Edinburgh Napier University

  Mexico City has experienced an accelerated and disorganised urban growth over time, triggering a deficit of housing stock, job opportunities, public transport and infrastructure services, in addition to environmental impacts related to construction of buildings.

Data associated with demography and History of Mexico City was collected, to find relevant events that exacerbated the boom of urban and population growth. Then, Statistical and data analyses were essential to illustrate numbers, so that the most critical decades could be identified. Finally, the urban growth was drawn to scale in Autocad for calculating areas and densities in different decades, which were related to the Mexican citizens’ quality of life.

It is clear from the results that the accelerated urban growth is relatively proportional to population growth in Mexico City. From 1940 to 1980 there was a boom when the population grew 7.3 times, whereas the urban area grew 8.5 times. The high population density is currently too high for satisfying the existing housing shortage with low-rise buildings.

These results are crucial to address further research in the Built Environment of Mexico City, which will be focused on decarbonising its residential stock through Circular Economy.