Scaling and Population Loss in Mexican Urban Centres

Cities are supposed to be busiest at their heart. In Mexico, the opposite happened. Over three decades of booming growth, people drained out of city centres and piled up on the fringes — in every single one of the country’s 69 large metropolitan areas.

The paradox: booming cities, emptying centres

Between 1990 and 2020, all 69 metropolitan areas lost population in their central zone, even as every one of them grew overall. Nationwide, central areas shed 2.5 million residents.

Review your city and compare against other city

Cities grow by stretching: Find where your city is

We found that cities expand in a predictable way: the population distribution at one date is simply the earlier distribution stretched outward.

A city’s later population map can be recovered by taking its earlier map and simply stretching it outward. The single number that measures that stretch is the urban expansion factor Φ — how far the population distribution has been pulled away from the centre between two dates.

This is a plain-language visualization summary of the research article Peraza-Mues, G.G., Resendiz, E., Figueroa-Soriano, R., Prieto-Curiel, R., Ponce-Lopez, R. (2026) [Forthcoming] Scaling and Population Loss in Mexican Urban Centres. Nature Communications. (Accepted 30 June, 2026)

Affiliations:

  • Tecnológico de Monterrey (Center for the Future of Cities; School of Government and Public Transformation; School of Architecture, Art and Design)

  • Complexity Science Hub, Vienna.

This web summary and visualizations were created by Gonzalo G. Peraza-Mues, Eugen Resendiz, and Juan E. Díaz Noguez.