Tequitinitlan
Tequitinitlan
𐐻𐐯𐐿𐐶𐐨𐐻𐐨𐑌𐐨𐐻𐑊𐐰𐑌 | |
|---|---|
   Clockwise from top: Cityscape of the central wards, Green River Business Center, Coral Tower | |
| Country | Zacapican |
| Republic | Zacaco |
| Atlepetl | Tequitinitlan |
| Established | 1914 |
| Districts | 12
|
| Government | |
| • Altepepixqui | Manauia Tlaxetli |
| • First Altepehuaque | Cachima Ezmac |
| • Chief Magistrate | Tzotemoc Miltic |
| Area | |
| • Total | 349 km2 (135 sq mi) |
| Elevation | 321 m (1,053 ft) |
| Population (2022 census) | |
| • Total | 4,706,097 |
| • Density | 13,485/km2 (34,930/sq mi) |
Tequitinitlan (Nahuatl: 𐐻𐐯𐐿𐐶𐐨𐐻𐐨𐑌𐐨𐐻𐑊𐐰𐑌), known colloquially as Tequi, is the second largest city in Zacapican and the capital of the Zacaco Republic. It is located 500 kilometers southeast of Quitzapatzaro and some 200 kilometers inland from the Makrian ocean, in the southern Zacaco valley. Tequitinitlan is a large city with 4.7 million citizens spread out over 349 square kilometers, giving an average population density of roughly 13,000 per square kilometer. The city is the most well known example of the Zacapine planned cities, built from scratch beginning in 1914 and expanding outwards through a series of urban expansion plans as the population grew. The city center was purpose built to serve as the political center for the Zacaco Republic, relocating the government from its temporary headquarters in Tecolotlan into new administrative offices, a new legislature building and a new set of courthouses. The needs of the expanding population and municipal economy which have emerged since, as well as the expansion of the city and Republican governments have necessitated the near constant expansion of the original facilities and neighborhoods, rapidly advancing the frontiers of the Tequitinitlan altepetl into the surrounding flat land of the Zacaco valley.
As a true metropolis in the Zacaco Republic, Tequitinitlan is a major cultural, economic and financial center for the surrounding region. Tequitinitlan is not only the political center of Zacaco, but the focus point of much of its industry and business activity as well. Many of the small to mid sized industrial cities of the southern Zacaco valley are part of an interconnected supply chain, the central hub of which is the city of Tequitinitlan with its own large manufacturing sector. The city houses the Zacaco Mutual Bank, and a major branch of the Agricultural Bank of Zacapican, both of which are deeply involved in funding development and investment in Tequitinitlan and the surrounding region. While the city is mostly known for its steel works and traditional manufacturing, it is also home to some of the more high end manufacturing in Zacapican aimed at ensuring the city's industry is able to keep up to the national and international standard and diversify itself. In particular, Tequitinitlan is home to most of Zacapican's semiconductor manufacturing, a complex productive process vital for the manufacturing of modern computers. This makes the industrial city a key link in the supply chains of the Zacaco Republic, the wider United Zacapine Republics, and the worldwide economy.
Etymology
The name of the city of Tequitinitlan derives from the Nahuatl words for "worker" (𐐻𐐯𐐿𐐶𐐨𐐻𐐨𐑌𐐨, tequitini) and the suffix -tlan (𐐻𐑊𐐰𐑌) denoting a place where such could be found. Directly translated, Tequitinitlan is the City of Workers, although this is also interpreted as the City of Work or Industry City. This naming convention stems from the political context of the city's foundation during the Xolotecate era, meant to evoke the ideals of the new and modern Zacapican the nation's leadership intended to foster. From its inception, Tequitinitlan was planned to house not only the government for the Zacaco Republic but also the machinery of the new industries being established all across the country which the high authorities intended to make the face of the nation.
