Mexico City

By Martha Schteingart, Jaime Sobrino and Vicente Ugalde

Mexico City is the second largest city on the American continent, the most populous Spanish-speaking city in the world and the richest city, in terms of GFP, in Latin America. The authors explore the political structures, demography, economy, social issues and public administration that make this megacity distinctive.

Unique and vibrant, Mexico City has been run since the 1990s by left-wing parties with more progressive social and egalitarian concerns about urban problems, and new proposals for different types of state participation. Political changes at the city level has led to changes and fresh approaches in some aspects of social life, including the creation of important local, grass-roots institutions. The book offers quantitative and qualitative assessments of the spatial structure of the city and its distribution of poverty and poor economic outcomes, alongide transportation provision, housing. Deindustrialization and the growth of the service sector alongside an expanding informal economy are also shown to be important dynamics in the economic restructuring of the city.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Agenda Publishing
• Release date: Feb 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781788214605

Martha Schteingart

Martha Schteingart is a professor-researcher at the Centre for Demographic, Urban and Environmental Studies, CEDUA, El Colegio de Mexico, Mexico City.

Book preview

Mexico City

Megacities

Series Editor: H. V. Savitch

As drivers of economic growth, demographic change and consumption hyper-conurbations offer unique opportunities to their hinterlands and national economies, as well as huge challenges of governance, planning and provisioning. Each book in this series examines the political and economic development of a specific megacity and explores how and why they have evolved and how policy decisions, couched in geopolitics, have shaped their outcomes. The series covers both paradigmatic mature megacities of the developed world, as well as the fast-growing emerging megacities of South and East Asia, and Latin America.

Published

London

Mike Raco and Frances Brill

Mexico City

Martha Schteingart, Jaime Sobrino and Vicente Ugalde

New York

Jill S. Gross and H. V. Savitch

Paris

Christian Lefèvre

Mexico City

Martha Schteingart, Jaime Sobrino and Vicente Ugalde

© Martha Schteingart, Jaime Sobrino and Vicente Ugalde 2023

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

No reproduction without permission.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2023 by Agenda Publishing

Agenda Publishing Limited

The Core

Bath Lane

Newcastle Helix

Newcastle upon Tyne

NE4 5TF

www.agendapub.com

ISBN 978-1-78821-457-5

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

Printed and bound in the UK by TJ Books

Contents

Acronyms

Introduction: Mexico City as a Latin American megacity

1Describing demographic change

2Economic restructuring under globalization

3Links between housing, mobility and transport

4Territorial inequalities and segregation

5Political change and the provision of public services

6Environmental issues and natural risks

7The city in search of an institutional solution

Conclusion: challenges and life opportunities in a megacity

References

Index

Acronyms

INTRODUCTION

Mexico City as a Latin American megacity

Urbanization and megacities

Major cities in Latin America and the Caribbean have undergone profound changes since the end of the past century. From the postwar period to the 1980s, the largest metropolitan agglomerations in the region led the economic expansion of their respective countries, expanding and enhancing their productive capacities. These metropolitan areas achieved significant social, economic, political and urban progress, concentrating large educational and health facilities, and becoming the main destination for internal migration flows. Latin America became one of the most urbanized regions in the world, second only to North America. By 2020 this subcontinent was home to six megacities with more than ten million residents each: São Paulo, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Bogotá and Lima.

Urban and metropolitan development in Latin America and the Caribbean has experienced structural problems linked to their relative capacity for labour absorption, social housing availability, urban growth management and planning, challenges for the metropolitan government and administration, and issues with advancing sustainable urban development. Likewise, the financial, technical and institutional capacities for managing large cities and metropolitan areas have been insufficient to cope with their explosive growth, driven by the migration of citizens often expelled from their places of origin and with limited training or few opportunities to deal with the challenges of their new habitat. Urban management has failed to ensure that the city expands on the most appropriate land or overcomes its structural limitations in terms of housing, infrastructure, facilities and services.

