Once upon a time there was a city, let’s imagine a metropolis that stands out as one of the three most important in its country, surrounded by about 80 km of pavement, an incomplete but figurative circumference.
The brand of our cities, from the citizen’s perspective, could actually be the least representative when it comes to promoting it in any field and in some cases, like the city in this fiction, when it comes to highlighting its virtues, a speech that mentions the inhabitants as part of an inert inventory, saying that the city is great thanks to them without even knowing them, how much of what we hear in the speeches is just an idea that gravitates on an ideal with respect to the governed.
Painting the floor of a basketball court orange in schools and parks, and years later seeing the same courts covered in blue or green helps little in terms of the desirable harmony between the identity of a society and the “polis.” imagined in the minds of those who dictate radio and television sermons, as well as newspaper headlines.
Imagine living in this space, yes, imagine that for almost three years you see a transport system announced for your city and when it is released you see that your neighborhood or sector is not part of the great TV project, it is not even part of the photos posted in the eight columns.
Perhaps, at that moment you understand that you live in a piece of the city and not in “the city”; that you are not part of that great metropolis of conferences. That same day, when you step on the traditional urban truck heading to the university, you see the corners go by without OXXO, the streets without asphalt in your neighborhood and the neighboring neighborhoods. Indeed, you had the cardinal luck of living on the North East side, an approximate stretch than 21 kilometers without one of these convenience stores.
This progressive city does not seem so progressive if you live on the side where the Sun rises, what would happen if the images of the city only had clay pots in the background, or ornaments of the traditional pottery of this sector? Would it be the same progressive city that is being talked about?
Of course, when the city is presumed, those who run it have other paths in mind, that relative and lucid progress is only drawn in the fanciful tourist “visit”. This evidence of carelessness in the management of the city brand could be interpreted as an irremediable fact or an inevitable phenomenon, what today is known as “collaterality”.
Inequality, of course, has shaped us throughout history, we could even assume it as necessary, only this in no way intends to make it invisible.
What color is the city you live in and, above all, what color would you like it to be in the future? It would be pertinent that, at least, it was of a color that we do not see on television every day. The concern to refound our brand or our environment falters when the story is told from a providence sheltered under the comfortable shadow of four high and solid walls.