To present a set of conclusions based on what has been analysed and discussed throughout this book, we begin by taking stock of the most important ideas that emerge from each of its seven chapters, and then refer to the elements constituting the most significant contributions to the position, definition and understanding of one of the largest urban agglomerations in the world. Set in the Latin American context, the Mexico City Metropolitan Area (ZMCM) shares certain features with the great metropolises of the world and the region, while other features are different. Their evolution and problems highlight the enormous challenges it faces.

The ZMCM is an extensive urban area encompassing land from 76 small political-administrative units, belonging to three major political-administrative bodies, called states or federative entities. One of these federal entities is Mexico City, divided into 16 smaller administrative units (alcaldías). Some parts of this book refer to Mexico City, while other chapters and sections analyse issues on a broader geographic scale, such as the ZMCM.

The first chapter studies the structure, dynamics and territorial distribution of the population in the ZMCM, in addition to reviewing the main guidelines of the population policy. The differential growth of the population over large areas of the ZMCM can be explained by the dissimilar behaviours of fertility, mortality, migration and intra-metropolitan residential mobility. The highest population growth occurred in municipalities on the inner periphery, while the central city saw a repopulation.

The total fertility rate in the ZMCM is one of the lowest nationwide. In 2002, it reached the generational replacement rate, 2.1 live-born children per woman, continuing to decrease to values of 1.7 live-born children per woman in 2020. For its part, the crude mortality rate in the ZMCM was lower than in the national context in 1980, with 5.7 deaths per 1,000 inhabitants per year. This indicator reached a tipping point in 2000, and thereafter began to increase, surpassing the country in 2004 and reaching a rate of 6.4 deaths per 1,000 inhabitants per year in 2020. The performance of fertility and mortality in the ZMCM has resulted in natural growth below that of the country.

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.

Population growth in a city is not uniformly distributed over time, or within its urban structure. From an interurban perspective, the differential urbanization model, proposed by Hermanus Geyer and Thomas Kontuly in the 1990s, posits that the growth of cities in a country changes over time according to the size of urban agglomerations (Geyer & Kontuly 1993). During the first stage, the largest city is the one with the greatest population dynamism, because it is the point of arrival of internal migration from rural localities. A group of medium-sized cities subsequently vie with the primary city as internal migration destinations, encouraging the phase of polarization reversal. The authors propose a third stage, counter-urbanization, characterized by the fact that small cities are those with the highest population growth rates, due to migratory movements of rural and urban origin with these population centres as their destination. In this model, internal migration movements mainly explain the demographic dynamics of the city.

Intraurban demographic change has been studied through the metropolitan geography patterns of population and employment, generally characterized by an initial displacement of the population and subsequently of employment, from the central city to the periphery, giving rise to suburbanization processes (Gottdiener et al. 2016: 138– 41; Piña 2014), as well as the emergence of polycentric urban structures (Champion 2001; Rodríguez 2012). The stages of metropolitanism correspond to (1) urbanization or concentration, when the greatest demographic growth takes place in the central city; (2) suburbanization, when the periphery achieves the highest rate of population growth; (3) de-urbanization, when the central city loses population in absolute terms; and (4) repopulation, when the central city resumes the path of demographic growth (van den Berg et al. 1982; Suarez-Villa 1988). The suburban and peripheral areas of the city are mosaics of diversity in the socioeconomic conditions of the resident population, as well as opportunities for the location of economic activities.

Based on these precepts, this chapter studies the demographic dynamics of the Mexico City Metropolitan Area (ZMCM) in the period 1980– 2020, the patterns of territorial distribution of the population on the interurban or regional, and intraurban, or metropolitan scale, and the main sociodemographic features of the resident population.

Mexico City has had various types of legal status since Mexican independence was recognized by Spain in 1821. In a country that fluctuated between federal and centralist systems during the nineteenth century, this city, the seat of federal powers, had various forms of local political organization in which the town council, a legal and political concept inherited from the Spanish colonial system, existed until 1928 (Table 7.1). That year, the town council was superseded by the Federal District Department (DDF), a federal government agency responsible for administering the public goods and services of the city through a federal budget and a solid bureaucracy. The DDF was responsible for dealing with major sociodemographic and economic changes in the metropolis until 1997, when it was replaced by the Federal District Government, a public entity in which the popular vote for the election of its head was reinstated. This late twentieth-century reform would pave the way for the enactment of the Mexico City Constitution 20 years later in 2017. The Constitution is conceived of as the response to demands such as restoring residents’ rights and political representation and granting the political institutions of the city greater autonomy.

The political context of the city had already begun to change in the 1980s. The 1985 earthquake appears to have galvanized citizen protests about the group in power and the type of political organization in the city. This period saw the political-electoral emergence of leftist political forces, which would win the first mayoral elections in 1997. Before this election, the solution offered by institutions for citizens’ political expression was a narrow cul-de-sac while the level of politicization was steadily developing in terms of its scope and sophistication. The demand for housing and basic services, common in the uncontrolled urban growth period, was joined by the demand to participate in the political decision-making process. What lay behind this situation? The origins of its explanation date back nearly a century.

