The Mexican metropolisation process presents critical challenges, mainly connected to the growing demands from peripheral municipalities to accommodate new residential developments. This chapter presents the second scale of the gatedness analysis framework, focusing on a regional scale using the case study setting of Puebla's metropolitan area. It explores how structural conditions, such as regional planning policies, limited municipal capacities, and financial interests in suburban development, can incentivise or constrain the gating process. It also explores how voluntary displacement, urban branding, and social practices connected to the privatisation of public life are instrumental in the appeal of gated urban life. Finally, it describes different physical barriers and control measures used in the city’ sprawling peripheries. This chapter presents the historical and structural conditions that paved the way for peripheral gated spaces while exploring the aspirations and anxieties that drove voluntary displacement to the suburbs and the factors behind extreme cases of fortification like the gated community Lomas de Angelópolis.

Regional structural incentives and constraints for metropolitan urban fragmentation

Between the 1990s and early 2020s, Puebla's metropolitan area has witnessed the emergence and proliferation of gated communities and other gated public and private facilities. Puebla– Tlaxcala's Grand Metropolitan Area (Zona Metropolitana Puebla– Tlaxcala) stands as the fourth largest metropolitan area in Mexico, with a population of 3,200,000 (INEGI, 2021). It is one of the nation's key commercial, educational, and industrial hubs; its constant growth was triggered by the arrival of one of the largest Volkswagen factories in America in the 1960s. This metro area has been identified as a ‘strategic spatial unit’ and one of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries’ most dynamic and fast-growing regions (OECD, 2013).