Mapping vertical urban growth in Mexico City in a seismic risk context

Due to the physical phenomenon known as resonance, the damages caused by the earthquakes of 1985 and 2017 in Mexico City have been strongly related to the number of storeys of collapsed buildings given the lacustrine nature of this territory. In spite of the apparent relationship between location, land value, building investment, urban planning and seismic risk, there has not been an attempt to correlate these variables to continue understanding the vulnerability of this city, and the way in which certain cadastral and urban planning instruments have been eventually increasing the risk. Therefore, this work correlate and map the mentioned variables and their changes in a period time from 2002 to 2012. Considering urban corridors as the sample, the results show that building codes, planning instruments and real estate trends have been implemented in a contradictory way. One the one hand, seismic zoning has been more precise in time. On the other hand, urban planning and real estate investments have been promoting densification in unstable soil. Therefore, future formulation of urban policies should be in consonance to seismic zones, without forgetting that seismic zoning and vertical growth are not a static phenomenon but a continuous one.