MEXICO CITY (dpa) – For decades, Mexico City was the epitome of unbridled urban growth.
Year for year the population soared inexorably as people fled the countryside in typical Third World country fashion while birth rates in the world’s largest Spanish speaking nation remained high.It has transformed the old Aztec town of Tenochtitlan into an urban Moloch notorious for its air pollution.According to the doomsday prophesies of the 1980s the city should have collapsed under its own size by the turn of the century.Yet actual population developments have contradicted the cliche that the major cities of emerging countries are condemned to unlimited growth.Greater Mexico, with its official population of 18.5 million, may be the second largest in the world after Tokyo. But the Zona Metropolitana, the metropolitan district consisting of the federal district of Mexico City and 38 surrounding municipalities, is growing only slowly. According to estimates by the national population council CONAPO it will rise to “only” 20.5 million by 2010.Earlier forecasts had said Mexico City’s population would already be at between 25 million and 30 million.“Mexico City is no longer a magnet,” said CONAP spokesman Miguel Angel Lopez.For years more people have been leaving than moving into the city. Only the birth rate, although falling, is managing to keep the population slowly rising, if below the national average.High levels of crime, pollution, unemployment and high prices have become a turn off for many.A CONAPO study shows that migration flows within the country of 101 million people have changed direction. The states bordering the United States and Caribbean coast have seen above average population increases.CONAPO points to a change in Mexican economic policy. Until the start of the 1980s this was seen in a state-conducted industrialisation process very much geared to the domestic market.Most industries thus settled in the city close to the government.An economic opening outwards amid globalization has led to a change with increasingly more export-oriented companies setting up in other parts of the country.For young Mexicans, who mostly have fewer children than their parents, there are many reasons for wanting to leave the capital.“Life here is cheaper and you can afford to buy property in good residential areas,” insurance salesman Carlos Pelletier told the magazine Proceso of his reasons for moving to Queretaro, 200 kilometres north of Mexico City.Management expert Enrique Morin is another to move to the town, after doctors warned of the dangers the Mexico City smog was causing to his son.“We are earning less here but we have sacrificed the economic benefits for our health,” she said.
