Abstract Body

The Mexico City Metropolitan Area, one of the largest megacities in the world, is exposed to the effects of multiple risks -geological, hydrometeorological, water stress, air pollution, and socio-political uprisings-, addressed reactively through short-term responses. Through this interdisciplinary study we investigated the relationship between intra-urban and peripheral green areas, urban and infrastructure systems, and water-related ecosystem services concerning social and environmental vulnerability, to inform decision making from an urban resilience standpoint. Information and data for Mexico City’s Metropolitan Area currently available are uneven, sectoral, and not integrated, which hinders efforts towards a systemic approach. Through an interdisciplinary team of urban planners, urban designers, biologists, environmental scientists, and geographers, we applied a hybrid methodology of spatial analysis to align and correlate diverse sets of data. A series of cartographies and an updated database of integrated environmental, urban, social, as well as risk and vulnerability information was generated. Its analysis was conducted through several workshops between the authors and specialists in different fields to corroborate, weigh-in, and discuss conclusions, based on a multi-criteria decision-making support software. A risk model and submodels were developed as a result, bioregional systems were defined, and recommendations for plans and interventions were included. The Mexico City Metropolitan Area represents a sustainability laboratory for testing integrated solutions that address the most pressing urban-environmental issues cities are currently facing. The study is intended to become a tool for decision-making processes in large heterogeneous metropolises, such as Mexico City, towards a proactive, collaborative, sustainable, and integrated understanding of complex urban systems.