This chapter describes the institutional changes undertaken to restore the political rights of Mexico City residents and recover the autonomy lost following the abolition of the town council in 1928.

Economic change in a city is linked to its economic structure. Activities develop at different rates and some have exceptional dynamics that are the driving force behind urban growth. Demographic dynamics, productive structure, population relocation and economic activities shape the organization, density, transformation and modification of built space. Moreover, in a city, the material supports that house the population and both traditional and legendary, and recent and emerging activities, overlap and coexist (Hirsch 1977).

There are five factors that help explain the way economic growth occurs in urban areas and the difference between them: (1) transport costs; (2) internal economies of scale; (3) agglomeration economies; (4) market size; and (5) innovation and technological progress. These factors play a part, but the role of manufacturing and services in the economy, the size and nature of the informal sector, the rate of investment and the primacy of the ZMCM in the national urban system are also critical to Mexico City.

Transport costs are related to the geographic position of the city for the acquisition of inputs and distribution of products, as well as the existing infrastructure for the mobility of goods and people (Arbia et al. 2016). Internal economies of scale involve the reduction of average production costs as the volume of goods or services produced or offered increases. These are generated within the firm by a more efficient use of production factors, especially the labour factor (Koster & Kapitsinis 2016). At the same time, agglomeration economies are a syllogism of internal economies of scale and involve the reduction of the average production cost that occurs in any productive firm when a city increases the size of its population. They are generated outside the firm and are achieved by harnessing and using infrastructure and facilities in the city, and because of the spatial concentration of the population and human activities (Giuliano et al. 2019; van Oort 2016).

The size of markets for the goods and services is another element for understanding local economic growth and its rate of change. Market size includes demand within and outside the city. According to the export-base theory, the larger the city, the lower the economic dependence on the volume of goods and services demanded outside it (Thulin 2016; Tiebout 1962).

Major changes in the global economic and industrial structure in recent decades have modified the spatial arrangement of cities. Urban researchers in the developed world have therefore explored the extent to which these transformations have taken place, but also the way the organization of urban space has influenced society and family life (Marcuse & van Kempen 2000; Maurin 2004). In recent years, the subject has begun to be addressed in Latin America by disciplines such as sociology, geography and anthropology. This analysis will be set in the Latin American context, where the issues of concern have subtle distinctions from those in more developed countries.

A common characteristic of cities is that the urban landscape does not change as swiftly as social relations, economic practices or political arrangements. It does not look radically different from the way it did in the past, since continuity is maintained through legal frameworks, customs and cultural traditions, as well as the rigidity of the built environment, which cannot be altered as easily (Soja 1989; Marcuse & van Kempen 2000). This is confirmed through the case of Mexico City, presented below. It should be added that in choosing a place of residence, families also choose their neighbours, since the social environment is believed to influence the success or failure of the lives of young people, their future and social status. In other words, the immediate social surroundings do not represent a secondary contingency of existence but are an essential condition for the development of all (Maurin 2004). Hence the importance of studying the social division of space, segregation and its effects on the population.

In Latin America, the more affluent groups usually choose to live in areas that are more central. Conversely, poorer families are condemned to live in remote areas that are unsuitable for settlement. These families are concentrated in urban peripheries, especially in areas where they are extremely important within the urban social structure, a common phenomenon in cities in the region.

Suburbanization in these countries has mainly involved low-income groups, partly through the formation and expansion of informal settlements (a phenomenon discussed in the previous chapter), which have served to reproduce the labour force at extremely low cost.

This chapter explores the question of whether the political orientation of the party in power influences public policies. A large body of research exists on the reasons behind the repeated triumph of the left in Mexico City and the association between this electoral behaviour and the Latin American left turn observed in the past decade, especially in presidential elections, often linked to the rejection of the free-market economy and government performance (Baker & Greene 2011). In this chapter, however, we will focus on identifying some of the features of the administrations led by governments that emerged from the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) between 1997 and 2018, without exploring the causes that might explain this electoral behaviour.

The purpose of analysing the impact of two decades of leftist administrations on the government of Mexico City regarding the way certain public services are produced and supplied is to determine whether those governments have shared features (continuities) that characterize the way the PRD governs this metropolis. This, in turn, will raise questions regarding whether this form of governance is typical of the behaviour of leftist governments in other metropolises. The underlying question is ultimately whether polity influences policy. More than 20 years after the election of the first Head of Government of the Federal District, several questions have arisen regarding the changes in public service production and supply. The first concerns whether there have been modifications in the way the city is governed, how they have been expressed and whether they can be explained by the political orientation of the incumbent government.

Academic discussions on urban public services explore the distinction between production and provision. Government provision does not involve government production. The idea that incorporating competition into local service production encourages efficient public resource use has been floated in privatization reforms for decades (Tiebout 1956; Ostrom et al. 1961). Another recurring issue in the discussion on services refers to universality, in terms of coverage, but also the quality of the services provided, regardless of the social status or location of residents. Academic production has explored the production of services, using an approach that underlines the tension between efficiency and coverage, or rather their supply (Badley 1996, 2001).