Mexico City. Where the morning belongs to writers and the afternoon belongs to weather.

Roma Norte has been written about so often, by so many people, that it has begun to write about itself. The cafés are aware of being café-cafés. The plaza is aware of being a plaza. Even the dogs — there are very many — seem to know which ones of them are photographed most often. None of this is meant pejoratively. It is simply the consequence of being, for a decade now, the most-photographed neighborhood in the Spanish-speaking Americas.

The rooms we worked in here sat, almost without exception, around interior courtyards — the small, often plant-filled, almost always tile-floored inner squares that the neighborhood's three-story porfiriato buildings were designed around. To work from a Roma Norte courtyard is to work in a space that the architecture has, a century before, agreed to keep cool for you. The acoustics are unexpectedly good. The light, filtered through jacaranda or rubber-plant or — in one notable case — a tall and slightly dying palm, is the city's best.

The standard Roma Norte arrangement is a desk on a covered loggia, overlooking the courtyard, with a kettle and an excellent wifi router and a door that closes behind you. Come here for the first half of any project. Avoid it if you cannot tolerate, between three and four-thirty, the sound of a great deal of rain.

What it sounds like

Birds, in the morning — Mexico City has, surprisingly, the densest urban bird population we have encountered anywhere. From the street, the bell of an organ-grinder; from upstairs, the radio of someone making lunch; from across the courtyard, the gentle clack of a typewriter that nobody we have asked has ever managed to identify.

Condesa is Roma's older, marginally calmer sibling. The buildings are mostly 1930s — the city's great art-deco bloom — and arranged around two parks (Parque México and Parque España) that together form one of the best concentrations of working-from-park real estate on the continent. The trees are tall. The benches are plentiful. The wifi reaches further than you'd expect.

The rooms here tend to be in the upper floors of those deco buildings — fifth or sixth floor, with original parquet, casement windows, and the particular quality of light that comes off white painted balconies in high-altitude cities. We worked in maybe a dozen here. Most of them had a tree in or just outside the window. We do not think this is coincidence.

Come to Condesa for any work that benefits from looking up. The horizon is broader here than in Roma. The rooftops, on a clear morning, give you back the volcanoes, briefly, before the smog reasserts itself. We have finished more contracts here than anywhere else in the city.

Coyoacán is twenty minutes from Roma and exists, by every important measure, as a separate city. The streets are cobbled. The houses are low. The plazas — there are several — have the quality of being plazas in a village two centuries old, set inside a metropolis of twenty-two million. We send anyone with a long-form project here. It is the part of the city most likely to remember what unhurried means.

Most of the rooms we worked in in Coyoacán were libraries — several of them private libraries that open their members' reading rooms to a few visitors one or two days a week. The others were family homes near the Casa Azul; we'd steer clear of the rooms right next to the Casa Azul itself, on principle, but a few streets over the air becomes available again.

The library we send people to most often is Biblioteca Particular № 4, which has three thousand volumes, two table-lengths of working space, and a rule about silence that is enforced by a small bell. Come here when you need to read. Come here when you need to write something you have, for months, been unable to begin.

San Rafael is the neighborhood Roma Norte was, twenty years ago. The buildings are the same vintage — 1900s, porfiriato — but mostly unrestored, or only partially. The rents are a third of what they are in Roma. The cafés have not yet learned to charge tourist prices, because there are not, yet, tourists. The wifi is excellent in roughly half of the buildings and unreliable in the other half. We tested every one of the rooms we worked in here; they were in the half that works.

We think of San Rafael as the budget end, but we mean this in the way one might say a particular wine is the budget option — meaning, simply, that it is honest. The rooms are larger here. The people are more curious. There is a particular kind of San Rafael arrangement — a former haberdasher's, a defunct dance studio, a once-photo lab — where you find yourself working inside a piece of small commercial history that has not yet decided what to become next.

Juárez is the neighborhood that connects everything else. It sits between Zona Rosa and the Centro Histórico, and for fifty years it was largely ignored by everyone except the bureaucrats whose offices it housed. It has, in the last six years, been very quietly rediscovered. The buildings are a peculiar mid-century mix — beautiful 1950s towers next to crumbling 1900s townhouses next to genuinely brutalist office blocks — and the rooms we worked in here reflect that mix. One is in a 1953 modernist apartment building. Two are in restored townhouses. Three are in former office floors of mid-century buildings whose ground floors now sell artisanal mezcal.

We come to Juárez when we need to be central without being in the noise of Centro Histórico itself. The metro is good. The walking is good. The views — and this is rarely true elsewhere — are excellent in three directions: south to Reforma, north to the Centro, and west to Chapultepec.