History
The site of the future city of Tequitinitlan was chosen to lie over the ruins of Chichicuahuilco, a community of some 30,000 that had been destroyed by the violence of the Zacapine Revolution. Much of the city had been destroyed, services had collapsed and the inhabitants had fled into the countryside rather than starve in the dying city. By 1910, the site was a wasteland and a visible manifestation of the desolation of many Zacapine communities following the brutal civil conflict of the Revolution. The site was hand-picked by Tepachoani Xolotecatl Acuixoc, the powerful ruler that consolidated the post-war political system under his control and became famous for his implementation of aggresive modernization and industrialization initiatives across the country. It was Xolotecatl's stated intention to turn the site of the desolation of Chichicuahuico into a symbol of the new nation he was building, and the ideals of his government. Tequitinitlan was to be modern and industrial, and bear no vestiges of the old world of Aztapamatlan and the medieval way of life that had persisted in many parts of the Zacaco valley. Even its named was chosen to symbolize the industrial rebirth of Zacapican that the Xolotecatl regime wished to emphasize domestically and internationally. In many aspects of its design, Tequitinitlan was treated as a model city, a proving ground for the modernist concepts Xolotecatl wished to impliment across the country. It was also to serve a propaganda purpose of demonstrating to the Zacapine public, scarred and disillusioned with the promises of the Revolution after years of war and poverty, the many benefits that Xolotecatl's modernization process would provide. The objective was to demonstrate what the future of Zacapican would look like and how the modern Zacapine citizen should live, for which the Chichicuahuico site proved doubly suited thanks to its direct proximity to the peasant communities and milpas of the southern valley.
Urban Structure
The urban landscape of Tequitinitlan is somewhat unusual compared to other Zacapine cities due to its relatively young age and nature as a fully planned city established in the 20th century. The early designers of the city left a distinctive modernist mark on the planning and architecture of the city center and many of its iconic districts and buildings, setting Tequitinitlan apart from the decidedly older and more varied major cities of Zacapican such as Angatahuaca and Tecolotlan. The pre-planned nature of the city allowed for the implementation of a highly geometric and rationalized layout to the city districts, featuring long straight avenues and transit arteries, public transportation systems that could be pre-built before the urbanization of the area, and above all the somewhat iconic Zacapine urban concept of the Altepetlianca which would serve as a self contained calpolli. These altepetlianca districts were built from large multi-story apartment complexes ranging in size from 4 to 17 floors arranged in squares open on one side towards an internal park where a playground or sports field could be found. Each altepetlianca in Tequitinitlan was designed to house between 5,000 and 20,000 residents, equivalent to the average population of an industrial calpolli under the economic model of Zacapican, and would provide localized services such as shops, clinics, pharmacies, day-cares and primary schools within their perimeter for the ease and convenience of the residents. The concept of the altepetlianca was to house the entire workforce of a calpolli factory and their families in a single self-contained housing center complete with recreation space and all the ameneties necessary for the daily life of the community.
The overall layout of the city was that of a wheel, whose spokes were seven major axial avenues traveling from one end of the city to the opposite and all circling around the central wards where the government buildings, central plazas, education and leisure institutions would be housed. Outside the central wards, in the space between the axial avenues, a series of concentric roads would allow transit between the major avenues and into the bulk of the city itself, which would be made up altepetlianca housing in some areas and factory districts in others. Tequitinitlan was planned with an expansive metro system from the start, with many of the train tunnels excavated and set into place before any construction had begun on the districts above. In particular, lines were planned out in advance to provide transit to and from the outlying wards and the city center with its important services and institutions, as well as providing transport between those wards where the workers lived and the districts where their factories were located.
As the city expanded, priorities for the design of new neighborhoods changed. In particular, the provision of shops, schools and other amenities to each individual altepetlianca would be seen as inefficient and expensive sacrifices made for the sake of walkability. City services would be increasingly concentrated and centralized to cut costs in new neighborhoods, resulting in larger schools, hospitals and shops, while the average height of the apartment structures would rise from 4-6 stories to a height of 12-15 stories with less green space afforded between each block of housing. This would bring in a type of centralized service center reminiscent of a shopping mall, a previously alien concept to Zacapine cities, as shops would be moved from being spread out across street level into large consolidated structures that would increase the efficiency of these services and expand the number of citizens that could be serviced by a single shop or city service like a school or clinic. As with many Zacapine cities, Tequitinitlan has very little gradient between the town and the surrounding countryside. The built up structure of the distinctive urban apartment blocks continues right up to the edge of the city, where they transition abruptly to the open cultivated milpas of the surrounding Zacaco valley.
