MEXICO CITY, MEXICO
Mexico City, the capital of Mexico, is the largest city in the Western hemisphere, a bustling megacity with a population exceeding 21 million people. The city serves as the political, economic, and cultural heart of the country, boasting a rich history and diverse urban landscape. However, like many major metropolises, it faces ongoing challenges, including traffic congestion, air pollution, and issues related to social inequality.
In addition to its large size, the city also has a unique food system. Aside from North American supermarket franchises, the city's diverse food system also includes a various historical food markets where traditional foods are sold alongside modern food choices. These local markets can include both formal and informal food retailers. In conjunction with these large food markets, the city also hosts informal food retailers, including street vendors and markets on wheels. Together, this system of food retailers demonstrates the distinctive food system supporting Mexico City.
RESEARCH on MEXICO CITY
HCP REPORTS
PAPERS
Opening Access to Urban Food Security Data in Africa from the Hungry Cities Partnership
The Hungry Cities Partnership (HCP) initiated a 7-year programme of food system research in eight cities of the Global South in January 2015: Mexico City, Mexico; Kingston, Jamaica; Windhoek, Namibia; Cape Town, South Africa; Maputo, Mozambique; Nairobi, Kenya; Bangalore, India; and Nanjing, China. This paper describes the research process in the four African cities of Cape Town, Maputo, Nairobi, and Windhoek. The HCP data provide rich and context-specific information useful in avoiding generalizations in theory and inserting a Southern and ...
Towards a New Food Security Index for Urban Household Food Security
The multidimensionality of food security can confound both statistical modelling and clear policy narratives. That complexity can become amplified in urban areas where food security is often a function of both local and global factors. Rather than focusing on one dimension of food security metrics, this investigation proposes a method for building an index of urban household food access, utilization and stability. The performance of this index is compared across three aggregation methods using household surveys collected from five cities ...
The Role of Infrastructure Access in Urban Household Vulnerability to Food Insecurity in Southern Cities
The geographical concentration of poverty in informal neighbourhoods across cities is a common socio-economic feature of the urban form. Many of these impoverished areas also suffer from limited access to urban infrastructure. Given the expense and planning necessary to develop urban infrastructure, these areas are socially vulnerable in part because of their exclusion from urban master plans. This vulnerability is made more severe by the knock-on impacts of limited infrastructure access on other aspects of human insecurity. This paper uses ...
Governing the Informal Food Sector in Cities of the Global South
The role of the informal food sector in the urban food system cannot be appreciated or understood without the compilation and analysis of systematic and representative data on the activities of informal enterprises across a city and along food supply chains outside it. At present, there are significant gaps in the knowledge base about the character, operation, and roles of the informal food sector; a pre-requisite for sound and supportive governance. This paper presents evidence on the relative importance of ...
Urban Food Deserts in Nairobi and Mexico City
Recent conceptualizations of “food deserts” have expanded from a sole focus on access to supermarkets, to food retail outlets, to all household food sources. Each iteration of the urban food desert concept has associated food sourcing behaviour in relation to household poverty, food insecurity, and dietary diversity characteristics. While the term continues to evolve, there has been little empirical evidence to test whether these associations hold in cities of the Global South. This discussion paper empirically tests the premises of ...
Compounding Vulnerability: A Model of Urban Household Food Security
The efficiency of the infrastructure systems in cities will define the extent to which dystopic visions of urban futures become a reality. At the level of the individual household, vulnerability to hazards in cities is defined, in part, by the ability to access essential resources and services. This discussion paper proposes a model to help explain the relationship between access to urban infrastructure systems and household vulnerability to food insecurity. Food access in cities is primarily achieved through food purchases, ...
Hungry Cities of the Global South
The recent inclusion of an urban Sustainable Development Goal in the Post-2015 UN Development Agenda represents an important acknowledgement of the reality of global urbanization and the many social, economic, infrastructural and political challenges posed by the human transition to a predomi- nantly urban world. However, while the SDG provides goals for housing, transportation, land use, cultural heritage and disaster risk prevention, food is not mentioned at all. This discussion paper aims to correct this unfortunate omission by reviewing the ...
POLICY BRIEFS
An Urban Perspective on Food Security in the Global South
The global food security policy community should reorient its actions on food security in the Global South to consider the urban food consumer. Since it is currently working with value chains in rural areas, we recommend that this view is extended into urban areas. Specifically, global and multilateral actors and national and local governments need to prioritize an urban food security agenda by engaging in and strengthening intra-urban value chains. This will have the dual result of lowering prices and ...
The SDGs, Food Security and Urbanization in the Global South
As governments develop policies to achieve SDG 2 in rapidly urbanizing countries, the need to pay particular attention to the role of the informal economy, non-food issues, pro-poor pricing structures and healthy food consumption patterns will increase. The case studies in Mexico, China, Kenya and India have highlighted important food security challenges facing urban dwellers and how to overcome them by targeting existing food systems such as supermarkets, the informal economy and PDSs. While local context will dictate the best ...
BOOK CHAPTER
Participatory Paradoxes: Global Urban Policy in the Post 2015 Sustainable Development Agenda
“Participation” has been a pivotal focus of urban studies since the 1960s. However, it is only over the last decade that new research aspects and critical debates on this subject have emerged across a wide range of disciplines. The changing role of planners, the rejection of traditional decision-making processes, the emergence of grassroots initiatives, the social differences that manifest in urban structures, and pressing ecological challenges—all of these are subjects that are redefining this field. The Participatory City is the ...
THESES
None available
JOURNAL ARTICLES
Do Urban Food Deserts Exist in the Global South? An Analysis of Nairobi and Mexico City
Recent conceptualizations of ‘food deserts’ have expanded from a sole focus on access to supermarkets, to food retail outlets, to all household food sources. Each iteration of the urban food desert concept has associated this kind of food sourcing behavior to poverty, food insecurity, and dietary diversity characteristics. While the term continues to evolve, there has been little empirical evidence to test whether these assumed associations hold in cities of the Global South. This paper empirically tests the premises of ...
(Re)constructing Informality and “Doing Regularization” in the Conservation Zone of Mexico City
This paper examines the introduction of land-use planning requirements into the regularization process of informal settlements in areas designated as “conservation land” in Mexico City. Since 1997, the government has increasingly deployed digital technologies to map and track informal settlement in conservation land in order to select those eligible for reclassification as “residential land use”: a prerequisite for other stages in the regularization process, including property titling, access to urban services and subsidised loans for home improvements. We argue that ...