obregon and Ricardo Thompson, who own a café in the upscale La Condesa neighborhood, erupt into laughter when asked if they have ever been to one of the beaches. "That beach thing was great, 100 percent a populist move to win over the masses," says Mrs. Obregon. "I think that the only purpose of it was to divert public resources," agrees Mr. Thompson.

Yet the criticism has not discouraged the mayor, who, among various future quality-of-life projects, plans to toughen antismoking laws and to bring wireless Internet to the masses.

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