Do We Really Live in Mexico City?

In the vast and contradictory geography of Mexico City, living is an exercise in partial belonging. Although its urban core is home to more than 9 million people and its metropolitan area to over 22 million, everyday life is built on a much more intimate scale: the neighborhood. The big city is experienced through short trips, personal routines, and neighborhood bonds.

I've always believed that cities are not so much places as they are ways of living. We don't inhabit them entirely — we navigate them from an intimate perspective. Living in Mexico City, or more precisely, in one of its neighborhoods, means walking the same streets daily, visiting the same bookstores, markets, and corners. In that daily repetition, the city reveals itself not as a whole, but as an overlapping of lived fragments. The true city, then, is not a map, but an emotional and functional sketch each person draws with their feet.

Neighborhoods like La Condesa embody this idea of a lived city. With fewer than 30,000 residents, it concentrates cafés, offices, restaurants, cultural spaces, and parks. Within a 15-minute walking radius, many essential functions of urban life are condensed. Carlos Moreno calls this the 15-minute city model, proposing that most of our daily needs — education, work, leisure, healthcare, shopping — should be met without major travel.

Here, the city both shrinks and magnifies: in a handful of walkable streets, with taco stands, bars, bookstores, markets, and terraces, a city is recreated that seems to contain everything. Just steps away are essential goods, meeting spaces, and emotional ties. The neighborhood stops being a periphery of the metropolis and becomes the center of a self-sufficient life. There’s no need to cross the city if the essential city is already there.

La Condesa partially embodies the city of proximity: from almost anywhere in the neighborhood, it's possible to walk to a hardware store, a bakery, a café, or a library in minutes. This closeness translates into a city that is lived rather than merely defined by legal boundaries.

From this perspective, microcenters are not just fragments within a larger city, but what actually make the city a city. The flow of neighbors, flâneurs, students, market vendors, and visitors creates rhythms that rarely extend beyond a few kilometers, forming small cities that, while retaining the CDMX label, function as autonomous universes. The neighborhood is enough.

This intuition about human scale isn’t new. Jane Jacobs, in "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," criticized the functionalist city of the 20th century and championed the vitality of walkable neighborhoods. Her image of the "sidewalk ballet" illustrates the idea that urban life is built on daily interactions: mixed land use, diversity of people, spontaneous encounters, and informal neighbor surveillance all generate safety and public life.

Jacobs advocated for mixed land uses — commerce, housing, services, culture — as a guarantee of constant movement and vitality, emphasizing that small streets, short blocks, and walkability are essential for experiencing the city daily. What matters is not the scale of the city, but the scale of life: what is lived on foot.

Juan Villoro, in "The Horizontal Vertigo," inherits this sensitivity. Mexico City, he says, is not a comprehensible totality but a sum of personal journeys. The urban maze reveals itself through walking, not planning. He invites us to see the city as endearing chaos: a living encyclopedia written step by step. The city is not only inhabited with the body: it is built with memory, affection, and repetitions that give it meaning.

For Villoro, living in a neighborhood is not giving up the city, but embodying it intimately. The city, for him, is what happens between the trees on a median strip, the cafés where writing happens, the sidewalks where neighbors meet. CDMX is not to be known, but walked. And walked from the ground up.

All this is compelling emotionally and functionally, but we must be pragmatic. Achieving this type of compact but connected neighborhood requires public policies to become a replicable reality and a model of public-private management.

From this perspective, the real challenge for cities like CDMX is not expansion, but replication: replicating what happens in areas like La Condesa in multiple neighborhoods. How can more people live in compact, connected, and functional neighborhoods? The answer involves a deep reconfiguration of public policy, urban spending, and governance models.

Janette Sadik-Khan, former NYC Transportation Commissioner, offers a roadmap in her book "Streetfight." During her tenure, she transformed car-dominated spaces into vibrant pedestrian plazas, as in the famous case of Times Square. She did so through tactical, low-cost interventions, proving that megaprojects aren’t needed to change cities, only political will and a people-centered vision. These strategies energized local commerce, improved safety, and enhanced public spaces.

For CDMX boroughs, this experience is crucial. Redirecting public spending toward pedestrian infrastructure, bike lanes, parks, and plazas can revitalize entire neighborhoods, generate local employment, attract tourism, and improve community health. Moreover, these cost-effective interventions can reshape the urban environment without requiring massive budgets. What’s essential is a shift in mindset: viewing infrastructure as a catalyst for wellbeing, not just as physical construction.

