Visor Urbano: Platform governance of land use in Guadalajara Metropolitan Region

Paper presented in IGU, Mexico, Sept 2022

Juan Demerutis and Ayona Datta

This paper examines the territorial politics emerging from the shift to digitally mediated urbanisation by a rapidly digitalising state of Mexico. It will focus on Visor Urbano (VU), a digital platform that provides open access information on land use in the municipality of Guadalajara. VU was funded in 2016, when the municipality of Guadalajara became one of the five winners in the "Mayors Challenge" convened by the "Bloomberg Philanthropies Foundation”. VU has been championed by the Mexican state as a technological solution which will minimize human contact with public officials in procedures related to urban development, with the main objective of combating corruption. However, this has three shortcomings: first that the geography of VU is limited to the metropolitan core and therefore the urban peripheries where the pace of urbanisation is the highest are still subject to the discretion of public officials. This is particularly salient in the absence of real-time information on applications and permits issued which impedes democratic processes of consultation with local communities. Second, VU does not provide any historic or contextual information related to tenure or land use changes. The information infrastructure of the VU platform both obscures and simplifies customary land rights particularly around ejido land. Finally, we argue that the geography of VU has given rise to grassroots territorial politics pushing back via low technology digital platforms to mobilise against urbanisation in the peripheries of the metropolitan area. The paper will conclude with suggestions for creating sustainable and just metropolitan futures in Mexico.