Comments on: Developers building crime-free private city outside Guatemalan capital

By: Alejandro Biguria

Alejandro Biguria — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 07:08:00 +0000

As a Guatemalan, trained architect and economist, projects that fail to include but propose to exclude citizens are far from the ideal city.

For those that have not visited Guatemala, as with many Latin American cities, Guatemala suffers from extreme socioeconomic inequalities. The lack of social policies and a clear and concise urban plan for the long run has resulted in multiple islands of development, shopping malls offering private security and close compounds for housing.

It is true that Leon Krier”s plan for this city was of replicating a city’s neighborhood, but the results are far from re-stitching the very much needed urban fabric. Unfortunately, new urbanism seems to have permeated with all developers in the country given the fact that there are few urban proposals that have such a strong commercial component to them. In the mean time, there are many of us that will continue to pursue the integration of the different urban plans at a horizontal level, rather than a top-down strategy.

By: MexicoCityGuy

MexicoCityGuy — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 17:59:00 +0000

If you were able to see the everlasting damage these privatized “cities” do to the real urban areas you would probably reconsider. Mexico City is becoming a very safe city each passing year, after the turbulent period between 1995-2005 when most of those kidnappings happened – my own cousin included. Yet the urban space has been modified dramatically by these private cities, and none of it for better. The segregation only brings blank walls onto public roads and leaves the rich, the money, out of the city. It also further deepens mistrust, for none of the sides can face each other in public space: the people who live in these projects never get to live or see – ergo understand – the complexities of the poverty that surrounds them; while the poor people can only watch from afar how these walled in bastards discriminate them, creating in them a sense of not-belonging, of underachievement.

I live in the heart of what you could consider a favela in the outskirts of the city, and believe me, by my looks and my lifestyle – blonde, upper middle class – I would be the easiest target of violence imaginable. Yet as I have never mistrusted, segregated, or treated anyone differently, I feel safe walking through my streets. Of course there are risks, but anyway, you won’t avoid them by closing yourself in. So why add up to social mistrust and segregation?

By: vincent

vincent — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 14:49:54 +0000

Does Tom Learmont below from South Africa also not know what he's talking about?

By: Tom Learmont

Tom Learmont — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 09:00:00 +0000

In an ordinary South African suburb, my house was subjected to three break-ins and one violent “house invasion” by four armed men – in a space of four years.
And I believe that some of the above commentators would have gladly moved to a gated suburb, had they been faced with life in the raw as I was. Now I’m still in town, but in an apartment with an electric fence and a security gate. Much as I deplore the architecture of the “halves”, the depraved state of the world and the city I live in, I refuse to offer myself as an egalitarian sacrifice to chaos.

By: MexicoCityGuy

MexicoCityGuy — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 02:51:00 +0000

No, it will never make sense. Cities are there to be used, their problems to be adressed. Closing in on your own only creates mistrust and deepens the already huge gap between Latin American classes. Where are you from? You clearly have no idea of what you are talking about.