The vertigo of Guatemala City disappears in Cayalá.
The quiet streets, white houses and paths adorned with pale pink hydrangeas here contrast with the clattering noise of street vending carts and brightly colored walls in other parts of the city.
Located in the east of the Guatemalan capital, Cayalá has quickly become the favorite destination of the country’s richest.
“This place is fantastic”says Isabel, a woman in her 70s, while she sits waiting for her son at a cafe table in one of the cool galleries with high ceilings reminiscent of colonial times.
Ciudad Cayalá is a 21 hectare urbanization inaugurated in 2011. It is a private residential project that has open areas and parks accessible to anyone who wants to visit them.
Isabel was born in Ecuador, but has lived in Washington DC, in the United States, for several years. She knows Guatemala City well because she lived there while her husband served as Ecuadorian ambassador to the Central American country.
He has been in Cayalá for a month looking for a house to buy and thus alternate his days of rest between his two adopted countries. Also to be close to her son, one of the 2,000 residents of this exclusive and controversial residential neighborhood.
“The first time I was in Cayalá I was afraid to sit outside, but then I realized that this is a safe place, everything is close at hand and the people are very attentive,” he says while gently moving his left hand in which he carries an emerald ring.
For years, the City of Cayalá has been the target of criticism from those who believe that it is nothing more than a sample of the extreme inequality that exists in Guatemalawhere 55% of the population lives below the poverty line and 71% is employed in the informal sector, according to data from the World Bank.
“This is a place that does not represent the majority of the population but only 5% of it,” Elena Ruiz Bejarano, director of the Observatory of the Rights of Children of Guatemala, tells BBC Mundo.
“In this country, most residential projects respond to the needs of a few and not those of the majority of the population,” says Ruiz Bejarano.
A “paradise” in the city
Cayalá means “paradise” in Quiche, one of the Mayan languages..
In 1913 the Leal family, one of the most powerful and richest in the country – owner of large areas of land and important private companies – acquired the land.
It took almost a century until construction began.
In 2003, the couple of architects from Estudio Urbano, Pedro Pablo Godoy and María Sánchez, presented to investors the proposal for a small “planned city” in which everything would be within a 10-minute walk.
The works, which began in 2010, are going in stages and have currently been built five private neighborhoods.
The particularity of this place is that it has areas open to the public, where visitors can stroll without needing to register or display permits, which has made it the main attraction for visitors to the area and tourists arriving from abroad.
For the project director, this decision was a “audacity”.
“The private security companies recommended that we Let’s build a wall and a gate. But that’s not what we did,” Pedro Pablo Godoy tells BBC Mundo.
Visitors circulate daily through this neighborhood that has dozens of shops, private clinics, restaurants and even a church. Even The United States decided to establish its embassy in Cayalá.
“What we are looking for is to create community. For this, the human scale in architecture is a key factor. We wanted everything to be done within a ten-minute walk,” says Godoy.
Marvi, a woman who lives in Santa Amelia, a few minutes from Cayalá, says that the place has become the center of the east of the capital. “Those of us who live in zone 16 solve everything here,” she says while she waits for her husband to finish shopping.
However, for Ruiz Bejarano, these types of projects that are within the reach of only a few They do not represent a meeting point between people from different socioeconomic realities, but quite the opposite.
“If there is no social coexistence with those who are different from me, there is no way to break those social barriers,” says the director of the Observatory of Children’s Rights of Guatemala.
And ultimately, the Entry to Cayalá depends on the private administration of the neighborhood.
Last October, a group of protesters demanding recognition of Bernardo Arévalo’s victory in the presidential elections was intercepted by armed guards with their faces covered who prevented them from entering the place.
“The presence [de seguridad privada] “It responds to the sole purpose of preventing disturbances and damage to private property,” the Cayalá administration reported in a statement.
For critics, this residential neighborhood does nothing more than highlight the social inequalities that exist in Guatemala.
“It is a space that seeks to provide security and guarantee of rights to a minimum part of society. Cayalá has come to make visible the inequality between the few who can belong to it and those who cannot,” says Ruiz Bejarano.
