Who is the city for?

Who Is the City For? is a bilingual, public-facing ArcGIS StoryMaps project that helps community organizations and the general public understand how digital nomads, short-term rentals, and tourism pressures intersect with housing affordability and neighborhood change in Mexico City (CDMX) and Medellín. Rather than treating newcomers as the sole cause of gentrification, the project highlights how outcomes are shaped by policy choices and policy gaps, including what is regulated, what is monitored, what is enforced, and which residents are protected. Using a comparative, document-based approach, it synthesizes publicly available laws, official guidance, and credible reporting to describe how governance systems in both cities are responding to rapid shifts in demand and conflict, and draws on peer city examples across Latin America and beyond to illustrate a range of tools, from short-term rental rules and transparency measures to strategies that support cost-of-living stability and long-term residents. The core deliverable is a goal-based policy toolkit organized around stabilizing rents and preventing displacement, managing short-term rentals and tourist-use conversion, strengthening tenant protections and enforcement capacity, addressing neighborhood conflict and public-space impacts, and improving transparency and data. The project also includes a section on public narratives and community responses, using cultural vignettes to document how people express belonging and respond to neighborhood change through art, music, and social media, ultimately reframing the debate around the central question of who benefits from urban change and who gets to stay.