Alternative Mexico is an innovative heritage project, aiming to promote the preservation of Mexico City’s heritage and its metropolitan area, in collaboration with the public, by using a mobile application (App), a website, and social media.

WHY NOW?
The continuous expansion of Mexico’s infrastructure capacity to increase its GDP, and to provide citizens with goods and services, has created new spaces promoting different ways of life that have been appropriated with time and are now part of her heritage. An ‘Alternative Mexico’ claims the preservation of an urban-based heritage, resulting from the need for economic and development growth. This type of heritage opposes the national and international institutional definitions of cultural patrimony, preserving resources based on monumentality, aesthetic values, and relevance to Mexico’s history. New heritage resources have no rights to be legally protected, as institutional scholarship disregards alternative views of what heritage means to society. Mexico City is a thriving modern and cosmopolitan city, following international sustainable green policies, but it comes with a price. Conflict and violent social expressions against infrastructure building to provide goods and services to its citizens, continuously, challenge the ideals of a national heritage and management process. It is time to address their discontent.

BRIEF
How to connect new heritage values to the national definition of cultural patrimony?

OUR SOLUTION
The design of an appealing, handy, and easy to use mobile application for iOS and Android platforms, supported by the Research and Technological Innovation Projects Program (PAPIIT IT400215, IT400618, IT400520) of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

WHAT MAKES US DIFFERENT?
What makes us different is how we build the contents of this project: by consolidating a strategic value research-chain with Mexico’s society. Contents result from city life.  Participants are aware of the cultural and social capital in their neighborhood. The yielded information through interviews, research and direct collaboration creates a repository of social memory, showing the value of our heritage extends now beyond monumentality and aesthetics. Alternative Mexico demonstrates its heritage has outstanding value to the nation’s history, as it is essential to promote peace and sustainability.