- Economic Revival of Mexican Public Housing Estates through Urban Design   64 kb by    Castro, Pamela | pcastro-suarez@brookes.ac.uk    Short Outline New neighbourhoods for creative economies? Or… Creative local economies for our existing deteriorated neighbourhoods, instead of permanent “conquests” of new territories we should go for the repositioning of our cities in the post-global economic arrangement. Abstract In response to extensive deterioration of some Mexican old social housing estates, which have proved to be a short-term solution, this paper attempts to introduce tools of the public open space morphology to improve the economic performance of these public housing estates. The proposal lies in providing more comprehensible and sustainable urban design tools to re-shape and transform the old social housing stock into a more productive one through the accommodation of a more diverse and self-contained distribution of economic activities at the local level to carry out residents’ daily-life economic activities. Because the current economic systems established in these public housing estates seem not ensure the appreciation of the properties, the trading surplus of the establishments inside of them and reasonable economic supports for the survival of the residents due in part to the morphological characteristics of their public open spaces, land subdivision and street patterns, the particular social “organization” of the residents and conditions of economic exclusion in which the trading relationships between businesses in the area take place. This paper shows the ways public open spaces and built forms intervene first as containers and links of businesses in the running of the capital accumulation through the production and distribution of goods and services, second, as products and conductors to private spaces through the production of urban space as commodity, third as accommodating spaces and facilitators to attract different types of labour force related with the incomes they bring to the area and fourth as attractors of property investments. Keywords public space morphology, local economy, public housing estates Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2005: Making Spaces for the Creative Economy   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper