This book opened by reflecting upon a puzzle. The GFC – as a crisis of the extant neoliberal model – appeared to present an opportunity for the political pendulum to swing back towards the left. Yet, more than a decade later, it is clear that Europe's centre-left parties failed to seize that opportunity. Not only have they failed to assert themselves electorally, programmatically and ideologically, but the GFC and attendant post-crisis politics of austerity have resulted in a crisis of centre-left party identity. Such parties were unable, and at times seemingly unwilling, to develop a progressive response to the crisis of neoliberalism or an alternative to the dominant austerity strategy in Europe. These failings created space the rise of radical left and other populist alternative parties and movements in both the UK and France.

Today, the future of the centre-left is more finely balanced than it has ever been. For some centre-left parties, the GFC was deadly. PASOK were wiped out by the insurgent left-wing SYRIZA, while the French PS clung on to a handful of seats in its strongholds. Yet, as we saw in Chapter 6, centre-left parties around Europe are in some respects rebuilding and, in a few cases, regaining power. The current conjuncture, marked by political volatility, the climate crisis and Covid-19, represents another potential opportunity for the centre-left. There is a strong case to be made for the need for a progressive economic response to tackle the climate issue while also addressing longstanding inequalities that the pandemic has both shone a light on and exacerbated. The question is: are centre-left parties capable of advancing that progressive cause?

Divided They Fell provides us with several new ways of appreciating this question. The book speaks to a number of existing literatures on the political economy of European social democracy, democratic representation and theories of ideational change. Although focused on the two cases of Labour and the PS, the analysis offers us some important findings at three levels of abstraction that have a wider applicability. At the macro level, it offers insight into the relationship between the conditions of contemporary capitalism and modern centre-left politics.

The idea that the centre-left has “failed” in the post-GFC environment is widely accepted, but there is little empirical evidence in the literature to help us understand the way in which the parties themselves reacted to the 2008 crash and attendant crisis of neoliberalism. In this chapter, we seek to rectify this by inverting our gaze inwards. We examine the internal dynamics of Labour and the PS and why these centre-left parties adopted the strategies they did post-GFC. To do so, the chapter concerns itself with studying the ideas and discourses developed within Labour under Ed Miliband (2010–15) and within the PS and the Hollande administration, including the campaign leading up to his election in 2012 (2011–17). It reflects on the discussions between policy actors where ideas are articulated, developed and deliberated as part of the development of their programme (Schmidt 2002: 233). This involves analysis not just of ideas but of the location and context of these ideas within the parties and around them (e.g. within associated think tanks), including what groups are encouraging their development and how they relate to the wider economic, institutional and electoral environment. This is achieved through an analysis of semi-structured interviews (for a full list, see the Appendix) conducted with key policy actors and triangulates this with an analysis of over 300 English-and French-language documents, including speeches, private internal party communication and interviews given at the time.

This analysis illustrates how the adaptation of these two centre-left parties to the neoliberal order in the 1980s and 1990s created a number of important internal reputational, ideational and strategic path dependencies. Reputational or “legacy” path dependencies refer to situations wherein parties’ prior commitments, experiences in government and discourses directly condition the strategies they adopt. Ideational path dependencies refer to how sets of economic ideas continue to run through the party, shaping party actors’ understanding of the economic world, even if their basis or rationale has been undermined by events or is contested internally. Strategic path dependencies refer to the way in which a set of “strategic political-electoral” ideas about how the political landscape should be understood and how “politics” is to be “done”, both internally within the party and among the wider electorate.

If the adage that “a week is a long time in politics” is true, a year or several is an age. Since Labour's general election defeat in 2015 and the PS's electoral pummelling in 2017, Europe has experienced a series of dramatic events that have rocked its political systems and economies, and even challenged the pattern of our very existence. Four key “shocks” can be identified. The first two of these shocks – the growth of the new radical left and rise of economic nationalism – are endogenous to the political and economic system in Europe. The rise of populist and alternative radical movements on both the left and right has been clear since the early 2010s with the growth of anti-austerity protest movements, which later turned into important political groupings and parties. Added to this, the twin events of the UK's referendum on EU membership and Donald Trump's election in 2016 shattered four decades’ worth of near continuous growth in global integration and trade with the rise of new forms of economic nationalism. The second pair of shocks – the climate crisis and Covid-19 – are exogenous in nature. The climate crisis is of course not a new problem, but the seemingly exponential multiplication of critical global weather events is pushing it to the forefront of mainstream debate. In addition to the challenges posed by the need to decarbonize our economies, in early 2020 the world was thrown into a state of emergency with the growing health crisis surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic. More than two years on from the outbreak, the economic fallout from the pandemic remains unclear. There can be little doubt, however, that the pandemic and associated “lockdowns” have changed the way our economies function, how businesses can operate and how ordinary people view their lives and livelihoods.

The fragmentation of the Labour Party and the PS in the mid-2010s was characteristic of a wider crisis of the European centre-left in the period. Across the continent, mainstream centre-left parties were fundamentally challenged by the rise of alternative radical movements. Corbyn took the helm of the Labour Party in the same year that SYRIZA's popularity served to demolish PASOK in Greece.

The titles given are those at the time of the interview and/or reflective of the

capacity within which they were speaking.

[Anon.], ex-economic advisor to French PS government A, Paris.

[Anon.], ex-senior economic advisor to Labour Party, London.

[Anon.], ex-economic advisor to Labour Party, [online].

[Anon.], ex-senior member of Labour Party shadow cabinet under Ed Miliband, London.

[Anon.], ex-senior strategic advisor to Ed Miliband, London.

Alain Bergounioux, historian and PS national secretary, Paris.

Alain Rodet, PS député, Paris.

Chris Leslie MP, ex-shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury and Labour Party MP, London.

Christoph Caeresche, PS député, Paris.

Craig Berry, Deputy Director of Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute.

Élie Cohen, economist and ex-advisor to Hollande, Paris.

Gabrielle Siry, PS national secretary, Paris.

Gérard Grunberg, Director Emeritus of the Centre d’Etudes Européennes, Sciences Po, Paris.

Gilbert Cette, economics professor, Aix-Marseille University, [online].

Henri Weber, ex-PS MEP, Paris.

Jean-Marc Germain, PS député, Paris.

Jean-Paul Fitoussi, economics professor, Sciences Po, Paris.

Jim Cunningham MP, Labour Party MP, Coventry.

John Wrathmell, ex-Labour Party head of economic policy, London.

Jon Cruddas MP, Labour Party MP and co-chair of Labour Party's Policy Review, London.

Jonathan Rutherford, ex-co-chair of Labour Party's Policy Review, London.

Kate Bell, ex-Labour Party policy advisor on work and pensions, London.

Laurent Grandguillaume, PS député, Paris.

Marc Stears, ex-strategic advisor and speechwriter to Ed Miliband, London.

Maurice Glasman, Labour Peer, London.

Nick Pearce, ex-director of the IPPR, Paris.

Pierre-Alain Muet, PS député, Paris.

Romain Perez, economic advisor at Vigi-ECO, Paris.

Stephen Bush, political correspondent at New Statesman, London.

Stewart Wood, ex-strategic advisor to Ed Miliband and Labour Peer, Oxford.

Torsten Bell, ex-senior strategic advisor to Ed Miliband, London.

Xavier Ragot, ex-economic advisor to French Socialist government and President of the OFCE, Paris.

Zaki Laidi, Professor of International Relations at L’Institut d’études politiques de Paris, Sciences Po, Paris.

The strategic failure of Labour and the PS following the GFC is most tangibly displayed in the significant electoral defeats they experienced in 2015 and 2017 respectively. After initial electoral success in 2012, just five years later the PS suffered its worst ever defeat. In the context of deep unpopularity, François Hollande made history as the first sitting president in the Fifth Republic not to stand for re-election. The party's chosen presidential candidate, Benoît Hamon, eventually finished in fifth place with an ignominious 6.3 per cent of the vote, while the PS haemorrhaged 250 seats in the subsequent legislative elections. In the UK, after five years of Coalition government austerity, Miliband's Labour lost the 2015 general election, allowing the Conservative Party to form a majority government for the first time since the 1992 election.

The failure of these centre-left parties is, of course, more significant than a straightforward electoral defeat. Given the centre-left's embrace of liberal capitalism during the Third Way era, the GFC acted as a catalyst for a rupture within the parties, engendering a historic crisis of centre-left party identity that has seen the parties divided and electorates drift away from them. No longer could accommodation of the neoliberal paradigm be justified on the premise of higher growth and rising living standards. The crisis period represented an important moment for the centre-left to reassert a progressive political economic vision. Instead, the PS has effectively collapsed as a true parti d’alternance with the political and financial resources capable of winning an election and forming a government. In its place, LFI, led by the left-wing populist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, emerged as the dominant party on the left in the Assemblée nationale. While Labour did not experience the same decline, it underwent a “revolution from within” with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as party leader in September 2015. Corbyn's leadership transformed the party over the course of a tumultuous five years in British politics, uprooting many of the intellectual and sociological remnants of New Labour in the process.

This chapter illustrates the significance of the failures of the post-GFC period for the centre-left in the UK and France beyond the immediate implications of a bruising electoral defeat.

More than any other issue, the most serious perceived threat to the future of the European left and centre-left is the idea that the conditions of contemporary capitalism render its governing project no longer viable. The breakdown of the postwar Keynesian consensus with the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system in the early 1970s saw the relative stability and rising living standards of the trente glorieuses replaced by a more volatile and crisis-ridden economic environment. The economic landscape that the crises of the 1970s engendered – the neoliberal paradigm – has proven to be hostile terrain for parties of the left. The rise of global capital mobility alongside a widespread push for market liberalization, diminishing taxation rates and shrinking welfare states saw centre-left parties largely adapt to this phase of capitalist development through the adoption of Third Way principles.

There is a long history of scholarly work detailing the structural economic constraints that this neoliberal environment places upon governing parties, and which are seen to hurt the governing ambitions of left and centre-left parties in particular. These arguments have come in waves. The first arrived with the high tide of the globalization debate in the early 1990s and argued that the contemporary conditions of globalized capitalism had destroyed the economic foundation of progressive politics by empowering mobile capital over democratically elected governments. A second wave of literature, in the late 1990s and 2000s, concerned itself with the impact of European integration and the way in which monetary union and growing fiscal surveillance institutionalized an anti-progressive dynamic within the EU. A third wave, which has roots in the pre-2008 literature but found added meaning post-GFC, grapples with the indebtedness of modern states and the increasingly tight grip that financial markets have on governments as a result. Much of this scholarship has built a strong thesis of the “death” of democratic capitalism and the non-negotiable emergence of neoliberal economic governance in its place.

This chapter engages with these literatures to ask the question: to what extent did structural economic constraints determine the centre-left's strategy post-crisis?

This chapter presents some of the urban conditions and policies that have shaped Mexico City's environmental problems, as well as the most serious natural risks it has experienced, particularly in its recent history. It begins with a description of the most salient features of urban expansion in the city in recent decades, and how this has occurred in various parts of the metropolitan area, to analyse its patterns of major population growth, since these factors have clearly influenced the two problems set forth below.

Expansion and sprawl of the urban area

Urban growth entails the physical expansion of a city's urban area (the surface or land it uses, while urban area comprises the political-administrative units), as well as the increase in its population. It also involves the transition from the predominance of agricultural activity, or natural areas, to the secondary and tertiary sectors (CONAPO & SEDESOL 2012: 11). This growth or physical expansion is generally accompanied by tensions and conflicts between agricultural land use in the natural or environmental capital area, and urban land use. In Mexico, these tensions are compounded by the issue of land tenure, characterized by a specific combination of private, public and communal or social ownership.

One available source of information in Mexico for the study of the urban area is population and housing censuses, which separate demographic and housing data into different geographic scales: (1) states; (2) municipalities or alcaldías; (3) localities; (4) basic geostatistical areas; and (5) blocks. The basic urban geostatistical area refers to the subdivision of municipalities or alcaldías and allows the formation of primary sampling units and the organization of statistical information.

Table 6.1 presents information on the size of the urban area in the Mexico City Metropolitan Area (ZMCM) for 2000 and 2020. For further analysis, the metropolitan territory was divided into four parts, which are also used in Chapters 2 and 3: (1) central city; (2) the remaining Mexico City alcaldías; (3) municipalities on the inner periphery; and (4) municipalities on the outer periphery.

The number of basic geostatistical areas in the ZMCM experienced a relative increase of 18 per cent from 4,994 to 5,875 in 2020. The urban area of the ZMCM totalled 2,111 km2 in 2000, rising to 2,362 km2 in 2020, meaning that during that period, it expanded by 251 km, equivalent to a 12 per cent increase (Map 6.1).

The topics of housing, transport and mobility are fundamental aspects that contribute to the organization of urban space. As regards housing, this chapter describes the types of housing production and distribution in Mexico City, linked to the programmes developed with state support, required by most of the population.

We begin with a summary of the evolution of the main housing programmes in Mexico, which provides a framework for the analysis of this issue in Mexico City and describes what has happened nationally and what positive policies can be identified locally. This chapter will also include informal settlements, which, according to researchers’ calculations, account for approximately half the dwellings built in the metropolis. Although informal settlements and the dwellings they consist of have been produced outside the scope of public policy, at several points in the development of these neighbourhoods, both local and federal government have intervened, particularly in the regularization of land tenure, through the provision of basic services (drinking water, sanitation, electrification, and waste collection) and housing improvement. In other words, governments have also been involved in informal settlements.

