What happened here? Reflecting on decades of poorly regulated urbanisation in Guadalajara

José de Jesus Flores Duran, PhD

I am a native of the municipality of Guadalajara, "tapatios" they call us. I grew up in the north of the city in the 80s and 90s, very close to the mythical Jalisco stadium, where the national soccer league is played. I remember that every two weeks I would accompany my dad to the Chivas games, the most emblematic team in Mexico. I also remember that when the city's Zoo was opened, my mom usually took us to visit it. Another good memory is going with my neighbours to a sports unit that was about a 20 or 30-minute walk from the buildings where we lived. I distinctly remember how far away this felt. At that time my trips were on foot and everything I saw amazed me. The district was far less urbanised and there was plenty of space to play "futbol llanero".  However, the field where we played in the last team my dad managed was already a thirty-minute drive from downtown Guadalajara, where we lived in the early years of the first decade of the 21st century. I didn't think about that in those days.

Nowadays, those old fields that I used to play in my childhood have been replaced by walled enclaves, urban developments and buildings. Even some of the distant fields where we used to play no longer exist; they have also been replaced by residential areas. There are no more spaces in the downtown area of the city and many people have had to move to the periphery, using much of their time to commute to their jobs and daily activities. As a result, the tapatios can no longer live in Guadalajara, and, as we will further discuss below, several conflicts have materialized that are difficult to overcome.

Disorderly growth

The city has expanded, absorbing everything in its path, including primary bodies of water, riverbeds, conservation areas, and agricultural land. This occurred despite the fact that, since its beginnings back in the 1940s, urbanization has always been accompanied by laws, regulations and plans; however, rather than regulating and guiding growth, the flexibility and constant modification of the legal framework resulted in disorderly growth, characterized by socioeconomic segregation, differential access to infrastructure, services and security, unequal rents (sometimes inaccessible), as well as the proliferation of irregular settlements, some of them in risky areas.

In addition to the problems above, which sometimes seem to be invisible, the indiscriminate use of the territory has led to various conflicts between the inhabitants of Guadalajara, groups of power, and the government itself. For example, these conflicts are reflected in the current political agenda and the discussions regarding the government approving the construction of buildings in an area that should be reserved for conservation (Las Villas Panamericanas, bought by Avaterra to offer high-cost apartments). In other cases, the land was expropriated several years ago to create a park and now, instead, Iconia apartment towers are going to be built; another one, because some parks (among them, Liberacion and San Rafael) have been intervened to implement hydraulic works against floods that will allow new buildings; and another one because some inhabitants of the inner city have been pressured to sell their houses and leave an area of interest that will become a high-density housing zone, the Creative District.

The government justifies the expansion of the city towards other valleys by arguing that in the central zone of Guadalajara’s metropolis, several years ago the land available for development was exhausted. However, despite the intense urbanization, these new built-up areas have not been integrated into the urban continuum.  Nevertheless, after pushing its population to the peripheries, in the last ten years, there has been a strong interest in repopulating the municipality of Guadalajara through vertical housing. The main argument, and the data support it, is that since 1990 there has been a continuous loss of population, which has led to Guadalajara being replaced by Zapopan in this matter since the 2020 census.

However, the repopulation of the municipality of Guadalajara has not been accompanied by a specific policy that benefits the bulk of the population, either through subsidies or social housing programs. On the contrary, since the authorization of vertical construction, land and housing has become more expensive, and it is becoming more and more difficult to find affordable housing in the central area, indicating that the central city is going to be filled with uninhabited buildings.

Is urban planning really working?

Growing up in Guadalajara and experiencing its development has had me thinking about the role of planning in the development of cities and their area of influence. The issues we see in Guadalajara are not unique to the city. For example, in Mexico City, which was also built on unstable land over bodies of water and unstable slopes, the outcome is similar. People have settled in risky areas, land prices are rising, and most of the population is driven towards the peripheries.

It seems that urban planning, rather than orienting and reordering, serves to justify the occupation of new spaces, relying on the flexibility and gaps in the legal framework that are well exploited, mainly by the real estate sector. Large developers and real estate companies are often the most interested in the implementation of planning instruments, they participate in public consultations to defend their interests. Meanwhile, municipal governments, most of them in a situation of institutional vulnerability, remain on the margins or only participate to legitimize the processes.

These problems resonate with research from other metropolitan areas in Latin America that suggest that planning instruments do not work or have not had the expected results due to a lack of legal or scalar congruence, instruments are not executed correctly, there is no follow-up by governments (less so when there is a change of administration), institutional frameworks are very fragile, the required investments are not made, and some sectorial interests dominate others. All this shows that inefficient planning is a general problem, at least in Latin America, which must be corrected.

When the city is built, there are processes and decisions imperceptible to most people that are transcendental in the way we live now and in the future. Surely none of my neighbours or my parents imagined that land would become a scarce and inaccessible commodity for many of us. Nor that we would have to move far away from our old neighbourhood in order to have access to housing. There was no way to think that some people were making decisions on our behalf that would have repercussions today in the lack of water and the increase in temperature of our once wonderful Tapatian microclimate. Now, confused and dissatisfied, we can only ask ourselves, what happened here? And live where we can.