Legislation: urbanization and planning in Coahuila in the mid-20th century and its national context

Abstract

A history of urban legislation helps us understand the form, function, and structure of cities, as well as the relationship between regulations and planning instruments, public policies, environmental conditions, and the sociopolitical system over time. This process of "legislating for the city" intensified throughout the 20th century in Mexico, extending to the state and municipal regulations, directly impacting the physical and legal reality of cities.

This article aims to identify the laws related to urban development that were enacted during the second half of the 20th century in Coahuila, establishing the substantial changes that occurred in the legal understanding of the state's cities. It also seeks to recognize which concepts related to planning, management, regulation, management, protection, and urban development were incorporated into Coahuila legislation during the 20th century. A historiographical account of urban legislation in Mexico is provided as a framework, along with a brief analysis of the main urban development regulations from the New Spain period until the enactment of the Human Settlements Law in 1976. Finally, the contents of the 1941 Law on Subdivisions of Cities of the State of Coahuila, the 1954 Planning Law for the State of Coahuila, the 1959 Law for the Protection and Promotion of Construction and Urbanization, and the 1977 Urban Development Law of the State of Coahuila de Zaragoza are analyzed and compared.

This work falls within the scope of urban history, a relatively new branch of history dedicated to analyzing and explaining the transformation processes of cities, in this case specifically from a legal perspective. For the purposes of this work, the specific content of the various laws was analyzed, and a thorough newspaper review was conducted. From a methodological point of view, for the preparation of this work, the specific content of the various laws was analyzed, and an exhaustive newspaper review was carried out. Likewise, historical methods were applied, such as the identification of archival documents (primary sources), found in the Archive of the Judicial Branch of the State of Coahuila and the General Archive of the State of Coahuila through institutional catalogs. The newspaper review comes from the Historical Archive and Digital Newspaper Library of the regional newspaper El Siglo de Torreón, whose funds cover the period from 1922 to 2000, and dozens of historical newspaper articles related to urban laws and regulations were identified. In addition, a historiographical analysis of urban legislation in Mexico was carried out, mainly to identify the ways in which the laws that regulate the city have been historicized.