Ortiz-Chao, C.G.; (2008) Land use patterns and access in Mexico City. Presented at: ACSP-AESOP Fourth Joint Congress: Bridging the Divide: Celebrating the City, Chicago Marriott Downtown Magnificent Mile, Chicago, USA.

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Abstract

The problem of distribution of land uses in urban space in Latin American cities has been examined under different perspectives. Most authors tend to model patterns of population and land use as a consequence of social and economic processes alone, failing to address urban space as an intrinsic variable. Instead, the theory of cities as movement economies argues that land use patterns are influenced by movement flows, which are in turn strongly affected by the urban grid. As a result, land uses such as retail would seek highly accessible locations to take advantage of such flows while residential uses would avoid them. However, space syntax techniques traditionally used to point out this relationship do not seem to reveal it so easily in non-organic cities like Mexico. This paper addresses the relationship between patterns of accessibility and land use in the first ring of Mexico City as a spatial strategy. A new functional description of the city where plots are nodes connected to flows that represent the street network is adopted. This model enables us to measure accessibility at the level of plots. Following this, we focus on the occurrence of land use types in highly or low accessible locations using cumulative distribution functions. If the distribution of land uses was random, the proportion of land use types would be more or less uniform throughout the area. It is shown that the relationship between accessibility and land use is not linear and is guided by movement economy forces. It is suggested that the understanding of these relationship is key to plan for sustainable growth objectively.

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