mexico city
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Mexico City2 0. 4 5 M L N P E O P L E . 1 4 8 5 0 H A
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0 2,5 5 10 Administrative City Border City Center Area Territory marked on tourist city maps Urbanized Area of the City
Prologue
I will briefly demonstrate the currents and crosscurrents that channel Mex-ico City’s urban transformation at the time of writing. The focus will be based on territories of the city that can be described as its periphery: the material and social geographies that are subject to, in conflict with, or left in oblivion, by ‘centrality and its movements.’ Furthermore, I will describe the tendencies of urban change by framing them as competing concepts that are both specific to Mexico City and, at the same time, allow us to draw comparisons to urban agglomerations elsewhere. Developing these concepts, I propose bringing the geographical, sociological and anthropological per-spectives together in order to arrive at a more complete, yet certainly also more complex map of the city’s transformation. This is not to gloss over problematic issues such as waste disposal, water supply, traffic, air qual-ity, social marginalization and displacement, or environmental risks, but to concentrate on the underlying forces that bring about their materialization in urban social space. Taken together, the tendencies for change in Mexico City can be described as the city-region’s comprehensive peripherization, a process that leads to the formation of an essentially different type of city, in which the periphery is increasingly substituting the city as the dominant everyday experience and common denominator of the urban imagination.
Tendencies of Change
The city, according to David Harvey, has to be regarded as process rather than as thing. With this in mind, it becomes apparent that when describing a city, it can only be the description of urban change. Yet this change is not a single cut following any clear narrative. On the contrary, it is an array of processes, pointing in multiple directions, while being entangled on multi-ple scales. The city, then, is a kaleidoscope of tendencies of urbanization, as well as the site of their conflict; and Mexico City, surely, takes both perspec-tives. It is no exception, but also a fine example. On the frontier of both citi-fication and urbanization, that is, in the 'peri-urban continuum’ (where the urban is central in the process of becoming both in material and in cultural terms), is where the future of Mexico City is currently under dispute.
The Peripherization of Mexico City
Christian von Wissel
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Rather than ‘a city’, the 21st century Mexico City is an urban agglomera-tion extending over some 1,600 square kilometers of continuously built-up land covering extensive – and continuously expanding – grounds consist-ing of five former lakes as well as of a small island - where the original city happens to have been founded by the Mexicas/Aztecs and re-founded by the Spaniards in the 14th and 16th centuries. Today this urban region spreads over three federal entities: the Federal District – the administrative entity that contained the entire city called Mexico until its ‘explosion’ mainly be-tween 1950 and 1980 – as well as the two federal states, the State of Mexico and Hidalgo. Nevertheless, Mexico City is also contained within one single, although certainly over-spilling valley, which is why it is denominated as the Metropolitan Area of the Valley of Mexico (ZMVM). This urban/urban-izing valley is what we refer to when we talk about Mexico City being a city of twenty million inhabitants.
Incomprehensibilization. The first tendency of change describes the cultural implications that emerge in a city in the process of taking over more and more of any territory and \ to hold on to it. Metropolitan and megalopolitan Mexico City forces its in-habitants to deal with the increasing incomprehensibility of their enviro-ment. The formula goes something like this: proximity squared by distance times diversity squared by its simultaneity, both of these divided by every-day life. Hence, coming to terms with the sum of such an 'urban unfathom-able' has become an essential aspect of life in Mexico City. Looking at the population numbers and ethnic and cultural diversity of the Central Amer-ican subcontinent, the anthropologist Nestor García Canclini refers to the ZMVM as a “city-continent” in order to describe the “heterogeneous multi-tude of zones, neighbourhoods, journeys and experiences offered by the ur-ban ensemble.”
Metropolitanization. With regard to these multiple zones and journeys, the second tendency of change becomes apparent on the geographical level of urban/urbaniz-ing affairs in the valley: the physically and demographic expansion of the city into the region. Over the past decades, the four inner city boroughs have lost up to 50% of their population, while municipalities such as Ciu-dad Nezahualcóyotl, Ecatepec, Tecámac and Ixtapaluca, located in the State of Mexico and Hidalgo, have accumulated the highest population figures and growth rates of the region. This way, the ZMVM has seen the transfer-ence of its population density from the center to the periphery. According to the last census (2005), ‘only’ nine million inhabitants lived in the Feder-al District while the remaining eleven million lived in the neighboring two states. This shift from city to region has been addressed as Mexico City’s ‘metropolitanization,’ a process in which the main city is intensifying its
functional influence over its equally expanding hinterland, together with setting off peripheral urban growth, as the result from “centrifugal flows from the metropolitan core”.
