Setting the Scene
solutions, promotion of sustainable urban transport, improving land management, and introducing better territorial planning systems at the local and regional level. The government is also in the process of further refining existing federal housing programs, including the main housing subsidy program “This Is Your House” (Esta es Tu Casa), to better align with the new policy priorities. Specifically, it started to implement differentiated subsidies and location-specific housing credits to discourage peri-urban expansion and encourage the redensification of inner cities. The Ministry of Agrarian, Territorial, and Urban Development (Secretaria de Desarrollo Agrario, Territorial y Urbano, SEDATU)4 calls for the concentration and redensification of the housing stock in the inner cities by introducing location-specific housing credits and subsidies in order to discourage peri-urban expansion. Efforts have been put into generating a System of Geostatistical Information on Urban Development, Land, and Housing that established urban contention perimeters (perímetros de contención urbana) for each city that are being applied to determine housing subsidies to limit the expansion of urban areas. Development and construction outside those limits would be controlled (desarrollos certificados). Furthermore, through the new model, the Government of Mexico aims to create urban land reserves—considered “developable”—in the outskirts of urban and metropolitan areas, and will equip them with infrastructure and basic services, as necessary for future growth. The creation of a unified National Housing Registry (Registro Unico de Vivienda, RUV) was an important step for implementing the recent policy reform, in particular regarding the location of housing. The RUV, established by law in 2004, became operational in 2009. Since then, new housing being developed in Mexico is registered with RUV, which collects relevant data on national housing supply, including property value, progress of construction, location, housing characteristics, and quality of housing. RUV has become an important source of information to improve decision making of both public and private actors involved in the provision of housing. It also serves as a screening mechanism to calculate the location-based point and eligibility of prospective housing developments for the federal housing subsidy program. The government has also made significant efforts to put in place measurement systems and to broaden information about urban dynamics. An ambitious national initiative, the National Urban System (Sistema Urbana Nacional, SUN), proposes to create a unified platform to support decision making for urban and housing policies. The SUN, launched by Mexican federal agencies in 2012, marks a significant effort to broaden information and understanding about urban dynamics and has been recognized as innovative among Latin American urban initiatives. See box 1.2 for details of the classification of city types on which the SUN is based.
Objectives and Scope of the Mexico Urbanization Review In light of the government’s new policy priorities, this Urbanization Review sets out to analyze recent spatial patterns of Mexican cities, their causes, and their impact and to provide an analytical basis to understand how well-managed Mexico Urbanization Review • http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-0916-3
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