I’m writing this from a cafe in San Francisco, sipping on a coffee that I bought for the price of a nice breakfast in Mexico. I ordered the drink in English, a language which at least 75% of the people ...
Though we’re entering into the season where this city seems to get rain every single afternoon, I’ve been running around to many corners of the city for the last several weeks, speaking to more people living in ...
Santa Fe, located about a 12-mile drive (or somewhat risky walk) from the center of Mexico City, is, depending on your perspective, the metropolitan area’s most modern district, or its most soulless. Set in the rolling hills west of ...
It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve been present on the blog, but while I’ve been away, I’ve had a great set of excursions into the edges of Mexico City. From semi-rural compounds in the ...
Santa Fe is Mexico City’s Edge City – a rapidly growing office park on the outskirts of an extant metropolitan area. Located along a major highway out of the city, the site (some 12 miles from the center) was once a ...
Mexico City’s Distrito Federal is the nation’s largest urban administrative unit. Of the 22 million residents of the metro area, 8.8 million live in the D.F. If you were to ask most Mexicans what the country’s “second city,” ...
Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl is the prototypical informal settlement of metropolitan Mexico City. Built just over the line from the Distrito Federal in the Estado de México, Neza—as it is commonly called—looms large in the imagination of the ...
As I (hope to have) covered in last weeks blog, the government-funded development at Tlatelolco, opened in 1964, formed by far the most ambitious housing project in Mexican history. In terms of a single site, its scope has never been matched. ...
Officially the Conjunto Urbano Presidente Adolfo López Mateos de Nonoalco Tlatelolco (*phew*), the district of Tlatelolco is today a fascinating vestige of mid-century Mexico’s modernist past, and—what I like even more—a vision of a future that ...
This week, continuing in my investigation of the geography of growth in Mexico City’s metropolitan area, and following my most recent exploration of the wealthier, more U.S.-styled segments of sprawl in the city, I made a trip ...
As I wrote before I arrived here, I grew up on an edge of Los Angeles—I could ride my bike down the hill to the park and the comic book store in the strip mall, and, with enough energy, ...
In the above gif, we can watch forty years of Mexico City’s built area expand, washing up against and around hills, lakebeds, and other obstacles. I’m very much drawn to this type of image in urban planning: evocative ...
Continuing his quest to document Mexico City, its neighborhoods and its 22 million inhabitants through writing, mapping, data visualization, photography and video, Fulbright-National Geographic Fellow Michael Waldrep shares pictures and observations about the metropolitan area’s Galaxia subdivision, built in an ...
http://instagram.com/p/xac9swC1Gq/ Infrastructure gives shape to the city, the same way a trellis gives shape to a vine. Along with natural and topographical features—primarily the hills and mountains that encircle the Valle de Mé...
About 18 miles from the Zocalo as the crow flies from the center of Mexico City, is my home for the month. A short, if convoluted ride on three of the city’s metro lines (for about 30 cents) takes you to ...