As regards mobility and transport, we will begin by presenting the evolution of the construction of the main communication routes through maps showing various cut-off points since the 1950s, and the way the layout of these roads is related to the evolution of key urban development activities at different times in the recent history of the city. This is followed by an analysis of the issues related to the various transport systems and how they have changed, and the way they have affected social groups. Commuting, explored at the end of this chapter, overlaps with the issue of the location of the main employment centres in the city, analysed in Chapter 2.

National and local housing programmes

Although Mexico has had housing programmes for limited sectors of the population since the early twentieth century, it was only in the 1960s that the first major social housing programme, the Housing Financing Programme, was developed.

To present a set of conclusions based on what has been analysed and discussed throughout this book, we begin by taking stock of the most important ideas that emerge from each of its seven chapters, and then refer to the elements constituting the most significant contributions to the position, definition and understanding of one of the largest urban agglomerations in the world. Set in the Latin American context, the Mexico City Metropolitan Area (ZMCM) shares certain features with the great metropolises of the world and the region, while other features are different. Their evolution and problems highlight the enormous challenges it faces.

The ZMCM is an extensive urban area encompassing land from 76 small political-administrative units, belonging to three major political-administrative bodies, called states or federative entities. One of these federal entities is Mexico City, divided into 16 smaller administrative units (alcaldías). Some parts of this book refer to Mexico City, while other chapters and sections analyse issues on a broader geographic scale, such as the ZMCM.

The first chapter studies the structure, dynamics and territorial distribution of the population in the ZMCM, in addition to reviewing the main guidelines of the population policy. The differential growth of the population over large areas of the ZMCM can be explained by the dissimilar behaviours of fertility, mortality, migration and intra-metropolitan residential mobility. The highest population growth occurred in municipalities on the inner periphery, while the central city saw a repopulation.

The total fertility rate in the ZMCM is one of the lowest nationwide. In 2002, it reached the generational replacement rate, 2.1 live-born children per woman, continuing to decrease to values of 1.7 live-born children per woman in 2020. For its part, the crude mortality rate in the ZMCM was lower than in the national context in 1980, with 5.7 deaths per 1,000 inhabitants per year. This indicator reached a tipping point in 2000, and thereafter began to increase, surpassing the country in 2004 and reaching a rate of 6.4 deaths per 1,000 inhabitants per year in 2020. The performance of fertility and mortality in the ZMCM has resulted in natural growth below that of the country.

Urbanization and megacities

Major cities in Latin America and the Caribbean have undergone profound changes since the end of the past century. From the postwar period to the 1980s, the largest metropolitan agglomerations in the region led the economic expansion of their respective countries, expanding and enhancing their productive capacities. These metropolitan areas achieved significant social, economic, political and urban progress, concentrating large educational and health facilities, and becoming the main destination for internal migration flows. Latin America became one of the most urbanized regions in the world, second only to North America. By 2020 this subcontinent was home to six megacities with more than ten million residents each: São Paulo, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Bogotá and Lima.

Urban and metropolitan development in Latin America and the Caribbean has experienced structural problems linked to their relative capacity for labour absorption, social housing availability, urban growth management and planning, challenges for the metropolitan government and administration, and issues with advancing sustainable urban development. Likewise, the financial, technical and institutional capacities for managing large cities and metropolitan areas have been insufficient to cope with their explosive growth, driven by the migration of citizens often expelled from their places of origin and with limited training or few opportunities to deal with the challenges of their new habitat. Urban management has failed to ensure that the city expands on the most appropriate land or overcomes its structural limitations in terms of housing, infrastructure, facilities and services.

These changes have been described from various perspectives in the specialized literature (Aguilar & Escamilla 1999; De Mattos 2010; Duhau & Giglia 2016; Rodríguez 2019; Ward 2004). The main ones include: (1) concentrated decentralization; (2) large-scale suburban expansion coupled with spatial diffusion and fragmentation processes; (3) social diversification and increasing inequalities on the periphery; (4) housing renovation through the recovery of residential areas and therefore migratory attraction from central areas, sometimes in conjunction with gentrification or similar phenomena; (5) changes in the type and intensity of segregation, and (6) increased daily mobility.

Population growth in a city is not uniformly distributed over time, or within its urban structure. From an interurban perspective, the differential urbanization model, proposed by Hermanus Geyer and Thomas Kontuly in the 1990s, posits that the growth of cities in a country changes over time according to the size of urban agglomerations (Geyer & Kontuly 1993). During the first stage, the largest city is the one with the greatest population dynamism, because it is the point of arrival of internal migration from rural localities. A group of medium-sized cities subsequently vie with the primary city as internal migration destinations, encouraging the phase of polarization reversal. The authors propose a third stage, counter-urbanization, characterized by the fact that small cities are those with the highest population growth rates, due to migratory movements of rural and urban origin with these population centres as their destination. In this model, internal migration movements mainly explain the demographic dynamics of the city.

