There's a constant that repeats itself in urban planning in almost every major city in the world: the diagnosis is correct, the proposed solutions concentrate power, and whoever already lived there is the one who pays the cost of "progress." Mexico City's 2025-2045 General Development Plan (PGD) is no exception. It is, in fact, the most recent example of a well-known formula.
The PGD identifies real problems: metropolitan fragmentation, underused land, insufficient citizen participation, disorderly growth. The diagnosis is well done. The problem lies in the solutions, which repeat mistakes that cities like Stuttgart, Amsterdam, and Tokyo already made and corrected at enormous cost. There are proven alternatives: strengthening local institutions instead of stacking new layers of regulation on top of them.
The first mistake is what the plan calls "Casas de Gobierno" (Government Houses) in the boroughs. The idea is to create metropolitan offices that oversee and coordinate what elected local governments should already be coordinating among themselves. It sounds reasonable until you read it carefully. This isn't about strengthening the boroughs. It's about creating a bureaucratic layer above them that answers to the central government, not to the residents who elected their local representatives. When a parallel "coordinating" structure emerges, what actually happens is that the original body gets hollowed out of power without the political cost of formally eliminating it. The boroughs will keep existing. They'll just have less real autonomy than they have today. An alternative would be to allocate direct budgets to the boroughs so they can coordinate without intermediaries, as was done in some areas of Paris to resolve similar tensions.
The second problem is the citizen participation the plan proposes. The new neighborhood assemblies sound good on paper, but they duplicate what the Citizen and Social Participation Committees (COPACOS) already do, with one crucial difference: these new structures answer to the central authority. When participation is convened by whoever already holds the power, it isn't participation. It's legitimation. Amsterdam learned this in the 1970s, when it tried to institutionalize participation from the top down and ended up with costly processes that produced consensus nobody respected. What worked was strengthening existing neighborhood councils with their own budgets and a limited veto power, not creating new bodies to compete with them. In CDMX, something similar could be explored: giving COPACOS real tools to influence local decisions, without overlap.
Redensification is where the plan has the best intentions and the most dangerous execution. Densifying established areas like Del Valle or Narvarte makes urban sense: there's existing infrastructure, there's transit, there are services. The problem is the order of operations. The PGD proposes densifying first and fixing infrastructure later, or worse, assuming that existing infrastructure can handle more load. Stuttgart and Munich solved this the other way around: they first invested in expanding service capacity—water, drainage, mobility—and only then opened up the land for greater density. Here the opposite is being proposed. What that means in practice is that current residents absorb the cost of saturation while developers capture the profit. That's not modernization. It's cost transfer with a technical name. Prioritizing infrastructure first not only avoids that harm—it builds community trust before the bulldozers arrive.
The recycling of underused properties, on the other hand, is a solid urban planning proposal. Converting vacant lots, obsolete warehouses, and surface parking lots into mixed uses has decades of backing. The problem here isn't the concept but the almost total absence of anti-corruption mechanisms in the text. "Flexibilizing" land use without clear rules about who can request changes, what criteria approve them, and how decisions are audited is, at best, an invitation to discretion. At worst, it's speculation with an official seal. Every time a Latin American city has "flexibilized" its land without clear checks and balances, the beneficiaries have been the same as always. To counter this, transparent public bidding rules could be adopted, as in Tokyo, where community auditing prevents abuse.
The problem underlying all of this is financing. A twenty-year plan that describes its funding sources as "captured land value gains" and "budget reallocations" doesn't have financing. It has intentions. There are no year-by-year budget tables. There are no itemized project costs. There is no binding mechanism obligating future administrations to continue what this administration proposes. Any government that takes office in 2030 can reinterpret, pause, or capture this plan without violating a single rule, because there are no financial rules to violate. This isn't a minor flaw. It's the difference between a plan and a public relations document. There are alternatives: independent metropolitan funds, financed by shared local taxes, operating under statutory mandates, as in some regions of Germany.
Cities that work don't work because they had great plans. They work because they protected what already worked while strictly regulating what was new. Tokyo has an urban density that should be chaotic and yet functions because its building codes, transit systems, and local participation processes have spent decades adjusting incrementally, without grand institutional revolutions. Amsterdam preserved its canals and human scale not because a plan ordered it, but because residents had real power to block whatever would destroy the existing fabric. CDMX's PGD correctly diagnoses the problems and proposes solutions that centralize power without real checks and balances. That combination has a well-known track record.
Urban fragmentation—the real problem the plan is trying to solve—isn't solved with more central power. It's solved with clear rules that all actors must follow, with local institutions that have their own resources and accountability to their communities, and with verification mechanisms that don't depend on the goodwill of whoever is in government at the time. Decades of comparative urban research document this. It's not a new idea. It's what the records of cities that have survived for centuries confirm: the ones that endure are the ones that distribute power widely enough that no one can fully capture them.
What's missing isn't a more ambitious plan. It's honesty about which institutions already work and are worth protecting, which rules are needed that no government can ignore, and which accountability mechanisms can operate without depending on whoever holds power. Twelve thousand years of urban history—from the first Mesopotamian cities to the neighborhoods surviving gentrification today—confirm that this question matters more than any master plan.
Stones don't lie, but historians sometimes do.
Sources:
1. Mexico City General Development Plan 2025-2045 (Government of CDMX)
2. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) — on local participation and urban fabric
3. Bertaud, Alain. Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities (2018) — on densification and infrastructure
4. Gehl, Jan. Cities for People (2010) — on human scale and neighborhood participation
5. OECD. Urban Policy Reviews: Mexico (2015) — on metropolitan governance in Latin American cities
