Managing the maelstrom: Decentralization planning for the Mexico City metropolis.

Abstract

From a current population near 19 million, the Mexico City metropolis may exceed 27 million by the year 2000. The many problems associated with this massive level of urban concentration include severe levels of air pollution, paralyzing congestion, and increasing costs of urban services provision. Meanwhile, the nation's periphery continues to suffer from severe economic and social underdevelopment relative to the nation's capital. Regional policies and plans to address these problems have been dominated by the concept of decentralizing the nation's urban-industrial system: i.e., dispersing urban and industrial growth from the metropolitan core to the national periphery. Mexican regional policy makers and planners have failed to adequately evaluate these proposed policies and plans for decentralization in a critical and rigorous manner. This evaluation must be made in terms of three critical criteria. The first is effectiveness: will a proposed plan genuinely return the benefits which are expected or hoped for? The second is efficiency: among several possible planning alternatives, which will return the greatest social benefits for the smallest social costs? The third is equity: which regional interest groups will be affected, and how will the costs and benefits be distributed among these groups? Research is based on three principal data sources: Mexico's National Development Plan: 1983-1988, which has predominantly determined the nation's sectoral, social, and regional policies during the de la Madrid administration; a plan prepared for the quasi-governmental Commission for the Conurbation of the Nation's Center, for urban-industrial deconcentration from Mexico City into the nation's Central Region; and extensive fieldwork in Mexico City and several other Mexican urban centers, concerned with the actual practice of regional economic development in Mexico today. Based on this research, a regionally disaggregated cost-benefit framework is proposed for policy and planning evaluation, and particularly to facilitate conflict resolution, negotiation, and other forms of adjustment among the many powerful interest groups which compete for scarce regional development resources.