Informal Metropolis: Life on the Edge of Mexico City, 1940-1976

In the 1940s, as Mexican families trekked north to the United States in search of a better life, tens of millions also left their towns and villages for Mexico’s major cities. In Mexico City migrant families excluded from new housing programs began to settle on a dried-out lake bed near the airport, eventually transforming its dusty plains into an informal city of more than one million people.

In Informal Metropolis David Yee uncovers how this former lake bed grew into the world’s largest s...