Quantification of the Urban Public Open Space for Metropolitan Municipalities in Mexico Using OpenStreetMap

Mario Chirinos Colunga 

This is the first study to quantify urban public open space and its accessibility across all metropolitan municipalities in Mexico, following a methodology similar to that proposed by UN-Habitat for Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11.7. It relies exclusively on open data from official sources, National Institute of Statistics, Geography and Informatics (INEGI), the Ministry of Agrarian, Territorial and Urban Development (SEDATU) and from OpenStreetMap (OSM), alongside a precise definition of the OSM dataset subset constituting public open space. The objective is to create a catalog for comparing municipalities or metropolitan areas and to provide an overview of the situation nationwide. The data used included: public space area polygons from OSM; urban zone polygons from INEGI’s National Geostatistical Framework; metropolitan area data from SEDATU’s Metrópolis de México 2020 publication; and population data from INEGI’s Population and Housing Census. The SDG 11.7.1 indicator comprising the proportion of land allocated to urban public open space and the proportion of the urban population with access to such space was calculated for all metropolitan municipalities in Mexico.