Transportation
Public Transportation
The Tequitinitlan public transportation system was prioritized during the design phases of the city over motor transport primarily due to the lower cost per capita of mass transit compared to providing motor vehicles to all future citizens of the city for their transportation needs. In particular, the city was planned to feature a mostly subterranean metro system of rapid transit to serve as the primary transportation system for ferrying workers to their jobs, students to schools, and citizens to after-work leisure activities. This was planned to work in conjunction with surface trams integrated with the axial avenues and concentric roads of the city to relay residents to within a ten minute walk of their residence. Motor vehicle transportation is accommodated on the road surfaces but is intended to be a tertiary system supplementing the rail transit network. Tequitinitlan as a planned city benfittied immensely in the installation of its metro network, where the difficult stage of preparing the underground tunnels was made relatively easy since they could be built first using a cut-and-cover method before any construction of the surface streets and buildings had taken place. Additionally, the Tequitinitlan metro was intended by the authorities to serve as a model to prove the efficacy of the system which was still in its infancy in the early 20th century, and in so doing encourage other cities to emulate the system themselves.
This combination of factors turned the Tequitinitlan metro into one of the most exemplary in Zacapican and the world. Today, the system counts with some 250 operational stations across 12 lines, serving a total of roughly 1.8 million daily riders, over a quarter of the city's total population and more than half of the working population. Emerging as one of the earliest such systems in the world at the time of its inauguration in 1915, the system has seen two major system-wide renovations in 1947 and 1985 in which rails, signal equipment and tunnel infrastructure was modernized and partially rebuilt in some cases. These overhauls represented major expenses for the city and required financial assistance from the Zacaco government and in part, the federal government of Zacapican, but were considered vital to due to the vital nature of the system to the basic daily operation of Tequitinitlan and its important industries. A third such major overhaul has been delayed in 2010 and 2016 due to cost overruns, as the municipal and republican governments have opted for less expensive localized works on problematic sections of the system.
Roadways have seen significant refurbishment and expansion beyond what was intended by the original plans of the city. The usage of automobiles expanded from the anticipated 20-50 vehicles per 1000 residents to upwards of 100 per 1000 residents, creating issues with traffic and the availability of parking. In many central wards of the city, extensive underground parking lots have been installed to alleviate the critical lack of available street parking particularly on holidays and weekends. The increase of road traffic has also been exacerbated by the addition of the city's omnibus system which directly utilize the roadways which were not designed for such a purpose. Designated bus lanes and bus stops have reduced the lanes available for other motor vehicles, although the additional public transit capacity added by the buses has served to mildly mitigate traffic by taking on passengers that might otherwise travel by car. However, the extensive nature of the three mass transit systems in the city has meant that an expansion of one system generally draws passengers from one of the other systems rather than removing drivers from the roadways.
Regional Connections
Tlatlacoyan station in central Tequitinitlan serves as the primary hub for passenger rail services across most of the southern Zacaco valley. The station is not equipped for high-speed rail, and instead operates dozens of low speed passenger lines connecting Tequitinitlan to its satellite cities. Service on these lines has expanded significantly in the past 40 years as the number of daily commuters using the system to travel from outlying communities into Tequitinitlan for work was risen consistently, representing a factor the city's original plans had not accounted for. In particular, new technology has been installed on many regional rail lines to enable the safe passage of fully loaded trains in short intervals of only a few minutes across the network during peak hours to accommodate the increased load of commuters onto the system, while the trains in the middle of the day and other off hours return to their originally intended frequency for dozens of minutes apart. Unlike the municipal mass transit networks which operate 24 hours a day, the regional rail system is subject to an six hour overnight shutdown between 11 at night and 5 in the morning.
Tequitinitlan airport, built in 1938 and expanded in 1969, features three 3,000 meter runways and three terminals with attached parking complexes connected by a self-contained tram network. As a significant hub in the air travel system in Zacapican, Tequitinitlan airport serves some 15 million travelers and 120,000 aircraft yearly, a statistic second only to the air travel statistics of Angatahuaca on the other side of the country. It is also a significant base for air freight and airmail services, with the largest tenant of the airport being not a passenger airline but the Zacapine national postal service. The airport is served by a special extension of the city's metro network as well as by two lines of the regional rail system allowing for incoming and outgoing passengers to travel quickly to and from the airport and the rest of the city.
