Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 370-395). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

The area that once were “The Great Tenochtitlán”, the aztec city surrounded by five lakes, greenery and impressive sustainable systems for housing and agriculture has turned out to be a megacity growing uncontrollably, leaving a negative environmental and social impact within. Over the last 60 years the population has increased from 5.2 to 8.8 million (INEGI 2010) in the Distrito Federal and from 5.7 to 20.8 million in the ZMVM (Metropolitan Area of the Mexican Valley) known as Mexico City, area which is projected to be the third biggest city in the world by 2015 (United Nations 2005). Research Questions: What would it take for a megacity such as Mexico City to take a shift into sustainable urban design and re-development? How can infrastructures such as transit, waste management systems and public spaces interact in a hybrid urban fabric of blue and green structures, in which the natural landscape and the built environment complement each other? Aim: The aim of this study is to address a research in one of the 16 boroughs of Distrito Federal: Tláhuac, which will be the place for the first metro line reaching the urbanized south-east, therefore the activation of the area is imminent. Tláhuac is a borough with an agricultural-urban character. The area is inhabited by middle-low income families. Its connection to the city, commercial areas and public space is deplorable. The site has large areas of non-utilized agricultural land, these areas are constantly squatted, one large plot of land with these characteristics is right next to the site where the new metro line will be built. Methodology and Design Tools: The study and design is supported by the emergent discipline: Landscape Urbanism, its theory of infrastructural landscapes is used as a way to conceal the urban and the regional, and so as the belief that “Landscape has replaced architectural form as the primary medium of city making” (Waldheim 2006). The methodologies used are literature review and spatial analysis. The final outcome is a new way to do urbanism in the post-agricultural areas of Mexico City, by including the preexistent landscapes as the urban fabrics when developing towards a more urban character. The basic design tools are; infrastructural landscapes throughout the use of the canals and chinampas, urban agriculture, eco-housing, recycling stations and inclusion of new services and community areas.

Ce travail de recherche propose d'identifier, de caractériser et de comparer les transformations récentes de l'occupation du sol sur deux zones humides urbaines : les hortillonnages d'Amiens (France) et les chinampas de Xochimilco (Mexique). Aménagés au Moyen-Âge pour l'agriculture, ces espaces ont subi des modifications profondes dans leurs fonctions et leurs usages durant la seconde moitié du XXe siècle. Ils sont aujourd'hui les supports d'une multitude d'activités qui engendrent parfois des conflits entre les groupes acteurs. Localisés au cœur du milieu urbain, ils subissent également les effets de la pression urbaine qui tend à concurrencer spatialement les autres activités et qui accentue les dégradations environnementales. Depuis une dizaine d'années, les deux sites, grâce à leur paysage caractéristique, sont devenus des " biens patrimoniaux " et des pôles touristiques. Ces transformations récentes sont appréhendées par une analyse diachronique des données-images. Associée aux données statistiques et stationnelles, celle-ci permet, après avoir réalisé un bilan des mutations, de proposer des orientations de gestion en adéquation avec les attentes des acteurs.

This dissertation examines the cultural politics of conservation efforts in Mexico City, where in 2000, the city legislated a soil and water conservation plan in its rural areas. During 12-months of field work in the village of San Luis Tlaxialternalco 1 focused on how the conservation plan was to be established in the wetlands with chinampa agriculture, directly above one of the city's fresh water reservoirs. Political ecology research of conservation suggests that ecosystemic processes are intricately linked to economic and social processes on many scales. Post-structuralist analysis has complicated homogeneous and generalizing descriptions of social categories, politics of power, and the causality between socio-economic, political, cultural, and ecological factors. Research in political ecology emphasizes the diversity of actors and their subject positions and seeks to locate and understand the dynamics of power and agency within and outside formal institutions. I examined the negotiations of the conservation plan on three social scales and I looked at the intersecting axes of power and the knowledge of various actors, and how they inform conservation. On the scale of the state, a discursive analysis of the 'coloniality of power' of the conservation plan uncovers the city government's underlying assumptions about how the fanners' land use practices and social organization contribute to the conservation effort. I ask how do those assumptions define and condition chinampa farmers as 'Indian'? I conclude that in the conservation plan, colonially-based discourses constitute rural communities and agriculturalists in ways that subject them to the city's needs and interests, and exclude them from equal livelihood opportunities. In San Luis Tlaxialternalco I examined ideas of 'community' by documenting how the conservation plan affected local power relations. Analyzing the dynamics among chinampero farmers in their meetings, I exarnined the alliances in and the 'voice' of the village. I conclude that 'community' is a fluid and contested entity shaped by class, knowledge, and cultural values in unpredictable constellations. The tjaird scale of analysis concerns women's knowledge and voice, and examines ideas of silence as agency. In semi-structured interviews and participant observation in farmer women's everyday lives in San Luis I explored how they make decisions that affect the environment. The research shows that multiple constraints and opportunities, such as economic responsibilities, class, prestige, and patriarchy shape women's daily lives and direct their decisions to advance goals consistent with their values even when their decisions may undermine the long-term health of the environment they depend on. By looking at the micropolitics of conservation, my research provides cultural understanding of how at different scales decisions that affect ecology are made and how they are articulated through cultural idioms in the charged context of the conservation plan. The dissertation de-mystifies predominant representations of chinampas and chinamperos. It also complicates ideas of 'cornmirnity' and suggests that the analysis has to go beyond class and include values and knowledge. Further, I show that relevant ecological knowledge does not automatically lead to 'appropriate' action, and that silence can be a powerful tool that resists impositions and firrthers individual and community interests. Finally, the thesis suggests that political ecologists need to move away from equating power with action and activism within "progressive movements", and that conservation efforts need to have multiple goals and follow diverse strategies. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

