Mexico City

Numerous urban scholars have been studying Mexico City—the capital of Mexico—since at least the 1970s, drawn to its remarkable growth during the second half of the 20th century and to its specific patterns of urbanization. The city is located at more than 7,000 feet above sea level in the southern section of a large, enclosed basin known as the Valley of Mexico. Its name officially designates what until recently was the Federal District, an area of 550 square miles divided into sixteen administrative jurisdictions and which, until 1997, lacked a democratically elected government. A 2016 reform transformed Mexico City into the country’s thirty-second state. In common usage, the name Mexico City also refers to the greater Mexico City Metropolitan Area, which as of 2010 also included fifty-nine adjacent municipalities in the State of Mexico and one in the State of Hidalgo, with a total extent of nearly 3,100 square miles. According to the 2010 census, Mexico City’s population is around nine million, while the greater Metropolitan Area has more than twenty million inhabitants. The city was founded in 1521 on the ruins of the Aztec capital on a small island in Lake Texcoco and gradually expanded onto the increasingly desiccated lakebed, which has created a particular set of environmental problems, such as constant flooding. Like other major Latin American cities, Mexico City—and later the Metropolitan Area—grew exponentially after the 1940s, as industrialization attracted massive migration. Its population jumped from three million in 1930 to around fifteen million in 1985. Mexico’s most important city, as well as its political, cultural, and economic center, Mexico City is a study in contrasts. It displays wealth and poverty extremes, world-class architecture next to marginal shantytowns, and a vibrant, cosmopolitan cultural life alongside high criminal rates and seemingly intractable environmental problems, which continue to attract the interest of a wide variety of urban scholars. This bibliography is selective rather than exhaustive. It privileges recent English- and Spanish-language scholarship, but also includes key texts that continue to inform the field, as well as recent urban historiography. It is divided into the main topics covered by urban scholars of Mexico City since the 1970s. These range from urban planning, urban politics, informality, poverty, and marginality, which were dominant themes until the 1980s, to urban protest and social movements, gentrification, and environmental, gender, and cultural studies, which have expanded the field more recently. The author wishes to thank Carlos Humberto Arroyo Batista for his research assistance in elaborating this bibliography.