The return of the plebeian city : The disembedding from below of Lagos and Mexico City (1982–99)

Résumé 0

At the end of the 1990s, Lagos and Mexico City were granted a large degree of autonomy from their respective federal states. Have the two metropolises experienced a process of relative state disembedding similar to that of global cities of the North, following their integration in post-1970 globalization, driven by the incorporation of their economic elites into new globalized spaces of accumulation? This article refutes the thesis of disembedding “from above” in the case of Mexico City and Lagos. The relative disembedding of the two (ex-)capitals occurred “from below,” given that it was driven by urban popular sectors rather than economic elites, through two mechanisms: the reterritorialization of popular politics and the weakening of the clientelist ties that linked it to the state. We thus return to the Weberian ideal type of the plebeian city and examine the modalities of this new incarnation.