Diffusion.Yet this is not the whole picture unfolding on the ground of the ZMVM’s peri-urban continuum. Increasingly, urban restructuring also shows the pattern of ‘region-based’ as opposed to ‘city-based’ urbanization. This ten-dency to expansion is challenging the clear-cut direction of development from inside to outside. As a consequence, it gives rise to the formation of what has been called the ‘diffuse city,’ an urban system now increasingly blurring the boundaries between city and hinterland, centre and periphery, not only in territorial and functional terms, but equally in terms of our un-derstanding of the city as such. The land-use pattern of this emerging re-gional city of the valley of Mexico is increasingly characterized by a heter-ogeneous mix of urban, suburban, peri-urban and rural conditions where industrial and agricultural territories are tied into the urban/urbanizing composition, much as military zones, wastelands, and ecological reserves.
Sub- and Counter-Centralization
Despite, or rather, because of the dynamics of diffusion, social geogra-pher Adrian Aguilar considers this new regional city to be developing new forms of centrality in their own right. In the current transformations of the ZMVM, he identifies tendencies also of re-, sub-, and counter-concentra-tion: tendencies, which produce and reproduce centers and peripheries of various scales and scopes. In accordance with centrifugal dispersion, this sub-centralization takes the form of “polycentric islands” and “linear devel-opments of higher densities.” These morphological re-concentrations of the urban landscape also become apparent in economic and cultural terms: ei-ther in the proliferation of commercial nodes, ‘centers’ more like in ‘shop-ping centre’ than in ‘civic centre’ – although this second category does also persist in historic villages that are drawn into the urban system – or in form of sub- and counter-cultural sites of resistance, as in the case of Valle de Chalco, for example, a municipality located in the far southeast of the valley.
Fragmentation. The diffuse regional city, therefore, is not a process leading to entropy, black and white fading out into egalitarian grey. Rather, its dynamic of in-creasing differentiation of centre-periphery relations and the simultaneous-ness of the contradictions they entail is that of a scattering, not annihila-tion, of urban functions, elements, groups and forms - their concerns and conflicts - and of the concepts by which to address them. The diffuse city is blurring conventional distinctions between what ‘the city’ is and what it is not, yet it never ceases to be a city of very tangible divides, with competing socio-physical fragments increasingly differentiated by territorial disinte-gration, multi-directional expansion of its parts and the proliferation of so-cial borders.
Multi-directionality. The first of these (sub)tendencies inherent in fragmentation is the defi-ciency of shared urban visions and inappropriate governance. The ZMVM is composed of 76 boroughs and municipalities located in three federal
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entities. Together with the country’s central powers, which are also locat-ed in the city, all these levels of government do not only act as agents of its change, but change it in multiple directions. “Hence, legislation, planning and urban taxation (tax on property) barely have any common ground,” the geographer Alfonso Iracheta affirms. The resulting competition in directing the processes of urbanization between the region’s parts leads to the situa-tion that the policies of one body are often made redundant by one another. Examples of this abound on all scales. We find them in the incomplete in-stallation of street lighting in a neighborhood caught up in the quarrels be-tween two municipalities (where one municipality installs the street lamps while the other declines to connect them to the electricity grid); we find them in competing and often contradictory legislation in regard to urban development and, for example, in the environmental management of the valley. We find another example even in the birth of a ‘political valley,’ the so-called ‘Valley Cautitlan-Texcoco’ - located inside the Valley of Mexico — yet aiming at implementing partial policies of urban planning in those ter-ritories of the urban region that belong solely to the jurisdiction of the State of Mexico.
Segregation. Socio-spatial segregation is the second of these (sub)tendencies of change that come with the multiple divisions and directions in a fragmented city and society. Polarized in overall terms by a wealthier western and a poor-er eastern part, the clear-cut distribution of Mexico City’s population gives way to a much more heterogeneous picture at the scale of the urban region’s uncountable neighborhoods. Where cities vanish, gated communities and privatized streets emerge. As a result, urban life is increasingly taking place behind fences and walls and under the surveillance of security guards and CCTV.
