Sunday Pick: Mexico City | Far Flung

0:28Happy Sunday, TED Talks Daily listeners. It's art, food, history. It also happens to be one of the largest cities in the entire world. Harnessing the creativity of a megalopolis isn't easy, but Mexico City shows us how it's done. In this episode of Far Flung, host Salim Reshamwala brings us along for a wild journey to learn about the sights, sounds, and rich history that make up this incredible city. Follow a real-life superhero who dons a luchador mask and a cape to protect his fellow residents from speeding cars, learn how citizens are hacking their way to a better public transport system, and see what it takes to crowdsource a constitution from a city with 21 million hearts and minds.

1:12To hear more thought-provoking ideas from history, listen to Far Flung wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about Ted's podcasts at audiocollective.ted.com. Now on to the episode right after a quick break.

1:35so I started Piatonito like six years ago as a defender of the right to walk the city it all started like a joke like yeah let's do it just for fun go out to the streets with with my cape and my mask, like luchadores, like wrestlers. And then suddenly it became a great idea to communicate the message. That's Jorge Canez. And in just a minute, we'll get to the message that made him put on a literal cape. I'm Salim Rashmwala, and from TED, this is Far Flung. In each episode, we visit a different place around the world to understand ideas that flow from there. Shout out to Women Will, a Grow With Google program for sponsoring this week's episode.

2:25This week, a giant. Mexico City. Mexico City is possibly one of the hardest cities in the world to describe. I think it's a huge city. It's a very compact city. It's full of surprises. It's a very diverse city. There's a lot of density. It's very open. Mexico City is, as you probably know, one of the largest cities in the world. It's the largest in the Western Hemisphere. It's 21 million people on the metropolitan area. So everything in Mexico City is in the superlatives. Once upon a time when the Spaniards came into the city, it was called the City of Palaces, for example. And it was like this floating, too good to be true, magical space.

3:07And nowadays, I think you can find a layer and traces of every city that Mexico City has been throughout the years. So you will find pyramids, but also our colonial past, as well as incredibly contemporary Mexico. That last voice is Gabriela Gomez-Mont. She's been a journalist, a visual artist, and a documentary filmmaker. But then one day she got what she called the wildest offer, basically a blank slate to propose any type of city department that she could envision. And so she proposed and became the head of Laboratorio para la Ciudad, the Laboratory for the City, which is an amazing name. We're going to hear much more from her in a bit.

3:50She's a perfect example of what we're looking at this week, how citizens in Mexico City have figured out ways to channel the imagination of massive crowds in one of the most crowded places on Earth. And we're tackling one big question. How might a city's thinking about those crowds change when artists and creatives get involved in government directly? So, Mexico City, 21 million citizens strong and a laboratory full of ideas on how to get things done with huge numbers of people. But first, back to our lone superhero. Walking in Mexico City, like any other big city in the world, is almost like an extreme sport.

4:34You have to be careful in every corner. Four people die every day in the streets of Mexico City due to road crashes. Two out of those four are pedestrians. We have built cities for the cars and not cities for the people. And that's not good for anyone. We have to start to think how to build cities for the pedestrians first.

5:00Jorge was involved with some pedestrian advocacy groups that would paint crosswalks and bike lanes. but without government permission. One day I went to the Lucha Libre, you know, the Mexican wrestling arena, and I said to myself, why not buy a mask, buy a cape, and go out to the streets as a vigilante of the pedestrians. And here's where we get to a superhero alter ego. Peatonito!

5:39So Jorge, I mean, Pantonito, would run into traffic, escorting people through intersections, directing that traffic, running over tops of cars parked on sidewalks. I can't emphasize this enough. He literally climbs on top of cars and sort of flexes on them. He's not hugely muscular or anything, which makes the visuals extra amazing. He basically acts like a superhero to help pedestrians and motorists interact safely and with kindness. Tell me a bit about this costume and the moment the costume stopped being a joke. What does the costume look like? I started with a normal mask that I bought outside of the wrestling arena.

6:25But then I asked my brother to design a mask with a crosswalk and a pedestrian. And also I talked with my grandmother and she made my cape with the pedestrian stripes, the black and white. And what's a day of fixing the streets looks like? Like if you wake up and you're like, OK, I'm going to do it. I'm going to be peatonito today. How's that day start? And what do you do during the day? Let me tell you what I do as peatonito in the streets. I go out and I help pedestrians to cross the street, especially elder people or people with disabilities. I paint pedestrian crosswalks. I paint sidewalks.

7:07I paint bike lanes. I push cars that are blocking the pedestrian crosswalk. So I push them backwards. I walk on the top of the cars that are parked in the sidewalk. My mother tells me not to do this anymore, but you know, it's only walking on the top of the car only to transmit the message that that's the space of the pedestrians and cars are not welcome here. Petronito, by the way, means little pedestrian, which is a very cute name for a luchador who helps pedestrians. But even a Mexican wrestling superhero can only do so much for his country alone. So in addition to guarding the streets, Petronito joined the government.