Intraurban demographic change has been studied through the metropolitan geography patterns of population and employment, generally characterized by an initial displacement of the population and subsequently of employment, from the central city to the periphery, giving rise to suburbanization processes (Gottdiener et al. 2016: 138– 41; Piña 2014), as well as the emergence of polycentric urban structures (Champion 2001; Rodríguez 2012). The stages of metropolitanism correspond to (1) urbanization or concentration, when the greatest demographic growth takes place in the central city; (2) suburbanization, when the periphery achieves the highest rate of population growth; (3) de-urbanization, when the central city loses population in absolute terms; and (4) repopulation, when the central city resumes the path of demographic growth (van den Berg et al. 1982; Suarez-Villa 1988). The suburban and peripheral areas of the city are mosaics of diversity in the socioeconomic conditions of the resident population, as well as opportunities for the location of economic activities.

Based on these precepts, this chapter studies the demographic dynamics of the Mexico City Metropolitan Area (ZMCM) in the period 1980– 2020, the patterns of territorial distribution of the population on the interurban or regional, and intraurban, or metropolitan scale, and the main sociodemographic features of the resident population.

Mexico City has had various types of legal status since Mexican independence was recognized by Spain in 1821. In a country that fluctuated between federal and centralist systems during the nineteenth century, this city, the seat of federal powers, had various forms of local political organization in which the town council, a legal and political concept inherited from the Spanish colonial system, existed until 1928 (Table 7.1). That year, the town council was superseded by the Federal District Department (DDF), a federal government agency responsible for administering the public goods and services of the city through a federal budget and a solid bureaucracy. The DDF was responsible for dealing with major sociodemographic and economic changes in the metropolis until 1997, when it was replaced by the Federal District Government, a public entity in which the popular vote for the election of its head was reinstated. This late twentieth-century reform would pave the way for the enactment of the Mexico City Constitution 20 years later in 2017. The Constitution is conceived of as the response to demands such as restoring residents’ rights and political representation and granting the political institutions of the city greater autonomy.

The political context of the city had already begun to change in the 1980s. The 1985 earthquake appears to have galvanized citizen protests about the group in power and the type of political organization in the city. This period saw the political-electoral emergence of leftist political forces, which would win the first mayoral elections in 1997. Before this election, the solution offered by institutions for citizens’ political expression was a narrow cul-de-sac while the level of politicization was steadily developing in terms of its scope and sophistication. The demand for housing and basic services, common in the uncontrolled urban growth period, was joined by the demand to participate in the political decision-making process. What lay behind this situation? The origins of its explanation date back nearly a century.

This chapter describes the institutional changes undertaken to restore the political rights of Mexico City residents and recover the autonomy lost following the abolition of the town council in 1928.

Economic change in a city is linked to its economic structure. Activities develop at different rates and some have exceptional dynamics that are the driving force behind urban growth. Demographic dynamics, productive structure, population relocation and economic activities shape the organization, density, transformation and modification of built space. Moreover, in a city, the material supports that house the population and both traditional and legendary, and recent and emerging activities, overlap and coexist (Hirsch 1977).

There are five factors that help explain the way economic growth occurs in urban areas and the difference between them: (1) transport costs; (2) internal economies of scale; (3) agglomeration economies; (4) market size; and (5) innovation and technological progress. These factors play a part, but the role of manufacturing and services in the economy, the size and nature of the informal sector, the rate of investment and the primacy of the ZMCM in the national urban system are also critical to Mexico City.

Transport costs are related to the geographic position of the city for the acquisition of inputs and distribution of products, as well as the existing infrastructure for the mobility of goods and people (Arbia et al. 2016). Internal economies of scale involve the reduction of average production costs as the volume of goods or services produced or offered increases. These are generated within the firm by a more efficient use of production factors, especially the labour factor (Koster & Kapitsinis 2016). At the same time, agglomeration economies are a syllogism of internal economies of scale and involve the reduction of the average production cost that occurs in any productive firm when a city increases the size of its population. They are generated outside the firm and are achieved by harnessing and using infrastructure and facilities in the city, and because of the spatial concentration of the population and human activities (Giuliano et al. 2019; van Oort 2016).

The size of markets for the goods and services is another element for understanding local economic growth and its rate of change. Market size includes demand within and outside the city. According to the export-base theory, the larger the city, the lower the economic dependence on the volume of goods and services demanded outside it (Thulin 2016; Tiebout 1962).