These changes have been described from various perspectives in the specialized literature (Aguilar & Escamilla 1999; De Mattos 2010; Duhau & Giglia 2016; Rodríguez 2019; Ward 2004). The main ones include: (1) concentrated decentralization; (2) large-scale suburban expansion coupled with spatial diffusion and fragmentation processes; (3) social diversification and increasing inequalities on the periphery; (4) housing renovation through the recovery of residential areas and therefore migratory attraction from central areas, sometimes in conjunction with gentrification or similar phenomena; (5) changes in the type and intensity of segregation, and (6) increased daily mobility.

Cities are not self-sufficient, meaning that they require functional links and interdependence with other localities. Economic interrelationships between cities are more intense at the capitalist stage of globalization, which has been analysed under the concept of the world network of metropolis (Sassen 2000). Interdependencies are the result of the new international division of labour, technological development, the computer age, and emerging forms of daily mobility of the population, objects and ideas. Within Mexico, these manifestations have given rise to urban or metropolitan regions, defined as spaces with a high concentration of population, activities and daily flows. Some of these urban or metropolitan regions are home to more than 50 million people, such as the Pearl River Delta in southern China (United Nations Human Settlement Programme 2008). In Latin America, various metropolitan regions have been formed, where migratory movements and daily mobility flows take place between the largest city and its regional ring of metropolises.

Urban and metropolitan development in Mexico

Mexico is a predominantly metropolitan country in that more than half its population resides in this type of urban agglomeration. A metropolitan area is a city encompassing two or more political-administrative units. Metropolization began in Mexico in the 1940s, and by 1980 26 metropolitan areas existed (Negrete & Salazar 1986). By 2010, an inter-institutional group, responsible for defining the country’s metropolitan areas during this century, had identified 59 such agglomerations (SEDESOL, CONAPO & INEGI 2012).

Despite the demographic, economic, social and political importance of metropolitan areas in Mexico, progress has yet to be made in the formation of metropolitan governments. The country’s legal framework only establishes the possibility of coordination between local governments as a mechanism for metropolitan government and administration. Experience has shown that coordination between local governments is not always achieved. Accordingly, one of the main challenges of the present and the immediate future is to create and consolidate mechanisms to ensure the organization and growth of metropolitan governance (Ugalde 2007).

Mexico City is the capital of a developing country that in 2010 commemorated the bicentennial of the start of its independence struggle. This city, originally called Tenochtitlan, was founded in 1325. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the area where Mexico City is today was part of the Aztec empire, the hegemonic culture of Mesoamerica at the time. The conquest of Tenochtitlan was achieved through the union of a handful of indigenous groups, led by a small Spanish army that had no connection with this history (Escalante 2008: 109). During the colonial era of New Spain, from 1521 to 1810, the central region continued to be the territory with the highest demographic and economic concentration, because the Spaniards adopted Mexico-Tenochtitlan as the capital of the viceroyalty.

In the twentieth century, the population of Mexico City grew from 345,000 in 1900 to approximately 20 million in 2000, and by 2020 it had risen to nearly 22 million. This spectacular growth occurred mainly between 1940 and 1980, and can be attributed to a national economic growth model based on the promotion of the manufacturing industry and protection from the international market: an import-substitution industrialization. The economic model of import substitution and protection from foreign competition entailed the intense concentration of infrastructure, facilities and productive capital in Mexico City. By 1980, it produced 44 per cent of the country’s manufactured goods, which served the domestic market, with a small portion being destined for export.

The 1980s marked a watershed in the evolution of Mexico. From a demographic point of view, the country began the last phase of the demographic transition model, characterized by a decline in total fertility rates. This decrease resulted from the greater participation of women in the labour market, as well as the family planning programmes introduced in the mid-1970s. Between 1980 and 2000, the average annual growth rate of the total population was 1.9 per cent, compared with 3 per cent from 1960 to 1980. The demographic transition was consolidated in the period 2000–20 when the average annual growth rate was 1.3 per cent. The economic sphere saw the exhaustion of the import-substitution model and a profound economic crisis due to the imbalance of macroeconomic variables and external indebtedness. Against this backdrop, the country swiftly entered a stage of globalization and, in terms of population mobility, the migratory flow to the United States accelerated, while internal migration slowed down.