7:56I started as an activist and then I became a public servant. I was like, all right, let's do it. I'm going to have power and some budget. And the first thing that you learn in the government is that there's no power and there's no budget. You have to figure out how to make everything by your own. What surprised you positively about working in government? It makes you more humble because when you're an advocate, you are always like shouting to the government and criticizing the government. But when you're inside the government, you're on the other side of everything. Now you're in charge of taking the decisions.

8:35And it's not easy. It's not easy. I think that every advocate should work at least once in the government to know how this interaction between the government and the citizens work. Which brings us back to Gabriela Gomez-Mont, the woman who got that chief creative officer dream job and created Laboratorio para la Ciudad. Which translates roughly into Lab for the City. I had a team of 20 people. Half of them came from the urban and political sciences, and half of them came from humanities. So it was everything from urban geographers, political scientists, social scientists, data experts, et cetera, et cetera, working hand in hand with artists, designers, filmmakers, historians, philosophers, writers, activists, and everything that we did sat in between.

9:25We saw from the very beginning a palpable paradox that I believe is very much the essence of Mexico City, but I see the world over, which is this huge loss of potential when government cannot necessarily tap into citizen talent after we decide on what we call their first provocations, which was kind of like the questions that led to whole research agendas at the lab, as well as the more experimental and implementable facet of it all. I love the language you're using. those first provocations is such an unusual term to think about in describing a project that's associated with the government. And I saw the laboratorio referred to as the city's ministry of imagination.

10:09And I love that name as well. Could you tell me a bit about why you're so engaged in these terms of like imagination and provocation, why the language around the laboratorio is kind of distinct from normal policy language? Language was for us an entry point, a different way of framing the conversations. And since from the very beginning, our main or one of our main missions was to become a strange attractor, if you will, to civil society. If we did not manage to create a space that became fascinating to people outside of government, everything was going to implode in our hands. And at the time, I was the first one surprised when it started working because the battle between civil society and government is so historic and so entrenched.

10:53You actually have to be able to paint a vision that people want to be part of. So narrative and language for many of our projects, such as, you know, Mapatón. Mapatón is a project where several thousand people signed up to help crowdsource information on the informal bus system of Mexico City. We'll explain more in a moment. Mapatón.

11:18So back to Mapatón. Let's start by telling you about a problem involving that massive informal system of buses. They're called peseros.

11:35Imagine a clunky-looking metallic white and green little beast covering the city because there are more than 30 ,000 of these across Mexico City. And they are a world of their own. The only thing is that this bus system actually, nobody knows or nobody knew what was really happening on the ground as a user of the bus system. The only way of actually figuring out how to get from one point to another is, let's say, asking five people and then averaging out answers or who looks more trustworthy. But there's no bus map whatsoever. And so the lab assembled a really diverse team to try and figure out how on earth they could get citizens accurate and up-to-date information on all those chaotic bus routes.

12:28The superpower of Mexico City is its community. So how do we bring in people to actually help solve this? We put out a call to Mexico City citizens and said, hey, like, help us map this. So rather than create a map for those bus lines, which would have taken years and a lot of money, the lab came up with an app, Mapatone, which got the bus riders to help map the paths and made it a citywide real-world game that people could play. Kind of like if Pokemon Go actually helped you get somewhere. And what would happen is that every time that you mapped a route from point A to point B, you would get points.

13:08The app had a smart algorithm in there that would basically give points for the longest route. You know, just like created an incentive system, if you will, so that people would map out a lot of routes and do the toughest ones first. And so Mexico City, thanks to very passionate people, was able to actually have its first go at a map of the bus system. And when you create a narrative that people want to be part of, people will come. So mapping the seemingly unmappable with a crowd and an app is one thing, but the city has gone even bigger in its civic engagement. They sort of crowdsourced the backbone of their democracy.

13:49One of the most fascinating projects, experiments, and conversations that we held at the lab, I believe, was around Mexico City getting its first constitution. Okay, some background. If you're thinking, wait, I don't think my city has a constitution, you're probably right. Mexico City used to be a federal district, so it operated in kind of a strange in-between. Neither city nor state, without much autonomy. A lot like Washington, D.C. So we did not even have representation on a national congress. And as it morphed governmental forms, it gained the right to a constitution. And that needed to be written.

14:31From scratch. So basically, the mayor and many people from other political parties decided to put together a team of 28 notables, as they call them, that were comprised of people from very different walks of life that were supposed to do the first draft that the mayor would then hand over to the Constitutional Congress. But then the mayor hit a challenge. Because a new constitution needs experts, sure, But for it to mean something to the people, for them to care about that new constitution, you need the people to believe in it, for them to feel like it's their own, not just a piece of paper handed down from above.