Education
Economy
The foundational industry of Tequitinitlan is steel production, one of the mainstays of the Zacaco's economy and an important link in the supply chains for various manufacturing enterprises in Tequitinitlan, Zacaco and the west coast of Zacapican. The steel mills of Tequitinitlan were among the first in Zacapican to use arc furnaces melting iron using large volumes of electricity to remove impurities and produce steel. The steel industry, already a major activity in the eastern districts of Tequitinitlan, expanded significantly in magnitude in the 1960s and 1970s thanks to the systematic introduction of nuclear power to the Zacaco region under the Macehualtlatollo regime. Cheaper nuclear energy and growing generation capacity facilitated the use of Tequitinitlan's electric arc furnaces and dramatically increased the volume of steel that could be produced simply by providing more megawatt hours to the factory districts. By the 1990s, the percentage of the city's workforce employed in the steel industry had fallen to 30% from nearly 80% in 1920. However, the number of steel workers had risen from 55,000 to over 500,000 in the same period, demonstrating the steady growth of the steel industry even as the general economy expanded and diversified. The workforce of the steel industry consists of four different calpolli associations dividing 27 calpolleh between them, primarily housed directly within the eastern industrial district as well as the northern quarter of the city.
Most of the steel production of Tequitinitlan and its satellite communities today is exported across the Zacaco valley, a portion of which travels to the ports of Tecolotlan and Quitzapatzaro to the northwest where it will be loaded on ships destined for export routes or else be used directly in the shipyards and drydocks for producing and maintaining commercial vessels. However, a portion of the steel is moved around Tequitinitlan on trucks and local freight rail systems between the factory sectors for use in the city's manufacturing centers. Steel products created in Tequi factories range in complexity from toasters to battle tanks. The most significant employers in the Tequitinitlan manufacturing sector are Citlamatapalli Aviation with all 40,000 of the companies workers living and working in Tequitinitlan, Cuauhquetztia with its ACQZ Armor Works subsidiary employing 50,000 workers in the city, and a collection of automotive manufacturers in the southern quarter of Tequitinitlan known as the Motor City. These industries also require advanced metal alloys such as aluminum alloy, titanium alloy and synthetic polymers, many of which are manufactured in the satellite communities of the city or else in the other urban centers of the Zacaco valley.
The national chip industry under the Centlaxotlaltica calpolli conglomerate has a presence in Tequitinitlan, representing the high technology manufacturing sector in the city's economy. Tequitinitlan plays host to Fabricator 4, one of the five total facilities in operation across Zacapican, employing more than 7,000 specialized workers in Tequitinitlan. Due to the high level of expertise and qualifications needed in these facilities, a significant portion of those employed by Centlaxotlaltica in Tequitinitlan are from other regions of Zacapican with a few being foreign born citizens who have subsequently relocated to work at the plants. Fabricator 4 opened in 2010, after which Tequitinitlan University began developing a specialized curriculum designed to train city natives to find employment in the semiconductor manufacturing industry as part of a plan put in place by the altepetl leadership to gradually phase natives into the highest paying manufacturing jobs in the city. The chip foundry of Fabricator 4 produces the newer type of 300mm wafers which are the international industry standard today. The development of microchip production in Tequitinitlan represents an effort by the national government to spread out the development of the more advanced sectors of the Zacapine economy which were previously highly concentrated in Angatahuaca, such that a greater portion of the population could benefit from the availability of high end jobs and standard of living increases such industries are expected to bring in their wake. Tequitinitlan's heavily steel-oriented economy has faced great anxiety since the Pulatec Steel Crisis showed the potential vulnerabilities such a focused industrial economy could face, which in part motivated Zacapine authorities to push for the diversification of the industry in one of the most important economic nodes of the country.
