The Smithian

MEXTRÓPOLI will...forge links between citizens and architects, designers, urban planners, sociologists, anthropologists, artists and politicians, and will examine the question of what a desirable metropolis could be. MEXTRÓPOLI also aspires to position Mexico City as an epicenter of architecture and a leader in creative transformation...

Thousands of riot police retook Mexico City's...Zócalo plaza...from striking teachers on Friday. There were violent clashes...Police moved into the area minutes after the elapse of a 4pm deadline the government had set for the teachers to leave the square they'd occupied for weeks...the protests were aimed at pressuring the legislature into modifying a wide-ranging education reform that threatens teachers with dismissal if they fail evaluations aimed at improving the dismal standard of the country's state schools...Most of the striking teachers come from Mexico's poverty-ridden southern states, and argue that the country's educational deficiencies are more closely tied to social inequity than their performance in the classroom.

An elderly man’s final day alive in Mexico City is rendered with intensity and rigor by filmmaker Michel Lipkes...[the] debut feature vigorously flies the flag of the “slow cinema” movement...

Masked youths [confronted] police in Mexico City...as a controversial bill to reform the education sector was approved by Mexican lawmakers. Thousands of teachers have marched in the capital in recent days to rail against the reforms introduced by President Enrique Pena Nieto.

....while I was applying to Harvard my proposal for the Cultural Center la Tallera Siqueiros...was chosen to be built. So while I was in the US I was still working in Mexico—it wasn't quite what I had imagined would happen but...After graduating I moved back to Mexico City and continued with my studio—it's been non-stop ever since...Mexico City has been great because I've built several things which a young architect in another country might not have been able to do. There is a DIY culture here which can be seen from street vendors to architects—it's a very free and liberating place to work...

The burdens of a public life, of living as a symbol of some vast and unquenched yearning, are well-known, but few among us understand with the terrible insight of the Shabazz family what it means to die that way. Malcolm Shabazz, activist, blogger, and grandson of Malcolm X, died Thursday in Mexico City at the age of twenty-eight. His is the seventh untimely death in an index of lamentation that spans four generations. For many years now it has been quietly known and seldom spoken that both Martin and Malcolm’s heirs occupy a space on the far end of some bell curve of suffering. The specifics—King’s brother drowning little more than a year after his assassination, his mother gunned down in the sanctuary where he and his father pastored, Betty Shabazz’s death after a fire in her home—seem both too crucial to forget and too cruel to recognize with any frequency.

Mexico City is stepping in with what could easily be the most impactful bike-sharing program of all, making a dramatic difference in the chronic congestion problem of the world's third most populated metropolis. EcoBici, Mexico City's bike-sharing program, is part of local government's Plan Verde...a 15-year initiative to enhance environmental value, public space, habitability, water supply, air quality, mobility, and other sustainability-driven factors that contribute to the city's livability. The long-term goal of the bike-sharing program is to convert 5% of city journeys to cycling—an ambitious goal with enormous potential impact...