Thus, budget logic must be rethought. Geoffrey West, in his studies on urbanism, introduces concepts of sublinearity and superlinearity. In urban systems, certain variables like infrastructure grow sublinearly (slower than population), while others like innovation or crime grow superlinearly (faster than population). This suggests that while urban concentration can be efficient, it can also become unsustainable without strategic investment.

Hartmut Herzog, in his book "Back to the Center," argues that neighborhoods should be self-sufficient without becoming closed enclaves. He proposes the need for a polycentric city, where multiple urban nodes offer services, jobs, and culture while being integrated by mobility networks and coordinated policies. For CDMX, this means rethinking boroughs' roles as welfare and planning managers. Neighborhoods that are compact but interconnected may be key to a more equitable city.

This approach is strengthened by the concept of "smart citizenship" developed by Igor Calzada. In "Smart City Citizenship," Calzada asserts that future cities should not revolve solely around technology but around the active participation of their inhabitants. Urban intelligence lies not in sensors or algorithms, but in empowered citizens co-designing their environment. This requires open data, participatory budgeting, transparency, and distributed governance. In CDMX, fostering this critical citizenship could lead to more resilient, innovative, and cohesive neighborhoods.

Paris, under Mayor Anne Hidalgo, offers a comprehensive example. Her implementation of the 15-minute city model has transformed the French capital’s urban logic. Hidalgo has declared that her project is based on “proximity, participation, collaboration, and ecology.” Under this vision, thousands of parking spaces were eliminated to create bike lanes, key zones were pedestrianized, and resources were distributed via participatory budgets prioritizing vulnerable neighborhoods.

One flagship program is "Réinventer Paris," which invites architects, urban planners, and citizens to propose innovative uses for underused public land. This public-private collaboration model has enabled the development of mixed-use spaces for housing, commerce, and culture, strengthening neighborhood identity without isolating it from the rest of the city. The key is strategic management: decisions begin at the neighborhood level but with a metropolitan vision.

What would it take to replicate these strategies in CDMX? First, giving boroughs greater budgetary and technical autonomy to plan locally. Second, reforming urban investment mechanisms to prioritize pedestrian, mixed-use, and low-cost interventions. Third, institutionalizing binding citizen participation schemes so that public works decisions respond to neighborhood priorities. Fourth, integrating these actions with a metropolitan network of mobility, data, and governance.

Mexico City already contains multiple seeds of this desired city. Neighborhoods like Coyoacan or Santa María la Ribera show that it’s possible to live at a human scale with local identity and nearby services. The challenge is to replicate this urban experience, expand it to peripheral areas, and prevent microcenters from becoming islands of privilege amid a sea of inequality.

Living in CDMX should mean more than surviving its distances and contrasts. It should be a daily experience of closeness, community, and urban dignity. To achieve this, a fundamental change is needed in how we understand and manage the city. From sidewalks to budgets, parks to public works decisions, the city must be redesigned from the bottom up, from its neighborhoods and the real lives of its residents, because ultimately, we don’t live in a city of millions, but on a corner, a street, a market, a park. And it is there, in that smallest fragment, where all meaningful urban policy begins and ends.

These strategies prove that it’s possible to design cities that function from their neighborhoods without losing metropolitan cohesion. For CDMX, integrating these lessons could mean not just improved urban efficiency but enhanced democratic quality of governance, allowing each neighborhood, compact yet connected, to be the vital core of a truly livable and participatory city.

Mexico City is not lived as a whole but as a succession of intimate, fragmented experiences that crystallize in the neighborhoods we walk and re-signify daily. In that convergence of perspectives, CDMX is not defined by its boundaries or population density, but by the neighborhoods each person lives as their whole world. So, when we say we live in Mexico City, perhaps what we’re really naming is a handful of streets, a park, a bakery, a church, a corner where the world begins.

And maybe that’s why, when someone asks us, “Do you live in Mexico City?” what we answer, whether we realize it or not, is the name of a neighborhood, a street, a corner. Because that is our real city. That’s where the map that matters begins and ends.

And the most important thing is that it also happens in Montevideo, Istanbul, London, and Mumbai