This story originally appeared in WIRED in Spanish and has been translated from Spanish.
The wide, mown lawns and leafy trees, the sports fields shining under their lit lights, the bouncy castles in the children’s play areas…especially Bouncy castles are what Celia Pérez Godínez envies. They are the decorations of the rich neighborhood she travels to every day as a maid in Cancún. Pérez envies the rich.
She tells me this as she sits on a rotten wooden bench one August afternoon, while her seven-year-old son gets stuck with his scooter on the broken road here, many miles away, north of the city, in a tiny park, full of trash and wild vegetation, a short distance from where Perez lives, near the outskirts of the city. As we talk, a homeless man in the background screams and laughs as if it were a joke that only he understands.
Perez is a 33-year-old single mother from San Marcos, Guatemala. In 2013, she immigrated to Cancun, a popular and over-promoted tourist destination in Mexico. She rarely has the time or money to go to the beach and can’t find green areas or decent, safe public spaces for her son to play in, so she has to make do with the few parks available, like this one. This is not the life she expected. “You hear that Cancun is wonderful, but when you get here… it’s a disappointment.”
Cancun, 54 years old, is Mexico’s youngest city. It was conceived from scratch in the 1970s as a new holiday destination in the country. In this sense, it has been a great success, but as an urban project it is a failure. Designed for 200,000 people, the population of its urban extension now exceeds one million. Previously, much of this area was jungle; today there are hundreds of hotels. Rapid real estate development has been undermining the surrounding vegetation year after year.
This growth has been an environmental nightmare, but also a social one, as it has provided hugely unequal benefits to the city’s richest and poorest inhabitants. According to recent research by Christine McCoy, an academic at the University of the Caribbean, the majority of Cancun’s inhabitants live without the minimum green areas or public spaces necessary for recreation, leisure, rest or socializing. This is especially true in those regions where the most vulnerable live.
Click play to see Cancun’s urban development from 1984 to 2022.
This inequality has evolved despite Cancún’s rapid expansion, which has consumed huge amounts of green space. Between 2001 and 2021, the surrounding region lost at least 30,000 hectares of rainforest, according to data from Mexico’s National Forestry Commission. The lands torn from the rainforest are now home to residential and hotel projects. And according to data seen by WIRED, there are many more developments in the pipeline. At the federal level, since 2018 the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources has received 40 requests for land use changes in the area. If approved, 650 more hectares of rainforest will disappear.
Data obtained through freedom of information shows which urban development projects have been processed in this period, from 2,247 small units of low-income housing to a 20-storey, 429-room all-inclusive luxury hotel. Crucially, none of them include applications for the development or improvement of public parks or green areas, in a city that is already bursting at the seams, having exceeded its tourist reception capacity for more than a decade.