Monitoring the land consumption rate of urban growth from the Urban Footprint of Mexico, an online national cartographic platform

Abstract

The spatial monitoring of the urban expansion and related population growth is useful for urban planning assessment of cities and megacities in the global South. Although market driven public programs for peri-urban low-income housing have retained much attention over the past twenty-five years in Mexico, a spatially explicit database of the consequent urban footprint together with the population census information has not been available online to the public. In this research, we build a geoscientific data collection consisting of:

A built-up layer in 2000 and 2010 for the 10 major metropolitan areas of the Mexico Central Altiplano Region;

A built-up layer in 2000 for the remaining 14 most prominent cities of the Mexican Urban System.

A land consumption index at county (“Municipio”) level in the Mexico Central Altiplano Region.

The Urban Footprint of Mexico  is the first online national cartography incorporating built-up and demographic expansion.