Not many areas in the city, or even in the world, have transformed so drastically in so little time like Santa Fe has; it’s one of the districts in Mexico City that in just a few years went from being one of the city’s dumps to one of the most forward and expensive areas in town.

The project of Santa Fe arose as an initiative from an interdisciplinary group of architects, urban planners and engineers, who proposed to the then governor of the city, Carlos Hank González, the transformation of one of the most degraded areas in the city: the Santa Fe garbage dumps, into a “first-world” area, taking advantage of its closeness to some of the high level areas like Lomas de Chapultepec, Tecamachalco and other fancy suburbs that started forming in the 80’s in the West sector of the city.

An integral plan of urban development was designed for this purpose, which in a gradual way would start dividing and building the necessary infrastructure to attract private investment and to be able to finance the city plan that would have to serve as a model for future developments; dividing the lands according to their purpose, determining the heights of buildings and the quantity of green areas it must contain. It was in this way that in less than 10 years, the area started to become populated with several transnational and national corporations which found Santa Fe an ideal environment to develop and introduce themselves to the global world of business. Simultaneously, the construction of the Santa Fe shopping mall began, being the largest in Latinamerica, it attracted important international commercial chains and together with the development of real estate projects, some of which were directed by outstanding Mexican architects like Ricardo Legorreta and Teodoro González de León, facilitated the population process of the area.

The last phase of the integral plan of urban development of Santa Fe is now taking place; it consists in the construction of a great number of office and apartment buildings, some of them with more than 45 floors, which will be interesting examples of international architecture.

In spite of the fact that the area’s attractiveness has diminished in the last few years, due to insufficient public transport and the fact that young families with a high income have decided to settle in centric districts like the Condesa area, Polanco and the Del Valle area, Santa Fe doesn’t stop being an interesting area, thanks to its modern architecture and its modern urban planning, which rapidly transformed a dump into a world-class area.