## 2 Materials and Methods
### Study Area
#### 2.3.2 Distrito Tec Area  
By considering a smaller scale of analysis, the level of complexity of the area reduces, allowing incorporating new variables and destinations within the scope of work of the current research project. Therefore, the local area analysis, considering Distrito Tec (See Figure 1) as the study area, can take a preliminary approach to analyse to what extent Distrito Tec meets the requirements of accessibility to different destinations, using walking or cycling as the transport modes, to be considered a 15 minutes city.  
It is important to mention that Distrito Tec is located within a central area of the city. Hence, in comparison to other areas, it is considered privileged in terms of its surroundings (see Figure 2). Based on this, it is expected that the levels of accessibility within such an area will be higher than the ones of suburban areas.  
The neighbourhoods surrounding the Distrito Tec Area are heterogeneous and affect the levels of accessibility of the area. The same counts for the mobility patterns. Therefore, it is important to give a brief characterisation of each one of them.  
According to Figure 4, the northern area has very low to medium marginalisation levels and is mainly residential with single-family zoning. The commercial activities are located on the main avenues and offer some additional services such as community schools.  
The eastern area has faced important changes since the 1950s, as it used to have a brick factory that was dismantled to allow several urban renewal processes to happen. There is a contrast between the socio-economic levels of the population. In the neighbourhoods in the vicinity of the brick factory, a low-income worker population predominates; in contrast, on the opposite side of the river, there are high-income gated residential communities. The land use variety is low, with most being residential with single-family zoning. The small numbers of commercial places and services tend to be located around the main avenues where vast shopping centres have been built (e.g., Nuevo Sur shopping mall).  
The western area is the oldest, dating to the 1920s. It is characterised by being a middle-income residential area with single-family zoning. Through time, a heterogeneous  
Figure 3: Population distribution (thousands) by ages 0–100+ in the MMZ (**a**) and Monterrey (**b**).  
land use mixture has emerged in the area, having many commercial activities and services located on the main avenues.  
The polygon of Distrito Tec was designed based on the neighbourhoods' boundaries, which are located in the vicinity of the university campus. However, the AGEBs do not fully correspond to such limits; thus, some AGEBs will not be completely encompassed within the polygon. For the current analysis, 11 AGEBs were considered as part of the Distrito Tec Area, as presented in Figure 4.  
The first set of variables to be analysed is access to public kindergartens and schools. For this section, a specific accessibility measure was computed for each education level to understand how the local people, depending on their age, are able of accessing education places. Considering that the closest destination might not be able to address the entire demand of the AGEB, as well as social preference factors, the accessibility measures were evaluated for the five closest locations (kindergartens, primary, secondary and high schools).