Others consider that Ciudad de Cayalá is a “White elephant”which has little to do with Guatemala.
“It is a city that is not realistic in its costs for Guatemala. Maintenance costs are very high, as is the cost of electricity. It’s a white elephant difficult to maintain“, architect Carlos Mendizábal, from the University of San Carlos in Guatemala, tells BBC Mundo.
Neourbanism
Cayalá is a project born from neo-urbanism, a architectural trend, emerged in the early 1980s that is found in the ancient cities of the past an ideal model for the present.
It seeks to create spaces in which light-colored buildings are no more than five floors and the streets are wide and sunny, with an irregular layout, visual edges and unevenness.
For some, Cayalá is innovation. For others, it is a place incapable of reflecting Guatemalan architectural roots.
“Guatemala has pre-Hispanic, colonial, modernist architecture, but not an architecture like the one reflected in Cayalá“says Mendizábal.
The Cayalá master plan was in charge of the Luxembourg urban planner Leon Krierone of the great references of neo-urbanism at an international level, the same one who designed Poundbury, in England, an experimental city commissioned by King Charles III.
More than a decade after its inauguration, the constructions expand across virgin lands looking for new owners.
But one of the basic principles of the project, which limited the height of the buildings, which now grow towards the sky, is being abandoned.
Godoy confirms that the next stages, which involve the construction of three new neighborhoods, include buildings that exceed the five floors of the initial project, but clarifies that They will be located at “strategic points.”
This has generated tensions among the architects, especially with Krier himself, who said that the pressure for The city grew and became “unbearable”.
“The construction of skyscrapers, I believe, is an immoral act,” said the architect whose ideal is the European city prior to modernity.
The challenge of maintaining the human scale, which is the very essence of the project, and at the same time expanding the offer to make the real estate business more profitable, has put its architects in an uncomfortable situation.
“This new phase pushes the limits of the original project. But the principles of neo-urbanism remain,” says Godoy.
Safety
The project, in addition to being designed with a clear urban philosophy, is also designed from the point of view of security.
In a country where homicide rates are among the highest in Latin America, Cayalá is presented as a “protected zone”.
The neighborhood is controlled by a rigorous surveillance system which, at first glance, is imperceptible. But as one spends more hours in the place, one can begin to detect the threads that hold it together.
The dozens of security employees, the cameras on every corner and the bars that divide the public areas from the residential areas do their job.
“These types of constructions, which are a kind of closed colonies, do nothing more than encourage the people who live in them not to want to leave the place,” questions Ruiz Bejarano.
The truth is that in Guatemala, not only the richest resort to private security. In many neighborhoods you can see men in civilian clothes with long weapons guarding even the most humble businesses.
“All the historical centers of Latin America are dangerous in certain areas. And Cayalá is no exception. This is also an area that suffers from insecurity,” says Mendizábal.
“It’s not Guatemala”
When Léon Krier is accused of having designed a “ghetto for rich people”, He defends himself by saying that the proposal to open private spaces to the public is quite the opposite, an attempt to generate points of contact between different social strata.
“It is a private investment that seeks a high-class client but anyone can enter. I particularly insisted to the promoters that the neighborhood have its doors open to everyone because otherwise society explodes,” Krier told Expansión magazine.
Godoy responds to criticism by saying that this urbanization model could be designed for lower-income neighborhoods.
“This is not a model that aims to be elitist. It is a model that can be replicated for all types of life. It is a replicable model for any social class, because we all have the same needs,” he says.
In a society in which the richest 1% of people have the same income as half of the population, according to Oxfam data, the existence of Cayalá can be read more as a symptom than as the origin of the problem.
“There are different Guatemalas for different people“says Glenda, a Guatemalan publicist who considers Cayalá to be as authentic as the historic center of Guatemala City.
While tranquility prevails in Cayalá, a few kilometers away, on the Paseo de la Sexta – the busiest pedestrian street in the capital – the excitement surrounds everything.
Two different realities, which coexist in the same space and which are barely they touch
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