Financialisation.Observing the commercial developers in their production of urbanization, we can identify another key tendency of change playing out in Mexico City. In contrast to the dominant informal and self-built housing production of former decades – making up some 40% of all the city’s built-up land – this production mode is now being challenged by a new type of urban develop-ment: that of formal mass-produced row houses, which by 2005, reached numbers equal to those of the production of self-built housing, both deliver-ing about 100,000 units per year. This new mode of urbanization is the re-sult of the increased financialization of Mexico City’s urban economy and landscape. By entering the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, and having successfully deregulated communal farmland two years earlier, large swathes of land in the Mexican ejido system of shared land ownership became the object of desire of international finance in search of capital surplus production. The noteworthy shift here lies not in the urban-ization of these lands per se – they have been squatted or illegally sold and
subdivided for informal developments before, too – but in the shift in the goals of urbanization.
Residualization. With the rise of the gated community, as the product of segregation and commercial ‘island urbanism,’ a new type of micro space has also emerged between more or less fortified enclaves. I suggest addressing these so-cial-physical urbanization gaps by using the term ‘border spaces’ (espaci-os limítrofes) to mark the social distinction between groups by the physi-cal distance between their territories. In their material appearance, they are best described as wastelands, as spatial leftovers or, simply, as residual space. In their social function, however, they are very diverse sites, active or passive, of low or high intensive conflict as well as spaces of possibility and openness for new and contesting ways of navigating the city. Border spaces abound in the segregated city, not least because of two out of several “unde-sirable” characteristics of diffuse urbanization, as Adrian Aguilar has la-mented: “poor land-use patterns and growing vacuums of law.”
Exceptionalization. This growing vacuum of law that Aguilar identifies calls for our alertness. On the one hand, it produces spaces where possibilities grow. This space is the wide field of informality, yet certainly not of illegality. It presents itself as a realm of opportunities, but one that comes at high cost. Rather than a vacuum of law, this framework for action is based on a ‘legal system of ex-ception’ in which subjects are held in extralegal relations of clientelism and corruption; a replacement for a formal rule of law. On the other hand, the vacuum of law also produces 'proper' spaces of illegality: spaces where in-stead of formal rule, criminal rule becomes the law. At times where trust in authorities, especially in the police, is reduced to zero and criminal activity is high (mainly burglary, drug dealing and kidnapping of which the latter two are related to the activities of several of the Mexican mafia cartels), so-ciety is atomized and people are left alone and vulnerable.
Responsibilization. Hence, where formal policies do not reach, whether on purpose or not, or where their powers to hold people in relations that make them governable are challenged, we encounter highly flexible and mobile ways by which in-habitants tie their lives to the movements of their city by taking responsibil-ity for themselves. Informality, thus, does not appear as resistance, creativ-ity or even the freedom of action of free citizens as often considered but as the responsibilization of subjects that have been left alone by the state.
Democratization. A countercurrent to the exceptionalization of legal and citizenship relations and the responsibilization of subjects is the next change tendency we can identify having its effect on the central Mexican valley. This is the ongo-ing process of democratization: very slowly indeed, and hindered again and again by serious drawbacks but nevertheless opening up new spaces of par-ticipation throughout the region. We can find examples on all scales: in the only-recently acquired sovereignty of the municipality of Tecamac over its local development plan, as well as in the creation of a number of cultural and arts-and-crafts centers, called ‘FAROs’ (factories of arts and crafts, or
“lighthouses”) that allow young people to explore and claim their rights of citizenship.
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Consolidation. The last tendency I would like to highlight is the process of metropolitan in-tegration. The dispersion of people and functions, inevitably, comes paired with the proliferation of ties, and issues, that hold and bring them togeth-er. Movement and its materialization proffer an example of the relation be-tween core and periphery. At the Indios Verdes interchange, for example, one can witness how a multitude of intercity, intra-city and inner city buses, coaches and minivans integrate with different transport networks, organ-izing passenger flows across the Federal District-hinterland border; against all political obstacles faced. At the same time, at the Buenavista train sta-tion one can see how the opening of a first suburban train line in 2008 has reduced travel times from centre to fringe from about one and a half hours by bus to 25 minutes by train. A disconnected system in the State of Mex-ico, these infrastructure projects nevertheless mark the path towards the consolidation of the valley as a dispersing, yet slowly integrating urban agglomeration.
