Read the flyers

By Edmée Pardo

I dislike the full-color printed flyers that pile up in the mailbox to sell, more often than not, items that are of no interest to me. But there's something about the colorfulness that I end up flipping through them, learning about that amazing offer that's not for me. Now, those flyers also arrive by message to the cell phone, to the web browsing pages, halfway through a youtube video, the worst ones are the ones that are forwarded to the chats with the best offer of a water filter or a course. Most of them are advertisements, but some, the fewest, are valuable information. How to distinguish them? If I knew right here I would tell you. I think one clue is the sobriety of colors. That's why I stopped at a leaflet that arrived in the mailbox of the building where I live advertising a real estate project. It was not about the sale of apartments or offices that are going to be built there, but about the informative meetings about what will happen on the corner of my house in the next 7 years. I don't know if they are just to warn us or to cause panic so that we run for our lives. This is the first time I have come across such a process and when the works are of enormous magnitude, 150,000 square meters in this case, part of the process includes neighborhood consultation. 

  It is a multi-purpose construction, shopping mall with movie theaters, offices, hotel and apartments for housing. The size of a city block, eleven stories down and 16 stories up. A project that during the seven years of construction will bring 7,500 workers a day to my corner. Let's not talk about the traffic because they also talk about changing the direction of the streets, the street vending it will generate, and how unsafe the houses near large constructions will become. And the water? The supply and the water table. We are in a tremendous water shortage, at zero hours of the day there is no water in Mexico City, the drainage is overflowing and in the rainy season the sewers are sources of sewage. How can they authorize these projects? Because it is already authorized, the only authority that can stop it is the Secretary of the Environment of Mexico City.