- Mexico City, around 20 million people live there today
- Its dominant geo-morphology is an endorheic basin (a closed drainage basin) surrounded by mountains and hills
- The area of the basin is 9,600 km2
- The original basin hosted 5 lakes fed by 45 rivers
- Most of the streams come from the top of the hills
- The annual rainfall range in Mexico City is 863 mm and the average of the annual temperature goes from 12 to 16 °C (minimum -2 °C to maximus 32 °C)
- This basin has hosted at least 6 different big human settlements in the last 2,200 years:
- Cuicuilco: 20,000 inhabitants ,year 200 BCE
- Teotihuacan: 100,000 inhabitants , year 400 CE *Sixth city in the world by population at that time
- Tenochtitlan: 300,000 inhabitants, year 1500 CE *Compared to Venice by European conquistadores
- Capital City of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, 1521: 130,000 inhabitants, year 1790 CE
- Mexico City after independence, 1821: 500,000 inhabitants, year 1900
- Metropolitan Area of the Valley of Mexico, 1940 onwards:
- 1,800,000 inhabitants, year 1940
- 13,000,000 inhabitants, year 1980 *IT BECOMES A MEGACITY
- 20,000,000 inhabitants, year 2010
- Jorge Legorreta Gutierrez, one of the great specialists of the basin of Mexico asked: How, in less than 500 years, a basin of one thousand square kilometres becomes the current land-base megalopolis dwelled by 20 million people?
- There are multifarious explanations and those have been reviewed in thousands of books and publications
- The visual aspect of this transformation is still generating analysis and material
- Here, a time lapse view of the current central area of Mexico City
- This is one of the biggest Ecological Footprints that human presence have produced on the planet
Tomas Filsinger 2005
EmergingTerritories 
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