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September 20, 2007
A Tower Fight, but Just What Borough Is This?
The NY Times
By Elisabeth Malkin
You can start rolling your eyes now, because in a surreal parallel universe, the NY Times reports on an influential developer who hires a global starchitect and, with the help of the Mayor, gets around local zoning restrictions to advance his plan to raze a historic building, at one of the city's worst traffic bottlenecks, to build a skyscraper that will putatively put Mexico City on the map. [And you thought we were special.]
An influential developer plans an enormous skyscraper at the edge of the city’s giant central park. A celebrity architect is commissioned, and the ambitious mayor unveils the proposal at city hall.
Instantly, the prospective tower’s largely genteel neighbors rise up in arms. They vow to tie the plan up in lawsuits and procedural reviews. There is also a reclusive investor, a much-questioned relationship between the mayor and the developer and a building on the site that, though it has long been ignored, preservationists now want saved.
...
The developers and their allies in city hall say the tower will catapult Mexico City into the ranks of the world’s great cities, alongside emergent Asian capitals where skyscrapers grow ever taller. For Mexico City to compete globally, “we will need dozens of projects like this,” said Jorge Gamboa de Buen, the chief executive of the project’s developer, Grupo Danhos. “The city will have to learn to deal with the issue of these projects.”Opponents say the tower is simply illegal. “They are twisting the law around like a pretzel to get their objectives through,” said Denise Dresser, an academic and commentator who is helping organize opponents. She said the city’s support for the tower recalled the days when authoritarian governments built big public works projects whether anybody wanted them or not.
NoLandGrab: Desarrolle, No Destruya Ciudad de México???
Posted by lumi at September 20, 2007 9:55 PM