From 1980 onwards, the country and the Mexico City Metropolitan Area underwent significant changes. The crisis in public finances, the exhaustion of the import-substitution model and the wave of globalization led the Mexican State to change the economic model to trade liberalization, which failed to prevent the emergence of further economic problems and drew strong criticism from certain social sectors, politicians and intellectuals. Mexico City, for its part, faced problems of diseconomies due to its size, having to adapt to the conditions of the new international division of labour, its low levels of productivity and the adoption of innovations due to the protectionist economic model previously in place. It also experienced social problems because of the lack of facilities to meet the demands of the population, and the housing deficit that was exacerbated by the 1985 earthquakes. Two processes resulted from these changes: (1) the shift from being a city with the greatest net attraction of internal migration flows to one with the greatest net out-migration balance, and (2) the sectoral restructuring of its economic activity.

During the last two decades of the twentieth century and the first two of the twenty-first century, the megacity saw net out-migration of −3.8 million residents, who moved to cities in the regional ring, the rest of the country and the United States. At the same time, certain changes were linked to deindustrialization. In 1980, the manufacturing industry required 911,000 people, with 42 per cent of national employees participating in this sector, whereas by 2018, this figure had declined to 846,000, accounting for just 13 per cent of the total number of employed persons nationwide. There was an employment shift to the services. In 1980, 404,000 people, accounting for 38 per cent of the national total, were engaged in this sector, whereas by 2018, this figure had increased to 2.8 million, equivalent to 34 per cent of the total workforce.

Mexico comprises 32 major administrative divisions, known as federal entities, or states, and 2,469 minor administrative divisions, called alcaldías or municipalities. The built-up area of the Mexico City Metropolitan Area (ZMCM) consists of land from 76 minor administrative divisions belonging to three major administrative divisions: Mexico City, Mexico State and Hidalgo (Map 0.1). Mexico’s legal framework grants sovereignty and assets to the states and municipalities, which together comprise a federal republic.

Map 0.1 Mexico City Metropolitan Area

Urban expansion between 2000 and 2020 differed significantly by territorial area. The urbanized area of the central city and the rest of the municipalities in Mexico City remained unchanged during those 20 years. In the central city, this can be explained by the fact that since 2000, land use in four of its alcaldías had been solely urban. As for the rest of the alcaldías in Mexico City, slight growth was observed in those located in the west and south, particularly the alcaldía of Tlalpan, whereas others experienced a decline in size, due to adjustments in the delimitation of the urbanized area.

The urbanized area of municipalities on the inner periphery increased from 836 to 936 km² between 2000 and 2020, equivalent to 12 per cent relative growth. The municipalities with the most dynamic physical growth to the northwest and east were both areas that reported radial physical expansion along two highways linking the ZMCM to the northern portions of the national territory and the eastern seaboard. For their part, municipalities on the outer periphery experienced the highest growth in urban area, from 484 to 634 km², a relative increase of 31 per cent. The most significant growth in these municipalities on the outer periphery occurred in the northwest and northeast, with urban development adjacent to the preceding area.

Land is the basis for the built environment and the starting point for understanding the way space is organized in its different uses within cities. A distinctive feature of Mexico is that it has both privately and communally owned land. From pre-Hispanic times, through to the colonial era and subsequent stages of Mexican history, private and collective ownership of land have coexisted, with the participation of various social groups, which has sometimes led to violent conflicts. The collective form of land ownership and rural exploitation in the pre-colonial era was known as the calpulli, an organizational unit below the city-state of the Aztecs. During the colonial era, collective property comprised the ejidos of the towns and communal lands granted to indigenous people by the Spanish Crown.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, an agrarian reform was undertaken that recognized the ancestral rights of collective ownership of the land, in addition to imposing restrictions on its commercialization. The ejido system granted peasants the usufruct obtained from production, but sale of the land was prohibited. Ejido land could only be used for urban purposes through expropriation, a legal instrument implemented when public utility clearly exceeded the social utility of the ejido.

At times, the metropolitan growth of Mexico City that occurred on land that was not privately owned facilitated the expansion of infrastructure for urban development and the creation of settlements for low-income sectors. However, this did not prevent urban speculation, the need for illegal access to land by lower-income sectors, or the exacerbation of urban struggles at certain times. The 1990s saw changes in the legal framework of land ownership, which had repercussions on the regularization of land ownership in settlements occupied by low-income families, as well as the possibility of selling ejido land.