Les partisans de l’approche énactive soutiennent que la cognition se constitue à travers l’histoire des différentes formes d'interaction (biologique, sensorimotrice, intercorporelle, linguistique, etc.) entre un vivant et son environnement. Ces interactions ne sont pas aléatoires, mais des activités obéissant à certaines normes que les énactivistes appellent sense-making. La cognition est, de ce point de vue, une forme de sense-making. Malgré les avantages indéniables que confère une telle perspective pour étudier la cognition, la présente thèse développe un point de vue critique par rapport à l’approche énactive et soutient qu'il est nécessaire d'approfondir notre compréhension de la dimension écologique du sense-making. Le but principal de la thèse est en conséquence de montrer que l'environnement joue un rôle encore plus important que l’approche énactive ne lui attribue habituellement. En m'engageant de manière critique dans le répertoire conceptuel de la cognition énactive, de la phénoménologie et des approches écologiques de la cognition, l’objectif de cette thèse consiste à poser les bases conceptuelles d'une approche énactive-écologique de la cognition. Pour ce faire, la thèse s’attèle à mettre de l’avant trois idées principales. La première consiste à redéfinir le concept du sense-making : contrairement à la conception qui s’est traditionnellement imposée dans le mouvement énactif, nous allons démontrer qu’il s’agit d’un phénomène de développement (et non de création) de normes. La rencontre du corps et du monde est toujours ancrée dans un champ normatif prédéfini, de sorte que nous devons réévaluer le rôle que joue l'environnement dans les processus de sense-making. En effet, si les agents se retrouvent toujours-déjà plongés dans un champ normatif (et non dans un environnement purement causal et physique), il faut alors reconnaître que l'environnement joue un rôle actif dans la constitution et l'auto-transformation des normes de sense-making. La deuxième idée poursuit dans cette veine et porte sur cette nouvelle conception de l'environnement, qui est ici défini comme un champ normatif actif, incarnant une tension entre le passé habituel du système agent-environnement et les contingences incessantes des événements du monde qui poussent le système vers leur auto-transformation et développement. La troisième idée principale de cette thèse consiste en une description holistique du champ d'action des agents (un lieu énactif) et des normes édictées (enacted) par des processus de sense-making sur le terrain (normes de lieu). Une esquisse générale du lieu énactif montre que les activités de sense-making sont liées à des processus écologiques qui enchevêtrent de multiples agents et localités matérielles dans un réseau écologique local. Ces réseaux écologiques forment une unité systémique et résiliente qui se déploie dans le temps avec les habitants du lieu, et fonctionne comme un champ normatif qui contraint et motive l'auto-transformation de chaque système agent-environnement / Supporters of autonomist enactivism or the enactive approach claim that cognition is a phenomenon constituted by the historical development of different forms of interaction (biological, sensorimotor, intercorporeal, and linguistic) between living bodies and their environments. For autonomist enactivists, the nature of these interactions is not entirely predetermined by general laws of causation but by norms enacted in the historical path of the agent-environment system, and thanks to processes of sense-making. Cognition is, from the enactivist standpoint, a form of sense-making. While there are multiple advantages in holding such perspective to study mind and cognition, this thesis develops a critical point of view and argues that it is necessary to deepen our understanding of the ecological dimension of sense-making. Specifically, the thesis aims to show that the environment plays a more critical role than autonomist enactivism usually attributes to it. By drawing on and critically engaging with the conceptual repertoire of enactive cognition, phenomenology, and ecological approaches to cognition, my objective is to set the conceptual foundations for an enactive-ecological approach to cognition. For this task, I propose three interrelated ideas. The first redefines sense-making as a phenomenon of norm development. The most common descriptions of sense-making involve the emergence of meaning from raw physical matter thanks to the activity of living organisms. As norm development, by contrast, sense-making refers to a constant enactment and re-enactment of norms of interaction from other pregiven norms, previously enacted in the past of the agent-environment system. I argue that the encounter of the body and the world is permanently embedded in a pregiven normative field and never in an abstract void where raw physical interactions occur. From this standpoint, we need, however, to re-evaluate the role that the environment plays in sense-making processes. If agents find themselves immersed in normative fields and not in raw physical landscapes, then the environment has a more active role for the constitution and self-transformation of sense-making norms than autonomist enactivists have acknowledged. In this vein, the second main idea of this thesis concerns the environment as an active normative field that incarnates a tension between the habitual past of the agent-environment system and the ongoing contingencies of worldly events that push the system to their self-transformation and development. The third main idea of this thesis consists of a holistic description of the field of action of agents (enactive place) and the norms enacted by processes of sense-making in the field (place-norms). A general sketch of enactive place shows that sense-making is tied to processes that entangle multiple agents and material localities into a local ecological web. An enactive place constitutes a systemic and resilient unity that unfolds in time altogether with its inhabitants, working as a normative field that constrains and motivates the self-transformation of each agent-environment system. Bodies are therefore part of wider unities of historical development: places.