Guadalajara Mapping

By Andrea Boschetti, Federico Parolotto - 13 June 2013

An inclusive, mineral city

Located in the central eastern part of the State of Jalisco, Mexico, Guadalajara is the world’s metropolis subject of this edition’s “radiographic” examination.
After Dublin, Milan and New York, we now consider another extremely complex conglomeration in terms of the many successive layers of history that have made the city what it is today. A Baroque town, Guadalajara underwent rapid growth during the 1970s to accommodate an unprecedented demographic boom, with the result that the population now exceeds four million.
As in the other cities of the series, the four maps give density distribution snapshots of the city’s resident population, its services (including quality-of-life indicators like hotels, restaurants and neighbourhood shops), public transport, and natural vegetation and public parks.
Like many metropolises in the Americas, Guadalajara was originally laid out with an isotropic grid structure, albeit not of uniform density. A surprising feature is how this orthogonal grid, clearly apparent in the historic centre, was subsequently overlaid in some areas by a hub and spoke pattern that drove the piecemeal outward growth during the 1970s. The original grid has nonetheless remained a fundamental feature of the city down the centuries.
The population density map shows how the city centre with its intricate, seemingly endless street pattern is relatively uninhabited. This is the result of progressive degradation of certain central areas, in turn perhaps also due to the centre’s inaccessibility to private transport and distance from the main urban thoroughfares, like Avenida Hidalgo to the north. In fact neighbourhoods immediately outside the city centre like Zapopan to the north, are densely populated.
Synonymous with urban quality of life, the services distribution map for Guadalajara, considered the cultural capital of Latin America, evidences...