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Mexico City’s mayor has never been afraid to court controversy. Clara Brugada has taken some imaginative steps in her efforts to undo decades of economic and cultural inequality in one of the capital’s most impoverished neighbourhoods.
That includes a Boeing 737 converted into a library, its overhead lockers stuffed with books, and a park where 50ft animatronic dinosaurs tower. Both are part of Brugada’s Utopias project.
On a sunny weekday at the Freedom Utopia – one of 15 centres built to promote health and wellbeing for the working classes – a father and son rally a ball on a tennis court, teenage girls jog around a racetrack, and 20 older retirees, men and women, swim steady laps of the pool.
Such sights might be common in many modest neighbourhoods with a decent leisure centre in the global north. But in Iztapalapa – where people previously had no access to cultural activities or sports – this is not just unusual, it is subversive.
“Utopias are a big commitment to equality,” says Brugada, who drew up the project as Iztapalapa’s mayor before being elected earlier this year as head of Mexico City’s authority. At Bloomberg Citylab, a conference on urban innovation in October, she told hundreds of fellow city leaders: “One of the great objectives we have is that the peripheries of Mexico City are no longer synonymous with inequality and abandonment but that the peripheries are the new city centres.”
Iztapalapa, where Brugada grew up, is the capital’s most deprived and populous neighbourhood. The 25km drive takes two hours in snarling traffic from the commercial centre, and the concrete sprawl feels a world away from the neocolonial houses, art galleries and cocktail bars frequented by the wealthy and the recent influx of US tourists.
Most of the region’s two million people work for below minimum wage and have little access to a cinema, library or a sports pitch, says Brugada’s successor, current Iztapalapa mayor Raúl Basulto Luviano.
The neighbourhood has historically been a dumping ground for ugly, undesirable projects, including the city’s landfill and a large prison, which the Liberty Utopia now borders.
“For decades they have put all the things that nobody wanted in the centre of Mexico City here. We were just seen as the periphery, the city’s back yard,” he says.
Itzapalapa was synonymous with crime and drugs. Luviano says that began to change in 2018 when Brugada began her bold socialist experiment, which could be replicated across Latin America and undo decades of neglect.
Utopias is the Spanish acronym for “units for transformation and organisation for inclusion and social harmony” and offer welfare services to promote wellbeing alongside sports and culture.
“The idea was to give the people of Iztapalapa the best,” Luviano says. “To give them what they thought they could never have.”
At the Freedom Utopia, once 40,000 sq metres of wasteland, there is access to washing machines, and children can play in a sand park, visit the planetarium and stroke goats, ponies and cows in a petting zoo.
“I come here every day. It’s well worth the wait,” says Guadlupe Hernandez, 68, shielding herself from the sun with an umbrella while queueing at a canteen where cheap healthy meals are sold. “You just cannot find this anywhere else.”
Free facilities include a 400-seat concert hall where classical music classes are held, and the temazcal – a traditional Aztec sauna, which the Spanish colonisers tried to outlaw to prevent men and women from sharing the steam room naked.
In Latin American cities such quality facilities are often unaffordable or reserved for the elites.
A decade ago Itzapalapa had one swimming pool for two million people, Luviano says. It now has 19, thanks to Brugada.
“It’s very uplifting to me and inspiring,” says Manuel de Araújo, mayor of Quelimane in Mozambique, visiting for the City Labs conference. He is struck by the power of using public space to give back people’s rights to culture, creativity and leisure.
“Most people would have walked through here and seen nothing. But they realised that this land was abandoned and that for these people, who were excluded for so long from development and policymaking, it was a chance to bring them together.
“It’s an idea that is replicable not just from Addis Ababa to Maputo but from London to Bristol,” De Araújo says.
The utopia’s most popular attraction is the house for older people. Inside the giant tipi-like structure 15 women are taking a dance class. Exercises focus on improving cognitive stimulation to stave off diseases that affect elderly people such as dementia, while counselling is offered to tackle trauma, depression and grief, says Michelle Rodríguez, a psychologist overseeing the programme. “And as you can see they are like a family now, supporting each other.”
The centre offers free tai chi classes, yoga, aromatherapy and massages to the women, most of whom have lost someone close and say they were mired in grief and loneliness.
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“I lost someone who was very important to me and could not see any way out,” says Juana de la Cruz Romero, 72. “It was unbearable. Thank God for this casa [house] and the utopia. They saved my life.
The women have become a tight-knit community, says Maria Luisa Ruiz Estrada, 80. “I lost my husband after 64 years of marriage. Imagine how I felt, what I suffered. I didn’t want to come here. My daughters made me. Now I don’t want to leave,” she says.
About 21,000 people use the 15 utopias each day. The hope is that by transforming the lives of strategic populations, particularly women who are the backbone of communities, the changes will ripple out across neighbourhoods.
James Anderson, head of government innovation at Bloomberg Philanthropies, which supports the project, says: “The utopias are not only extraordinary in their scale and breadth, they flip on its head this idea that poor people don’t deserve excellent services.”
And they have reduced the city’s chasm of inequality, says Pablo Lazo, an urban development director at World Resources Institute, an NGO studying the project’s impact.
The people of Iztapalapa previously had 5.5 times fewer cultural services within 30 minutes of their homes than residents of the city’s wealthiest neighbourhoods. That has more than halved to 2.5 times, he says. “The Utopias have been very successful in bridging the gap between Iztapalapa and other parts of the city. It’s a big shift in the right direction.”
The mayor’s office believes the utopias have driven down crime in a neighbourhood that used to record one in every five of Mexico City’s murders. Serious offences such as assault, robbery and murder have dropped by between 25% and 74.1%, depending on the utopia.
Brugada now wants to build 100 utopias so that every neighbourhood has one.
“We want a city that generates employment and fights poverty, a city for everyone, a city where the walls that have divided … are torn down. A city where the poor come first, the women first,” Brugada told the visiting mayors at the City Labs conference.
Her ambitious plans have not been as popular outside her left-leaning Morena party. One opposition candidate accused Brugada’s office of corruption, of “ghost utopias” which were never completed. Brugada’s office told the Guardian the claims were baseless and dirty campaign politics.
There are also concerns that the model is simply too idealistic. Some have called it the latest example of the Latin American left’s tendency to spend taxes unsustainably. Each utopia costs on average $5m (£3.9m) to build and $500k a year to maintain, according to the mayor’s office.
“Given the huge underinvestment over decades, the capital investment is 100% justified. What I am more interested in is the maintenance costs. Will communities pay for it or will it be subsidised in a way that compromises other services in the same area?” Lazo says.
The utopias have also come under fire for “luxury” services such as hydrotherapy, massages and classical music training, when much of Iztapalapa relies on tankers amid a water crisis.
The radical approach is precisely what makes the project so exciting, says Miguel Robles-Durán, associate professor at Parsons The New School for Design in New York.
“You know the programme is working when the rich are complaining that the poor have a gym and a swimming pool,” says Robles-Durán. “This is so pioneering, as it is an entirely new political economy where every citizen, no matter how poor, should have access to these services. And it is the first case in 20 or 30 years that Mexico has broken with the neoliberal dogma that there is no money for this.
“This is living proof that if you want to, you can spend money on the poor.”