Compact Peripherization. Drawing conclusions from the multiple and contradictory tendencies of ur-ban change in the valley of Mexico outlined above is, of course, an impos-sible task. The city as process composed of numerous processes resists any attempt of containing it on ground or paper. Notwithstanding, we can lo-cate this array of currents and crosscurrents in lived and shared space and describe the overarching experience they produce in those who cause and/or are caught up in their dynamics. To describe this experience, the writer Juan Villoro refers to his hometown ‘simply’ as being a case of “horizontal deception,” where neither the name ‘Mexico’ nor the term ‘city’ are actual-ly appropriate, because what they refer to is not only many cities, but each disintegrating within the contours of the other. The decisive result of such ‘fraud’ is the ‘dizziness’ it produces, by means of its many and paradoxical movements of urbanization. Adapting Canclini’s notion of the unfathomable to the topographic condition of the valley, we can therefore argue that Mex-ico City is a continent in a nutshell. Adapting Villoro’s notion of horizontal deception, we can argue that the regional city of Mexico is a process of com-pact peripherization.
Neza York: From Slum to Slim Nezahualcoyotl, Mexico City
Felix Madrazo
Once the concept of periphery is considered obsolete, it is possible to recy-cle it, to convert the preposition ‘around’ into a theoretical proposition that gives a number of new twists to the concept and explores its possibilities.
Not many informal or irregular settlements get out of their dead-end cy-cle, let alone become successful, which is why it is imperative to look more closely at the sequence of events that turned the peripheral slum and no-go area of Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl (in short, Neza) in the periphery of Mexico City into a highly urban territory that nowadays attracts investors and in-habitants of all types. How do transformations occur when cities mutate from emergency settle-ments into consolidated urban cores? The notion of the center vs periph-ery in cities became problematic at the point where cities were unable to deal with sudden contradictions. When normal peripheral conditions began to appear in the city center, with vacant plots and the presence of the poor, there was an uncertain demographic future. The outskirts of the city sud-denly turned into urban nodes. Can we try and understand this from a dif-ferent perspective? The idea of ‘developing countries’ helped single out cer-tain countries that were beyond ‘second’ and ‘third’ world categories. The term ‘tiger economy’ was used for countries like South Korea, helped to benchmark a country and its performance vis-a-vis developing countries. In urban matters, concepts that deal with time and mutations, defining places beyond their geographical location, are still scarce. Neza’s success in Mex-ico City is a combination of the stubborn struggle of its inhabitants to gain the attention of successive governments, power emanating from their sheer numbers, solidarity and concentration. Its specific ‘suburban’ street typol-ogy, in the form of a grid, has helped spread the benefits to all parts of the city. What then are the secret ingredients of this Mexican urban miracle?
Nezahualcoyotl. a.k.a. Neza York
Nezahualcoyotl, also known as Neza York, is in no way close to Manhat-tan's city profile. Yet in terms of population density the city of Neza indeed could be read as if a horizontal skyscraper. Its urban layout is spread even-ly, around 10 x 4 km in a regular gridded network, and contains one of the
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largest and densest low-rise cities in the world. It has a population of 1.11 million in an area of just 4,190 ha; a density of 264 people per hectare. The densely populated Randstad in the Netherlands with a density of 83 peo-ple per hectare, or urban Paris with 70 people per hectare, are well below Neza’s density. The borough of Manhattan, one of the densest urban areas on earth, with 273 people per hectare, is almost equal to Neza. This desni-ty is remarkable as most building in Neza average only 2 storeys. The block size is also remarkably similar to New York dimensions; most of Neza’s blocks are 220 x 35 m, while in Manhattan they are of similar length, but 20 meters wider.Neza also shares something else with New York: the exuberance of its ar-chitecture. In Neza this is represented by 285,027 self-built houses and the skills and potential of owners to improve and expand them over time. Offi-cially founded in what was the periphery of Mexico City 50 years ago, Neza is currently the second biggest municipality in terms of population of the State of Mexico; a self governing state surrounding the Federal District. De-spite being a municipality not belonging to the Mexican capital, Nezahual-coyotl has become a de facto part of the Mexican metropolitan region due to its proximity and relevance. Its rise from a barely legal settlement built by thousands of families into one of the most populated and active places of Mexico City in a period of 50 years is worth revisiting.
If you read such an ad today, you might conclude that the house could be an attractive property worth buying. The price tag, at 1,672,000 Mexican pe-sos (around $125,000 dollars) might be tight for your budget, yet it tempts you to find out more. Can such an attractive property be located in the ‘in-famous’ suburb of Nezahualcoyotl, widely known as one of the harshest neighbourhoods of the city, a no-go area for many? In the mass media, Neza is still considered a place where only the narcs live. Yet, as you continue reading, the property remains attractive; schools, parks and many trees are indeed nearby according to Google Maps. More surprising, there is even a private university around the corner. The airport is actually quite close and not only the metro, but very soon the Metrobus, connects the capital and nearby areas. Shopping malls with top of the line products and museums are nearby. It is hard to properly assess its depiction in the media, but it is less difficult to believe that price regulation at this level begins to show a city attractive enough for such property prices.
