This essay uses Google Earth images to examine urban morphologies in Mexico City. Vertical views of the world embraced by cartographers and planners have long legitimated claims to authority, truth, and temporal power. Since its introduction in 2008, Google satellite view has only reinforced such presumptions, particularly given the company's entangled relations with the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Agency. Nevertheless, aerial photographs provide an undeniably useful source for architects and urbanists to study city form and metropolitan expansion. The vertical view is particularly valuable for its capacity to illuminate spatial relations that are otherwise difficult to trace on the ground, but which nonetheless shape everyday human experience. The goal of this essay is to discern a range of city forms in the rapidly expanding metropolis, and to contemplate the ways in which urban morphology frames everyday life in one of the world's largest conurbations. It is part of a longer-term study of Mexico City's urbanism based on fieldwork, mapping, and spatial analysis.

The conceptual dyad of urban/rural has long formed the basis of the planner’s description of space. However, the terms themselves are increasingly insufficient to describe the world in which we live, presenting as overdetermined and reductive signifiers. In this photographic essay, we use Google Earth satellite images to examine a series of locations where descriptors such as ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ falter against manifold, shifting, and unstable landscape forms. We draw on Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the abstract spaces of capitalism, globalization, and urbanization, which he argued are dialectically produced through their interaction with landscape. However, where Lefebvre contended that abstraction instantiates in more or less discrete typological forms, we argue that abstract space only becomes intelligible under conditions of ‘entanglement,’ where qualities such as ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ become momentarily comprehensible at the instant we observe or describe them. In the end, holding the world still long enough to describe it reveals crucial patterns and relations, but always at a cost, always with the risk of reduction, simplification, and overdetermination. Such pitfalls are inevitable in research; however, they become all the more prevalent as the terms we use to describe the world become less and less applicable, and as the accumulation of anomalies compels us to build new models and to tell new stories.