This story in the original appeared in WIRED en Español and translated from Spanish.
The wide lawns and leafy trees, the sports fields shining under their illuminated lights, the bouncy castles in the children’s play areas—especially the bouncy castles—the envy of Celia Pérez Godínez. These are the trappings of the affluent neighborhood she frequents every day as a domestic worker in Cancún. Pérez envied the rich.
He told me this sitting on a rotten wooden bench on an August afternoon, his 7-year-old son stuck his scooter on a broken path here several miles north of the city, in a small park Filled with trash and wild plants, it’s a short distance from where Pérez lives, near the outskirts of the city. While we were talking, a bum in the back was shouting and laughing as if he was the only one who understood.
Pérez is a 33-year-old single mother from San Marcos, Guatemala. He moved in 2013 to Cancún, Mexico’s over-promoted and wildly popular tourist destination. She rarely has enough time and money to go to the beach and can’t find green areas or decent, safe public spaces for her son to play, having to settle for some parks, like this one, available. This was not the life he expected. “You hear that Cancún is wonderful, but when you get here … it’s a disappointment.”
At 54 years old, Cancún is the youngest city in Mexico. It was designed from the beginning in the 1970s as a new vacation destination in the country. In this regard, it has been a wild success. But as an urban project, it was a failure. Designed for 200,000 people, the population of its urban sprawl has already exceeded 1 million. Previously, most of this area was jungle; now there are hundreds of hotels. Accelerated real-estate development has bitten the surrounding vegetation year after year.
This growth is an environmental nightmare but also a social one, providing hugely unequal benefits to richer and poorer city dwellers. According to recent research by Christine McCoy, an academic at the University of the Caribbean, most people in Cancún live without the minimum green areas or public spaces needed for proper recreation, leisure, rest, or socialization. This is especially true in those regions where the most vulnerable live.
Click play to see Cancún’s urban development from 1984 to 2022.
This inequality has developed despite the rapid expansion of Cancún that has consumed large amounts of green space. Between 2001 and 2021, the surrounding region lost at least 30,000 hectares of forest, according to data from Mexico’s National Forestry Commission. In the land torn from the forest there are now residential and hotel projects. And according to data seen by WIRED, more developers are on the way. At the federal level, since 2018 the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources has received 40 requests for additional land use changes in the area. If approved, another 650 hectares of forest will be lost.
The data obtained through freedom of information shows what urban development projects were processed during this period, they range from 2,247 small and popular housing on the one hand to a 20-story, 429 -room all-inclusive luxury hotel. Crucially, none of these include applications for public parks or green spaces to be developed or improved, in a city that has been bursting at the seams, exceeding its tourist carrying capacity for more than a decade.