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Reclaiming Neza
Since its foundation in 1325, the City of Mexico has suffered from severe flooding due to its geographical condition of an endorheic basin - a topo-graphical condition that retains rainwater without offering an exit for it by rivers or oceans. To protect against flooding, a proper system of water evac-uation was required. Infrastructural works to drain the water out of the ba-sin are numerous and go way back in history, even to the time of the arrival of the Spaniards. As the lakes were finally drained at the beginning of the 20th century, the question of what to do and who should exploit the gradu-ally reclaimed new land are crucial to understand the emergence of the city of Nezahualcoyotl in what used to be the lake of Texcoco, the lowest but big-gest of all Mexican lakes.
The drying of the lakes coincided neatly with Mexico City’s demographic explosion that put pressure on the city housing stock aafter the 1940s. In just 30 years, the metropolitan area went from 1.6 million people in 1940 to 9.2 million in 1970. As housing rents escalated in the city center, the revolu-tionary government tried to tackle unpopular price rises by using ‘pegged’ or ‘frozen’ rents in 1942. Landlords fired back by stopping all housing main-tenance. By 1950, to add more pressure to the mix the ‘regente’ (appointed mayor) of the city, Mr. Uruchurtu, had forbidden the creation of new neigh-bourhoods within the Federal District limits. In a few years the combination of decaying rental buildings in the center, demographic growth and increas-ing densification forced thousands of recent immigrant families to search for land where they could build their own houses cheaply. The municipali-ties of the neighbouring State of Mexico were an obvious answer and Neza-hualcoyotl was one of the first that became available to them.
Visions for a New Land
The first attempts to give the reclaimed land a new purpose were carried out in 1919 and 1921 when the situation was considered an emergency due to the sudden appearance of dust storms from the dried lake surface that began polluting the city. The federal government aimed to turn the area into agricultural land, and later, into a fish farming area, but both projects failed to take off. This failure led the government to consider allowing pri-vate capital to develop the land. In 1930, engineer Angel Peimbert, and ar-chitect Luis MacGregor drafted a scenario that combined intensive agricul-ture, industry, and eventual urbanization through the subdivision of plots. Integrating the reclaimed area into the expanding city became obvious. By 1932, the governor of the State of Mexico, Filiberto Gomez released the state-owned land of 7000 hectares to a few private developers, sold by the government at the preposterous price of 1 peso per hectare, on the condi-tion that the buyers woud environmentally treat the land and clean it from any toxic remains. This unusual sale ended up in the hands of top military generals (including future high rank politicians Lazaro Cardenas, Francis-co Mujica and Leopoldo Treviño), federal government officials and even the two visionaries of the area, Messrs MacGregor and Peimbert. The plot size started at 40 hectares and each private investor could acquire 2 plots.The transfer of property into private hands was soon contested by com-munal land farmers (ejidatarios), who claimed parts of the dried lake terri-tory as their own. This initiated a long struggle for legitimacy. Regardless,
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the Mexican state government proceeded with the plan; the land became available to investors for development. Several developers, some of them with recent experience in developing ‘proletariat’ neighbourhoods in the city, seized the opportunity and started to advertise the sale of plots of-fering several ways of payments, usually spreading the instalments over a few years. Most developments offered compact plots of 10 x 20 meters. The massive sale went on without much government supervision or respect to law. Within a few years, thousands of plots were sold without paved streets, sewage, sidewalks, public lighting, water or electricity, and for decades many of the neighbourhoods remained untouched. The basic infrastructure was to be installed once enough buyers had paid their loans to the develop-ers so that, according to them, there would be enough capital for their in-vestments. Some developers forwarded this responsibility to the buyers of the plots from the very start. However, many developers never completed (or even started) to honour their promises. The Mexican government was partly to blame for this blatant abuse of power since one of its laws from 1948 actually permitted developers to shield themselves legally against the claims of landowners for not completing basic infrastructure. Repression and threats to leaders kept initiatives of collectives to a mini-mum during the first decades. When rumours spread that one developer did not actually own the land they were paying for, those struggling against the developers called a meeting that included the police, Mexico City gov-ernment, the developer and the collective. Their answer to their demand for property rights was a unanimous ‘strike’ on monthly payments until the developer handed over the official property deeds as promised. After this success, several movements spread, demanding developers complete infra-structure works. There were actions against government efforts to tax them in order to supply the missing infrastructure. Collectives became actively operational also against land evictions, since their contracts with develop-ers included a severe measure of eviction if instalments were delayed for more than 2 months. From terra indomita, Neza slowly started to gravitate to the voice and power of organized collectives.