The ZMCM faces enormous challenges as regards its government and administration, since it encompasses 76 smaller political-administrative units belonging to three different states. Although a metropolitan government has not been created, there have been experiences of coordination between local governments to address sectoral aspects. Of all the commissions created, the metropolitan environmental commission has undoubtedly been the most successful in terms of the organization and implementation of mechanisms for regulating air pollution.

At the same time, the government of Mexico City, the capital of the country, has differed from that of other states in the country. Mexico City lost its democratically elected mayor in 1928, after which it was governed by a mayor appointed by the president of the republic. At the end of the twentieth century there was a political reform to allow for the election of the head of government of Mexico City. As a result of this constitutional change, the first head of government was elected in 1997. Since then, leftist parties have won elections for the head of government of Mexico City. Andres Manuel López Obrador won the elections for head of government of Mexico City for the period 2000–06 with the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD). In 2018 he ran for the third time, winning the presidential elections for the period 2018–24 with the National Renovation Movement (MORENA), partly the result of a breakaway from and an attempt to overhaul the PRD, which also won the central government of Mexico City in 2018.

When considering the environmental aspects of the ZMCM, it is important to note that it is situated in the central portion of the country, within the Central Region of Mexico, at an average altitude of 2,240 m above sea level. It is one of the most populated cities on earth, as well as one of the highest. Its location poses formidable challenges for the provision of drinking water services, wastewater disposal and treatment, the final disposal of over 20,000 tons of solid waste and the mobility of over three million motor vehicles a day. The challenges of this megacity are even more daunting when one recalls that the environmental impact of this enormous concentration of people and activities is cumulative and sometimes irreversible. It not only affects the atmosphere, soil and water currents of the basin of the Valley of Mexico, but in some cases, other parts of the country. The consequences of this activity are not restricted to the consumption of natural resources and their degradation but are also reflected in the health of the population. This problem is especially worrying for future generations in this part of the country, given the limited results of government efforts to date.

The geographical position of the ZMCM not only poses significant challenges as regards environmental matters and its sustainable development, but also entails risks and vulnerability to natural phenomena, especially earthquakes. Natural disaster management in Mexico has focused on the reconstruction and/or restoration of the federal and state infrastructure. At the same time, natural disaster prevention measures have yet to be consolidated in the public agenda or in people’s habits. Although there is a consensus that public policies and related resources should focus on prevention rather than reconstruction, in practice, the opposite has been true. Moreover, no significant progress has been made in the creation, dissemination or adoption of a culture of prevention (Ruiz-Rivera & Lucatello 2017).

The most recent major earthquakes took place in Mexico in September 2017. The first, which occurred on 7 September, with an epicentre on the southern coasts and an intensity of 8.2 magnitude on the Richter scale, mainly affected areas in the southeast. The second took place on 19 September, with an intensity of 7.1 magnitude and an epicentre on the border between the states of Morelos and Puebla, in the Central Region of Mexico. The most severely affected states were Mexico City, Guerrero, Hidalgo, Mexico, Morelos, Puebla, and Tlaxcala. These earthquakes have been the most significant adverse events the Mexican State has faced to date due to the magnitude of the damage registered and the size of the area affected. Changes in the way they were tackled underlined the strengths and challenges of the country in coping with natural disasters. Since reconstruction is not a short-term activity, destructive natural phenomena must be dealt with using both a short- and medium-term perspective.

This book

The seven chapters in the book address demographic, economic, social, environmental and political issues. They provide an overview of the characteristics and recent evolution of this megacity, as well as the challenges it faces in a middle-income country, and its position in the global network of metropolises. The analysis includes theoretical aspects that have guided research on the topics discussed, as well as comparisons with other large cities in Latin America and the Caribbean. The comparisons reveal the changes common to the region and the specificities of metropolitan development in this megacity. The analysis includes the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on various aspects of metropolitan life, such as mobility, the labour market, mortality, access to public services and citizen participation.

Chapter 1 analyses fertility, mortality, migration and mobility for the period 1980–2020 to show their influence on the demographic transition and population growth and their impact on the sex and age of the population structure. It also explores changes in the territorial distribution of