Naucalpan de Juarez
Nahuatl for 'four neighborhoods,' Naucalpan designed Ciudad Satélite as an independent city but positive feedback loops absorbed it into Mexico City's gravity—now the State of Mexico's largest GDP contributor where reef-like niche partitioning separates export wealth from 268 informal settlements along a polluted river.
People have lived along the Hondo River since the Tlatilca settled here around 600 BCE, but the name that stuck came later—the Aztecs called it Naucalpan, Nahuatl for 'place of four neighborhoods.' Six centuries on, the four neighborhoods have become a parable about what happens when a satellite gets captured by a planet's gravity. Ciudad Satélite—literally 'Satellite City'—was designed in 1957 as an independent commuter community northwest of Mexico City, separated by a planned greenbelt. The greenbelt lasted a generation. Positive feedback loops consumed it: each new development attracted workers, workers attracted services, services attracted more development, and the gap between Naucalpan and Mexico City filled with concrete until the satellite was absorbed into the megacity. Greater Mexico City now holds over 21 million people across the municipalities of the Zona Metropolitana del Valle de México, and Naucalpan—population roughly 834,000—is the largest contributor to the State of Mexico's GDP.
The absorption follows the logic of preferential attachment: larger nodes in a network attract more connections. Mexico City's economic mass pulls satellite municipalities into its orbit with a force proportional to its size. Naucalpan's roughly $12.7 billion in international exports—overwhelmingly motor vehicles at $5.77 billion, with smaller contributions from pharmaceuticals and engine parts—flows through supply chains that exist because Mexico City exists. The Torres de Satélite, five prismatic towers designed by Luis Barragán and Mathias Goeritz with color by Jesús Reyes Ferreira as symbols of modernist independence, now stand in a traffic circle surrounded by the very conurbation they were meant to escape.
The municipality operates like a reef system where organisms sharing the same substrate occupy entirely different ecological niches. Ciudad Satélite and Lomas Verdes house upper-middle-class families in planned developments—the sunlit upper reef, rich in nutrients and connected to global currents. Meanwhile, 268 informal settlements shelter roughly 9,000 families along the polluted Hondo River and abandoned railroad tracks, where some households spend half their monthly income on privately sourced water because municipal infrastructure does not reach them. This is niche partitioning driven not by species preference but by resource exclusion: the same municipal boundary contains neighborhoods plugged into international export networks and neighborhoods where the Hondo River carries untreated sewage past front doors. The municipality generates enough wealth to cover its citizens' needs twice over, yet a fifth of residents live below the poverty line.
Naucalpan's allometric scaling problem is the megacity's problem in miniature. As urban organisms grow, infrastructure does not scale proportionally—water systems, transport networks, and waste management require disproportionately more investment per additional resident. The result is a municipality where billions in vehicle exports share a boundary with flood-prone informal housing built on riverbanks. The Nahuatl name promised four neighborhoods. The reality is two: one plugged into the global economy, one plugged into the Hondo River's sewage.