5 Milestones in historiography of the suburb in the City of Mexico

Abstract

From the practical experience in urban planning and the teaching of urban history, we consider that the terms suburb and suburbanization do not enjoy a deep rooted as explanatory concepts of the processes that have determined the structure of urban areas in Mexico. The suburb in Mexico is usually thought of as a residential space located in the urban periphery, originally intended for the population with higher incomes and that in the twentieth century was expanded to include large sectors of the emerging middle classes. The irregular settlements that dominated the processes of urbanization in the last century are rarely conceived as suburbs although they share the peripheral location with those. In any case, in the periphery of Mexican cities, diverse urban morphologies are agglomerated that are not always the product of the influence of the Anglo-Saxon residential suburb, since they include high-density housing units, popular neighborhoods of informal origin with different degrees of consolidation, conurbated towns and, of course, formal subdivisions for middle and high income families with very diverse architectural typologies.