Currently, over half of the world population lives in urban areas. Trends show that the urban population will continue to grow and most of that growth will be in countries with developing economies such as Mexico. Calthorpe Analytics partnered with Centro Mario Molina, a leading environmental NGO in Mexico, to adapt the RapidFire and UrbanFootprint models to Mexico and to build and analyze regional scenarios for the 20 million population Mexico City region.
This exciting collaboration built a framework that can be deployed across Mexico and Latin America, and is being used to frame critical growth and social equity issues in Mexico City with information about the climate, energy, water, health, and fiscal impacts of federal, state, and local development, transportation, and housing policy choices.
Calthorpe Analytics generated three scenarios for the Mexico City Metropolitan Area to analyze and evaluate the consequences of different urban growth options. These scenarios were compared for their impacts on land consumption, local infrastructure costs, energy and water use, auto kilometers traveled, and travel time spent in private cars and in public transportation.
Analyzing the trend or “business as usual” scenario identified important critical improvement areas that were incorporated into the vision scenario, resulting ina reduction of up to 80% in land consumption and infrastructure costs, savings of $4,500 pesos per capita in annual energy costs, and a 20% annual decrease in water consumption. In addition, the vision scenario exhibits a 13% reduction in annual kilometers traveled by private automobiles.
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