Health
The Public Health Corporation of Tequitinitlan, a non-calpolleh corporate entity of the municipal government, operates 16 numbered hospitals serving the residents of the city. It also operates the 337 local clinics built into the altepetlianca wards across the city. A decline in funding has led to many of the smaller clinics shutting down, reducing the availability of preventive care and minor procedures such as asthma treatments and vaccinations usually provided at such municipal clinics. This has followed a trend across many Zacapine cities to centralized and concentrate healthcare facilities. Tequitinitlan suffers from significant effects of air pollution resulting from the industrial centers within the city limits, in particular the steel industry. The city has documented elevated rates of lung cancer and respiratory disease which has been directly correlated to the proximity of residents to industrial sources of air pollution. This is the most significant health concern in the city, one that has directly led to the expansion of health infrastructure directly concerning the most common illnesses related to pollution as well as public pressure to reduce the levels of pollution through the use of scrubbers and other technology removing pollutants from the exhaust and waste materials of the city's factories.
Culture
Climate
| Climate data for Municipal Palace, City Center | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Month | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Year |
| Record high °C (°F) | 41.6 (106.9) |
41.2 (106.2) |
39.4 (102.9) |
36.2 (97.2) |
35.5 (95.9) |
32.8 (91.0) |
34.3 (93.7) |
38.2 (100.8) |
41.1 (106.0) |
42.0 (107.6) |
41.5 (106.7) |
43.5 (110.3) |
43.5 (110.3) |
| Average high °C (°F) | 30.9 (87.6) |
29.6 (85.3) |
28.1 (82.6) |
24.8 (76.6) |
21.3 (70.3) |
18.7 (65.7) |
18.3 (64.9) |
21.1 (70.0) |
23.2 (73.8) |
26.6 (79.9) |
28.7 (83.7) |
30.3 (86.5) |
25.1 (77.2) |
| Daily mean °C (°F) | 24.3 (75.7) |
23.1 (73.6) |
21.7 (71.1) |
18.0 (64.4) |
14.5 (58.1) |
11.4 (52.5) |
10.8 (51.4) |
13.3 (55.9) |
15.7 (60.3) |
19.5 (67.1) |
21.8 (71.2) |
23.7 (74.7) |
18.2 (64.8) |
| Average low °C (°F) | 18.5 (65.3) |
17.5 (63.5) |
16.4 (61.5) |
12.8 (55.0) |
9.4 (48.9) |
6.3 (43.3) |
5.5 (41.9) |
7.3 (45.1) |
9.5 (49.1) |
13.3 (55.9) |
15.6 (60.1) |
17.9 (64.2) |
12.5 (54.5) |
| Record low °C (°F) | 7.6 (45.7) |
7.5 (45.5) |
2.5 (36.5) |
−0.5 (31.1) |
−4.3 (24.3) |
−6.1 (21.0) |
−7.1 (19.2) |
−4.9 (23.2) |
−2.6 (27.3) |
1.5 (34.7) |
3.7 (38.7) |
7.0 (44.6) |
−7.1 (19.2) |
| Average precipitation mm (inches) | 126.3 (4.97) |
97.0 (3.82) |
112.1 (4.41) |
61.3 (2.41) |
18.8 (0.74) |
4.5 (0.18) |
13.3 (0.52) |
8.9 (0.35) |
35.2 (1.39) |
69.8 (2.75) |
112.2 (4.42) |
154.6 (6.09) |
814.0 (32.05) |
| Average precipitation days (≥ 0.1 mm) | 12.0 | 10.3 | 10.3 | 7.1 | 5.0 | 2.8 | 3.2 | 2.2 | 4.9 | 7.6 | 10.5 | 12.7 | 88.6 |
| Average relative humidity (%) | 66.3 | 69.5 | 72.6 | 72.3 | 71.4 | 70.1 | 65.5 | 58.0 | 55.9 | 58.0 | 60.3 | 63.6 | 65.3 |
| Mean monthly sunshine hours | 252.8 | 223.0 | 216.3 | 188.9 | 163.4 | 154.3 | 175.7 | 203.5 | 213.4 | 230.6 | 246.6 | 233.6 | 2,537.6 |
| Percent possible sunshine | 60 | 62 | 54 | 55 | 52 | 49 | 53 | 60 | 60 | 60 | 62 | 57 | 57 |
| Source: Zacaco Meteorological Service | |||||||||||||