Anchoring of urban renewal: Urban complex Paseo Molino in the Historic Center of the city of Toluca, Mexico

Authors

Abstract

Currently in the historical centers of the Mexican cities converge modernizing tendencies expressed in their physical form, commercial activities and social tensions. The article analyzes the anchoring of urban renewal in the historic center of the city of Toluca, through the Paseo Molino complex, which marks a milestone in the production of vertical housing, shops and services in a sector that does not know similar backgrounds. Through semi-structured interviews and exploratory tours, the urban environment of the project, the agents and mechanisms of the appropriation of urban land and the prospective of the expected impacts are characterized. The urban anchor expresses levels of intervention and degrees of public and private decision that configure a different mode of urban management through the intensification of urban use and mechanisms that establish the trust to guarantee profitability. It concludes in the importance of the rearrangement of government and private sector relations to face the continuity of the past that goes back almost two centuries, and which will henceforth constitute a factor that could curb the multiplication of modern urban interventions in the historic center of the city of Toluca.

Keywords:

Historical center, urban complex, urban intervention, urban renewal