Areas of Street Markets: Spatial Fragmentation in Mexico City at the beginning of the XXth Century

Abstract

In the first decades of the XXth century, several areas in Mexico City consolidated an important commercial activity in the streets. In the next pages, I reconstruct the principal zones of street trading by reviewing the licenses granted by the local administration to realize this type of subsistence activities. The purpose is also to recover the concept of "rumbo" to explain the urban fragmentation in this period and demonstrate how, in some popular zones of the city, there were yet no clear distinctions between public spaces and private spaces. Besides, this paper highlights the fragmented perception of the urban space, parallel to the expansion of the constructed area in the Mexican capital.