From the Culture of Poverty to Carlos Slim
It is in this period of struggle and desperation that the appearance of Neza at the fringes of the city became a prototypical case study for researchers and journalists in Mexico and abroad. American anthropologist Oscar Lew-is described this in ‘The Culture of Poverty; the life of 5 families of Mexico.’ One of them, the Sanchez family, had just started to settle in the barely-in-habited settlement of Nezahualcoyotl. The picture depicted is an intimate life of a complex family structure; a family struggling for water, facing bad-ly connected public transport, partly supported by raising animals at home but with an overwhelming feeling of insecurity.
Another American expert on Mexico City, the geographer Peter M. Ward, despite being more optimistic on the power of self-built environments, con-sidered the area in 1976 a future problem due to its isolation: “For the vast area of colonias proletarias in the east of the Metropolitan Area (Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl), isolated from any convenient commercial or industrial zone, this problem is clearly a real one.” Nevertheless, the battles to obtain water, sewage, electricity, paving, and property titles were eventually won, achieveing stability for its inhabitants and future investors.
Slowly, the city of Neza gave off a more complex and vivid picture that de-fied the prevailing concepts of poverty, exclusion, or even the idea of any peripheral slum. The main city ring (periferico) connected Neza with the city; the city Metro opened parallel to Neza’s border, the linea A, in 1991. Though affordable housing production by the state or housing corporations represented a mere 35% of housing demand in Mexico by 1970, Neza inhab-itants’ self-initiative contributed greatly to ‘solving’ the housing shortage of Mexico City. By 2011, Neza said farewell to its characterization as a slum in all senses. The final chapter of the Neza York story occurred recently when Mexican heavy weight entrepreneur Carlos Slim proposed to the then-gov-ernor of the state (currently president of Mexico Enrique Peña Nieto) to turn the Xociaca open waste dump of Mexico City, located in Neza and one of the biggest in the world, into an ambitious theme park: Parque Bicente-nario. The area of investment covers 138 hectares: parks, universities, shop-ping facilities and garbage recycling plants are to become an example to other regions of the World, according to Carlos Slim.
The City in Reverse
Contrary to the problems of European or American cities, where the debate is now often centered around how to involve the community in the devel-opment of peripheral neighbourhoods, Neza puts the question in reverse: how can the community devise strategies to get the government involved in solving the challenges of the city? The skills and perseverance used by the inhabitants of Neza proved that struggle to be successful. They were not mere temporal poses, but the result of addressing a set of specific and fair demands. In Neza, the citizens are the key component to the improvement
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of any place in the city; their massive self-investment and improvement in their quality of life eventually became the magnet for more and more in-vestment. When I go to Google Maps and its Street View function, I notice these street profiles do not show a spectacular city life, but there are many bars, markets, and places to play pool, but none seem to my taste. Yet, as I continue strolling in Google Street View, I suddenly realize that I am no longer able to distinguish Neza from many other neighbourhoods or streets of Mexico City I know. Neza has blended into Mexico City: there is no way now to call this the center or the periphery.
Federal District - México The political Metropolitan division of the México Valley (ZMVM) Drying of the lake area of the México Valley Urban footprint Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl
Fig. 2. Expansion of Mexico City footprint versus the drying of lakes
1 Niederberger Betton, Christine. Paléo-paysages et archéologie pré-urbaine du Bassin de Mexico, México: Centro de estudios mexicanos y centroamericanos .1987 2 Ingeniero Gerardo Cruickshank García. Rescate hidroecologico. Proyecto Lago de Texcoco. 3 Exequiel ezcurra. Las chinampas a la megalopolis. La ciencia para todos. 2005 4 ZMVM, Zona Metropolitana del Valle de México, México, 2000.
Lago Xochimilico
Ing. Luque Loyola
Lago Peipus
Lago Wetter
Av. Nezahualcoyotl
Lago Michigan
Lago Patzcuaro
Lago Patzcuaro Lago Peipus
Lago Atitlan
100
Lago Mayor
Lago Ontario
Lago Zirahuen
Lago Trasimero
Lago Yojoa
Lago Mask
Lago Onega
Lago San Pedrio
Lago Tequesquitengo
Lago Winnipeg