Most Mexican cities suffer from a rapid process of suburbanization or horizontal expansion (urban sprawl), despite the fact that their densification and compaction is an existential imperative. Densification is essential to rationalize the construction and use of infrastructure and the provision of urban services, for the financial health of municipalities, to achieve efficiency in land use and mobility and transportation, minimize ecological footprint, improve civic coexistence, and strengthen security. Simply put, it is very expensive to build and operate infrastructure and equipment for drinking water, drainage, electricity, parks and gardens, roads, and transportation systems for dispersed populations in low-density urban contexts. The cost per inhabitant can be exorbitant. It is much cheaper to provide any of these services to dense populations than to dispersed ones. Worryingly, in recent decades, most Mexican cities have expanded territorially much faster than their population has grown, further decreasing their density, according to a detailed study published by CONAPO in 2025. In the vast majority of Mexican cities—those with 100,000 or more inhabitants—the urban land area grew more than the population in the period 1985–2018. In that time, urbanized land expanded 5.2 times, while the population only doubled. The Average City Density (ACD) dropped from 124 inhabitants per hectare to less than 108 in the same period.
The phenomenon is much more noticeable in large cities, along with the abandonment and emptying of central areas and historic centers, and in parallel with the increasing occupation of peripheral areas. Interestingly, however, in some cases things have begun to reverse due to new demographic and cultural patterns, smaller families, preferences favoring centrality, and unacceptably high costs and times of transportation from the periphery. This has put upward pressure on rents in certain central areas and neighborhoods, requiring explicit policies to increase the consequent housing supply, which necessarily implies densification. It has also contributed to gentrification, particularly in abandoned and decaying neighborhoods that now show a new face of urban regeneration. In Mexico City, unfortunately, re-densification and gentrification have not occurred in the Historic Center, after the exodus of universities (UNAM, IPN), banks, offices, and shops decades ago, and the expulsion of housing and population after the 1985 earthquake. Another factor is the invasion, degradation, and privatization of public space by mafias of street vendors colluding with the government itself, who take over streets, squares, and parks, and use buildings of high historical and heritage value as warehouses and ruinous hideouts.
Obviously, densification requires in certain cases the adaptation of infrastructure, for example, water, although per capita water consumption is lower in high-density urban circumstances. The financial health of local governments also benefits from high densities, since property tax collection per square kilometer multiplies, which is reflected in better urban services. Densification also allows land to be freed for the creation of parks and other public spaces (in contrast, for example, to the atrocious and absurd "floating causeway" recently built in Tlalpan). Densification offers greater efficiency to public transport and encourages accessibility and pedestrian and micro-mobility, resulting in less traffic, lower energy consumption, less pollution, and a smaller ecological footprint (impacts per square kilometer).
It is essential to design and implement an urban densification policy at the federal level, although it is recognized that territorial and urban regulatory powers rest with the municipalities according to Article 115 of the Constitution. Therefore, urban densification policy at the federal level must be one of induction rather than regulation. Fortunately, there are potentially powerful instruments applicable by the federal government, such as housing policy, federal contributions, metropolitan funds, and incentives for changes in municipal urban development programs that allow and encourage densification. (Of course, according to the characteristics of the urban environment, the width of each avenue and each street, and respecting trees and private gardens of environmental value, and areas or buildings of heritage value). It is essential to review the logic and structure of property taxes, basing them on land value rather than building value, to penalize abandonment and underutilization, and to reward density and verticality, as well as the integration of accessory dwellings in large single-family lots. All this requires solving the problem of neighborhood opposition to densification, deeply rooted in misinformation, distortion or absence of urban culture, the ubiquitous NIMBY syndrome (Not in My Backyard), and lack of leadership from local authorities. National education and urban culture campaigns must be undertaken, and Sedatu must be pulled out of its irrelevance.
