Urban reform, rebeldismo, and Mexico's University City, 1945-1958

This thesis contrasts the discursive formations of Mexico City's University City during the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s with the lived, social experience of its space by the university students. The University City was a utopian project, designed in an inverse relationship to the unplanned and chaotically expanding Mexico City; it was also intended to contain and isolate student dissent (rebeldismo), perceived as a threat to social order and political stability. Planners, architects, muralists, and government and university sponsors attempted to create a new cultural community, the comunidad universitaria, by projecting the social uses of the physical spaces and buildings of the modernist campus within the newly implemented legal framework of the Organic Law (1944). This thesis contributes to a growing multi-disciplinary literature concerned with how human behaviour and subjectivities are influenced by the urban milieu and, conversely, how these paradigms, in turn, give shape to the urban environments.