About
An urban and territorial analysis practice.
Cartograma is an urban and territorial analysis practice directed by Rodrigo Cepeda, lawyer and urban planner. It works with evidence, cartography and models to turn territorial questions into decisions that can be justified and carried out.
Approach
Territorial information is a tool for deciding, not a product in itself.
An urban plan is, first of all, a legal instrument: it assigns building rights, uses and restrictions. Reading it as a lawyer and modelling it as a planner makes it possible to measure what it really allows, what fits on each parcel and what has already been built.
That double reading runs through Cartograma’s work: turning regulations, public data and mobility problems into concrete questions, with explicit methods and stated limits, so that decision-makers know where to act and on what evidence.
The projects on this site are the sample: 24 analyses of Cancún, each with its method, its data and what its figures cannot say.
Rodrigo Cepeda is developing a line of work provisionally called the architecture of public decisions: studying and improving the traceability between the evidence an institution produces and the decisions it finally adopts.
Direction · Rodrigo Cepeda
2024–2025
Territorial planning adviser
State government · Mérida, Yucatán
- Led the mapping work of the metropolitan land-use planning programme: assessment of current territorial conditions and the basis for sustainable urban-growth policies.
2022–2024
Director of innovation
State government · Monterrey, Nuevo León
- Turned the citizen hotline into an omnichannel platform with speech recognition, language processing and generative AI; user satisfaction rose 40%.
- Data analysis with text mining for decision-making, open data and visualisation tools.
- Public innovation challenges, user-centred services and a state network of citizen-service officers.
2015–2022
Director of analysis and citizen services
Civil-society organisation · Puebla
- Institutional performance evaluation system based on quality and timeliness metrics for public services.
- Citizen follow-up and service processes, linked to the national crime-prevention strategy.
2015–2022
Technical lead
Civil-society organisation specialised in security · Mexico City
- Updated the citizen-participation component of a police certification methodology and built tools to track certification progress.
- Technical assistance to public-security departments in Puebla, Chihuahua and Querétaro, and implementation in two municipalities of metropolitan Monterrey.
2017–2019
Special projects lead
Citizen council on security and justice · Puebla
- Coordinated a team of lawyers advising crime victims and preparing their complaints, and a monitoring programme for prosecutors' offices.
- Inter-institutional prevention strategies, including one against femicide violence with universities and business organisations.
2014–2015
Consultant
Federal government · Mexico City
- Organisational and gap diagnosis of the security and justice institutions of Sonora; institutional reorganisation in Baja California Sur.
- Crime-incidence diagnosis in San Luis Potosí and design of twelve crime-prevention models.
Education
- 2023–2024Master's in City and UrbanismUniversitat Oberta de Catalunya
- 2022–2023Specialisation in Sustainable Cities and TerritoriesUniversitat Oberta de Catalunya
- 2020–2021Specialisation in Public Policy and the Right to the CityUniversitat Oberta de Catalunya
- 2023Certifications in public-sector citizen service (EC0105) and citizen participation in policy-making
Capabilities
- Reading and modelling planning instruments →Zoning against the built city · Can the plan be built?
- Accessibility, mobility and network analysis →One hour by bus · The walled city
- Road safety on corridors and crossings →Crossing to get there · The hotel boulevard
- Territorial diagnosis and indicators →Centres and corridors · Twelve cities in one
- Spatial analysis and GIS →Present in all 24 projects
- Visualising and communicating evidence →An interactive atlas in every project
Contact
If you have a territorial, mobility or data problem you would like to raise, use the project request or write to contacto@cartograma.mx. Rodrigo Cepeda’s background is on LinkedIn and more visualisations on Tableau Public.