The systematic inability of different levels of government to guide urban development has contributed to increasing levels of urban sprawl and the accumulation of severe service deficits that reduce the overall quality of life and may impair the metropolitan region’s future development. While these challenges are generally well understood by policy makers in Mexico, it has nevertheless proven difficult to address them due to weak urban planning (Herbert et al., Municipalities regularly authorise land subdivisions without updated master plans and without a metropolitan framework to gauge the long-term costs of the urban sprawl. Moreover, they are often operating with outdated land-use plans - some approved more than 25 years ago, when the region was a fraction of its current size - which do little to guide more sustainable development patterns.