Mexico-City, sustainability and culture: A plea for hybrid sustainabilities for a baroque and labyrinthine city

•This article shows the interrelationship between sustainability and cultural plans.•The article analyses the links between sustainable policies and gentrification.•Mainstream sustainaility plans disregard Latin America's history and modernity.•The article makes a plea for the design of a concept of hybrid sustainability.•Hybrid sustainability should reflect Latin American labyrinthine modernity.

This article focuses on Mexico City's sustainability plans and politics, as well as some related art projects and practices. Where Mexico City was declared the most polluted city of the world in 1992, it is now known for its very pro-active environmental politics and related initiatives. At the same time the city is gaining attention as a cultural city and hosts a growing creative class. The article shows how these two, sustainability and the cultural/creative, are interrelated in various ways. In one way the city's sustainable policies reinforced the gentrification process of the city's historic center. In another way the cultural elites respond to the city's activities in sustainability in terms of an increased interest in eco-artistic projects. In a third way the article shows how the introduction of the Western concept of sustainability is problematic in a Latin American cultural context. It runs the risk of - again - reinforcing the existing cleavage between well-educated Western oriented elites on the one hand and the mestizo masses and indigenous people on the other hand. Moreover it disregards the fact that Latin America has a fundamentally different kind of modernity and culture that can be labeled as labyrinthine, baroque or hybrid. The Western concept of sustainability most probably will not function within such a culture, a reason why the article makes a plea for the design of a concept of hybrid sustainability (or sustainabilities) that match the characteristics of the Latin American reality in general and the reality of Mexico City in particular.