A Tale of Mega Cities

As more and more of the world’s cities grow huge, the citizens of Mexico City dare to dream a livable future.

By Charles Montgomery

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Photos by James Baigrie / Getty Images (Mexico City); Masterfile (woman)

Francisco Calderón loosens his tie and breaks into a sprint as he crosses the eight lanes of Avenida de los Insurgentes, part of the network of hundreds of superstreets that criss-cross Mexico City. He may have the red light and the eye of two traffic cops, but a stampede of VW Bug taxis, trucks and buses have already begun to roar into the intersection like so many Pamplona bulls.

“La Ciudad de la Esperanza!” Calderón shouts above the roar as he leaps onto the centre median. The City of Hope. That’s what chilangos – residents of the Mexican capital – have been calling this beast for the last few years.

It’s hard to imagine what would compel anyone to use the expression, especially here. We are surrounded on all sides by some of the continent’s worst traffic – 10,000 car crashes in a good year – breathing in air famous for its toxins, enduring an eardrum-splitting racket and, if we look down Insurgentes – past the hawkers and squeegee tots and pure water delivery carts, through the canyon of billboards – there is no horizon, just an endless, hazy sea of urbanity. Nine million residents. Or is it 20? Or 28? Nobody can agree on the population of the place or where the city really ends since it jumped its official boundaries decades ago.

The most striking thing about this landscape is that it is not at all unique. The world’s cities – particularly the big ones – have been expanding at a mind-boggling pace. This week alone, cities will absorb a million new babies and migrants. China is leading the way, with 150 million new urbanites in the last decade. For the first time in history, more of the world’s people live in cities than the countryside.

There are now 15 cities with more than 10 million inhabitants. With almost all future population growth predicted to take place in urban areas, these so-called megacities are just the beginning. By 2025, Asia alone will boast 10 cities topping the 20 million mark. The people are coming. The future is overwhelmingly urban. The question is, can that future be made livable? And can the megacity beast be tamed?

Mexico City is a logical place to look for answers to these questions. After all, this was one of the original megacities and also one of the first to be confronted by its own imminent mortality.

The town began its life as an island, an Aztec Venice in the middle of a vast lake fringed by gardens. Four centuries after the Spanish conquest, that lake has virtually disappeared. By the 1980s, the city had sucked at its aquifer so greedily that the hollowed earth was sinking like a wrung-out sponge. The soot-blackened Metropolitan Cathedral had foundered nine metres in a century and was now listing like the Titanic. The air was so toxic that birds were falling dead from the skies. And the earth – well, it was shaking like a dog trying to rid itself of fleas.

The earthquakes of 1985 reduced much of Mexico City’s grand Centro Histórico to rubble. One hundred thousand residents fled the district for the suburbs. Crime skyrocketed. It was only a matter of time, whispered the doomsayers, before the sewage canals ruptured, the aquifer was tainted and a water-borne plague turned the city proper into a giant coffin.

City of Hope, indeed.

But 20 years later, Mexico City has inched away from the abyss. People are flowing back downtown. Sinking buildings are being shored up. Bicycle routes have been painted onto once-forbidden avenidas. The city is rediscovering its colonial heart. Calderón, who once fled the city on weekends, now takes visitors for lunch in the shady cafés of Condesa, a previously derelict neighbourhood now declared an oasis of Euro hip by The New York Times.

It’s Calderón’s job, as coordinator of public participation with the capital’s three-year-old environmental ombudsman’s office to be familiar with the city’s troubles. But today, out in the middle of Insurgentes, he is beaming.

“Back in our worst days, the sky was red, always red. Now look at it,” he says, gesturing up at the blurred January sky. “We can actually see the sun!”

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