Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This paper presents some findings of a research project about Mexico City's urban regulation compliance. The starting point of this research is a very empirical and even intuitive question: how does urban land regulation in Mexico City work? Is it followed and obeyed by the real state sector? How should be understand the omnipresence of official notices announcing the closure of construction works in the city? The paper aims to explore some explanations for housing development sprawl and the proliferation of illegal urban land use practices. A firs intuition to answer these questions suggested to analyze the legal framework applied to regulate Mexico City's land uses. A second step was to find information about the zoning and construction authorizations. This evidence let to identify some regularities in the compliance of urban regulations, but specially, it provided a general overview of urban regulation in the city in order to explain how the regulation compliance works in real state sector’s practices.