The New York Times is Wrong About Guatemala's New Town

Ciudad Cayalá is one of Guatemala City's best public spaces and a sign of the country's positive future

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This week, a look at NYT criticism of a new town project in Guatemala City.

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Ciudad Cayalá: not actually a dystopia. Source.

The Argument from Vibes

This week the NYT published a piece on Ciudad Cayalá, a large, master-planned new town built in Guatemala City. Everything you need to know about the article is in its title: New Utopian Enclave? Or a Testament to Inequality?¹

The article is the latest entry in a malicious genre I call: “the argument from vibes.”

The argument from vibes is a shameless, dishonest trick.² Critics paint a word-picture that suggests a certain aesthetic, in this case: “inequality.” The bad vibes spread over the subject, in this case: Cayalá. An imaginary vibe replaces real thought or analysis.

I’ve spent hundreds of hours in Ciudad Cayalá. There’s plenty to question about the project. I don’t understand the endless white brick. I don’t believe in Cayala’s style of master-planning. But calling it a “testament to inequality” is absurd.

Cayalá’s white brick tradurbanism, designed by Leon Krier. Photo by Sydney Angove on Unsplash

Cayalá is one of Guatemala City’s best public spaces. It attracts a crowd across social classes. It’s safe. It’s walkable. It’s fun. It’s not perfect, but it’s a bright spot of urbanism in a dysfunctional city. Cayalá also happens to be privately owned and operated — which is what really seems to upset the critics.

Smiling Customers Can’t Hide the Dystopia

The NYT begrudgingly admits that Cayalá is a public space. Their own photos show happiness. Go and look. Each image is full of people enjoying their day in Cayalá. It’s obvious to anyone who knows anything about Guatemalan society that not everyone mentioned or pictured is an uber-wealthy elite.³

Young families eat crepes and pose for wedding photos, blissfully unaware that they’re actually participants in a dystopian testament to inequality. Source: NYT.

The NYT is eager to suggest that beneath this veneer of “young couples intertwined on park benches whisper[ing] sweet-nothings to one another” — yes, a real sentence from this article — lurks a rotten, dystopian core.

Does the NYT lean on data to prove their point? Falling profits? A survey of aggrieved customers? A sordid history of mismanagement? Of course not. They make their case through the relentless abuse of vibey clichés.

First we get the exclusion vibe:

Evoking the feel of a serene Mediterranean town, Cayalá features milky white buildings with red-tile roofs, a colossal civic hall with Tuscan columns, cafes and high-priced restaurants, colonnade-lined plazas and walkable, stone-paved boulevards. All of this is open to the public — except for the gated sections where about 2,000 families live. (emphasis mine)⁴

Then we get the “playground for the rich”:

… [Cayalá] is largely a playground for the well-off, hard to reach by public transit, environmentally devastating and has attracted significant investment even as other parts of crime-ridden Guatemala City fall into decay.

Nor do we escape the obligatory “sterile shopping mall” trope:

Cayalá is still a shopping center⁵ pretending to be a neighborhood.

The NYT even channels 80’s cyberpunk novels by making a big deal about private security guards that “closely monitor the grounds.” I have seen these guards — they are inconspicuous men in business suits who stand near the entrances and exits.⁶

What’s the alternative here? People walk in Cayalá because the town prevents street crime! Is this dystopian inequality or a practical solution to LatAm’s problems?

Not even restaurant owners are spared a cynical vibe-takedown:

“In 20 years, Cayalá will be just like La Rambla,” said Andrés García Manzo, a restaurateur who lives in one of Cayalá’s secluded villas, drawing a comparison to Barcelona’s legendary pedestrian-friendly promenade. “You can walk everywhere here in peace.”

One can’t help but think that we’re supposed to see poor Andrés as hopelessly naive, perched in his “secluded villa.” How dare the resident of a secluded villa aspire to a beautiful, safe, walkable experience in his city. Doesn’t he know that places that aren’t Cayalá are unsafe, un-walkable, ugly, and broken?

Cayalá is Bad Because Everywhere Else is Worse

The NYT’s main point is that Cayalá “aggravates problems of inequality and access to urban spaces.” How? By being a better public space than the areas around it. If this sounds absurd to you, well…

Criticism of Cayalá has been building for years, with some questioning the project when urban areas that are potential gems, like Guatemala City’s old center, are in disrepair.

People light a government building on fire during protests in one of Guatemala City’s “potential gems.” Photo by Diego José on Unsplash

By the NYT’s own admission, Cayalá offers a pretty and pleasant town. This town is open to anyone who wants to walk in. But, somehow, Cayalá is a “testament to inequality” because it doesn’t have the problems of the public realm outside of Cayalá.

In other words, Cayalá is bad because the rest of Guatemala City is worse.⁷

Are the founders of Cayalá in charge of public transit outside of Cayalá? Are Cayalá employees responsible for the street crime in Guatemala City’s “potential gems” that drive people away?