15:11So the lab got entrusted with creating a way of getting more people involved in the process. They set up an online forum. But nah, in case you want to try this, you can't just write a constitution via the comment section of a website. This is the government. You have to have some rules. So they made it into another kind of contest. If you had an idea you thought was important enough to include in the Constitution, you had to create a petition and get other people to support it. Petitions that got a lot of support had the chance to present their ideas to the 28 notables. And even to the mayor himself.

15:49Some of these ideas that were crowdsourced in this way were more broad. Things like making sure the Constitution included LGBTQI rights and rights for people with disabilities. But some were more specific, like guaranteeing a minimum amount of green space per resident. And it was all driven by the idea that everyone has the right to the city.

16:15Believe it or not, Mexico City has almost 5 million kids in a metropolitan level. So this is a whole Finland just of kids. And we have never addressed children. Speaking on those very young folks, could you tell me a bit about the Petoninos street play program and what it was and why you had to make it? So one of our tiny projects that became very dear to everybody's hearts was a project called Petoninos. A phrase that Gabriela mentioned that stuck with me was, averages can be tyrannical. When she said it, she was talking about how, on average, Mexico City has a ton of green space. But most of the parks are located in the city's center.

17:00Huge chunks of the city have hardly any green space at all. So averaged across the city, there's a lot of green space. But that average is deceiving. Lots of those 5 million kids don't really have a place near home to play. That led Gabriela and her team to develop Peeto Niños. It's a simple idea, closing down streets to create outdoor play areas for families. And Peato Niños is born out of a sense of this need in many different neighborhoods, like the places that most need this community bonds, this being able to meet face to face, because many times they are the most dangerous places. So we thought, can we do a small experiment of basically taking these best practices from the 70s of being able to close down streets on a regular basis.

17:51And so we'd go on a Sunday already with the support of the community there and close down the streets. And like a Pied Piper, kids would start coming out of everywhere. The comment that we heard so often was like, I had no idea that there were so many kids here. So to this point about having 5 million kids on a metropolitan area and the invisibility of kids on a policy level, I do think that because we never think of a megalopolis as a city of children, which it actually is. It's not the, you know, children are not the future of Mexico City. They are Mexico City. What we need is to reimagine the space and the scope and the language and the way that government activates the city and that activates its communities around it.

18:34To really think that your community is your superpower and that then so many things can be readdressed. Could you tell me what lessons Mexico City has to teach other megalopolises struggling with overcrowding specifically? If you, you know, if you sat down with someone from one of those cities and they were looking to you for advice on how to start on this path, like, what would you advise them? Much of the work that we did at the lab is how do you take the Excel sheets and make them speak in very different ways. This, I think, is a big challenge in any megalopolis, that it's so easy for us to be an anonymous mass.

19:08But I also think that the inverse is also possible. As I mentioned, like the sheer civic energy that can just travel the city and create so much momentum. But for that to happen is where I believe a very fundamental shift needs to happen of the government. Yes, providing services and doing things with the complaints it receives and keeping peace, but also orchestrating citizen talent. But there's so much wealth to be tapped into in these cities. And even though, again, like Mexico City might seem insurmountable in its challenges, I do believe that the resources that the city has when seen under a different optic is also just as gargantuan as any type of challenges that the city faces.

19:57A big part of what Gabriela's work with the lab was trying to do was to reframe the way people see crowds. And while the lab didn't survive the most recent change in city government, many of the people on Gabriela's team are still working in government, continuing those ideas both in Mexico City and internationally. Like Gabriela said, your community is your superpower.

20:23And since we're talking superpowers, some advice from Piatonito. Just in case you were thinking of being a luchador in the streets of your city, He wants you to know that you've got to make these ideas your own. I have a great friend in Sao Paulo, and he decided to make his own costume personalized for his city. His alter ego name is Superando, and he dresses like a Brazilian superhero with the Brazilian colors. So that's better in Brazil. So it depends where do you go, and it depends how people will react with your costume and your activities. That's great. So you basically have to make your community superhero for your community.

21:07Exactly.

21:11The thing that struck me in all these conversations was a sort of trust in the imaginations of masses of people. We talk a lot about big data, but it's easy to underestimate all that individual creativity. At one point in our conversation, Gabriela said, you can view Mexico City as 21 million mouths to feed or 21 million minds to learn from. Here's to minds, y 'all. Far Flung with Salim Rashomwala is produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Newsom of Magnificent Noise for TED. Our production staff includes Our fact checker is Alejandra Vasquez. Ad stories are produced by Transmitter Media. This episode was mixed and sound designed by Luis Gil.

22:18Our executive producer is Eric Newsom. Special thanks to our sponsor, Women Will, a Grow With Google program. I'm Salim Rushamwala.

22:44Thank you.