I’m all for restoring old town squares, but is this a zero-sum game where Cayalá’s plaza’s success means the old square must fail? While Cayalá is safe, clean, well-run, and attractive to customers, existing public spaces in Guatemala City aren’t. How is this Cayalá’s fault?

Cayalá isn’t a utopia. It’s an attempt to build an alternative to Guatemala City’s broken public realm. An honest analysis of the project doesn’t show perfection. But it does show that Cayalá is a project founded on optimism, not dystopia.

A manicured garden and lawn in Cayalá. Photo by Alejandro Alas on Unsplash

Building New Towns is Fundamentally Optimistic

Let’s reframe the NYT’s article with a bit of data and a more charitable worldview.

In a story that’s now common around the world, Guatemala is getting better.

Contrary to its “third world” reputation among NGOs and missionaries, Guatemala is already an upper middle-income country. Barring a political catastrophe, Guatemala will continue to grow in the decades ahead.

Don’t believe me?

The number of Guatemalans in extreme poverty is squeezing down to zero. This means that all the American volun-tourists handing out food in impoverished villages should start making plans to invest in Guatemalan companies and to hire Guatemalan remote workers in the decades ahead:

The fertility rate of Guatemala is also falling and, most likely, will eventually reach the lower level of developed countries.

And the GDP per capita of Guatemala has grown steadily — not perfectly, but steadily — for the last 60 years.

The same holds for Guatemala’s GNI (which is the basis for Guatemala’s ranking as a middle-income country):

What do these trends have to do with Cayalá?

Cayalá is a bet on Guatemala’s positive future. You don’t invest a hundred million dollars on a sprawling complex of fancy white bricks and open it to everyone if you plan to serve only a tiny elite.

This is why the NYT’s article is so offensive to me.

How easy it is to trash, from the comfort of the armchair, the honest work of building something as hard and ambitious as Cayalá. The facts support a cautious but real optimism for Guatemala. And that optimism animates a project like Cayalá.

We are so quick to excuse the trash, traffic, crime, inefficiency, and other problems in our public spaces. Instead of recognizing these spaces as ruined by bad incentives and poor management, the NYT calls them “potential gems.” Where is this sunny spirit of charity for a great privately-run public realm like Cayalá?

This double standard plagues the Startup Cities space. It’s as though the broken aspects of the status quo have no causes. Then, when someone builds an alternative to the default awfulness — funded by their own capital, time, and effort — critics drag them down with childish narratives of sci-fi dystopia.

I’ve written before that critics often blame customers for cities’ problems. The NYT’s absurd argument-from-vibes is similar. Apparently, having the audacity to build something better than the status quo makes you responsible for the status quo’s many problems.

New town projects like Cayalá will always be vulnerable to cynical arguments like these. We can fight this nonsense with data, with product, and with an uncompromising seriousness about a future where startups build cities.

1. Surely a town could be somewhere between these extremes?

2. In some ways it’s like other logical fallacies (e.g. argument from authority), but seems to be an especially modern and “very online” way to make fallacious arguments.

3. The NYT admits that “Indigenous families chatting in Mayan languages” enjoy Cayalá’s streets and shops.

4. The report suggests that Cayalá’s developers didn’t even want the gates, but residents voted for them. If you know anything about Guatemala City, you know that gates are a basic feature used by even low-income communities in Guatemala City.

5. Regular readers won’t be surprised to hear that I think the use of “shopping mall” as an insult is wrong. The shopping mall is an excellent analogy and model for Startup Cities. Not the shopping mall as a sterile single-use building. But the shopping mall as a privately-managed public space where entrepreneurs balance the needs of diverse customer groups in honest pursuit of profit. See The Art of Community.

6. Even gas stations in Guatemala City have security guards.

7. I’ll always have a soft spot for Guatemala City. But there’s no way to deny it: its public realm is mostly terrible. Not everywhere. Not all the time. But mostly, the streets and plazas of Guatemala City are unpleasant. (This is why tourists hop on buses to the beautiful tradurbanist mecca of Antigua, Guatemala. I highly recommend a visit to Antigua, among other areas outside of the capital!)

Guatemala City copied much of the car-oriented urbanism of the United States (including its zoning). But it copied these destructive patterns in a context that’s horribly adapted to it. Guatemala City is full of steep hills and deep valleys, many of which are unbuildable. Space for roads is scarce. As Guatemala sprawls, its roadways end up a sea of potholes, landslides, broken down cars, and other problems. It has the traffic problems of America’s worst suburban sprawl, but none of the highway capacity and more abuse of public funds. Worse still, the fear of street crime and poorly-designed pedestrian infrastructure encourages people to drive instead of walk.

I believe these trends will get better as Guatemala grows richer.