Charming Guanajuato – How to Design for What We Never Say Out Loud

Charm, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps. But I can’t escape the conviction that it would be an aesthetic crime not to place Guanajuato, Mexico at or near its apex of any list of the most charming cities in North America. This colonial era gem of roughly 200,000 inhabitants, part of the globally integrated Guanajuato state of some 6,000,000 people, exudes the kind of rich and relaxed public life far wealthier US cities tend to lack. Put another way, the old city of Guanajuato shows off several qualities contemporary people everywhere, and especially Americans, profoundly desire but don’t quite know how to even speak about as priorities, much less build into modern cityscapes.

So, for this deep summer break blog post, my plan is to do a show and tell on these special qualities, with the emphasis more on showing than telling, though I do want to speculate on some practical and cultural barriers to building for successful urban density here in the United States.

Plazas, Plazas, and More Plazas

Within the central part of Guanajuato there is seemingly a plaza every few hundred yards. This is a city set up to make it easy to relax in public space, and people gravitate here to do exactly that, including teeming tourists from Guadalajara, Mexico City, Monterrey, and other large Mexican cities. Relatively few Americans and Canadians tend to make it to Guanajuato, and unlike what you see at the big coastal resorts, Spanish is assumed here (contact Luis at the fabulous La Hacienda Spanish School if you want to use your trip to improve your language skills). See below for images of two wonderful plazas in Guanajuato, the Plaza Los Angeles and my absolute favorite Plaza Baratillo. Also check out the image of the Jardin Union, a major plaza at the absolute center point of the city that reminded me more of the Place des Vosges in Paris than anything else I’ve seen in North America.

Bottom is Tops

The city where I grew up, Seattle, is a place of hills and valleys. Rich people typically live on the hilltops, and poorer people in the valleys. The valorization of altitude is also apparent in California (think of Mulholland Drive in LA or Pacific Heights in San Francisco) and Oregon (think of Portland’s West Hills). Connected to the lust for altitude in the US is the desire for privacy, to see but not be seen.

In Guanajuato, and to some degree in Mexico generally, the situation seems to me the opposite. The center of the city, and many of its oldest and most elegant buildings, are at the bottom of a bowl in the surrounding mountains. While I did spot a few slick new homes on the ridge tops, my overall impression was that I had somehow entered the inverse of the United States, a place where the bottom was on top.

This sense of having entered some kind of inverse was true for many aspects of life in Mexico, not always in positive ways. I can’t shake the image of the many heartbreaking fliers on Guanajuato streets showing the faces of “disappeared” young women, or the relieved voice of a young hotel clerk happy to move away from Mexico City to coastal Sayulita because it meant she no longer had to worry about her children being kidnapped. Mexico is very far from a utopia. But its warmth and aesthetic sophistication and anything goes style makes it truly feel a place across some kind of asymptote, a nation that has an enormous amount to teach us “estadounidenes.”

Density and Color

Most Americans, as this Substack post by Matt Yglesias points out, prefer to live in auto oriented suburbs. Perhaps I do too. My home, though near the city center in Sacramento, is in a decidedly suburban style neighborhood. You can’t force people to change their personal and cultural preferences. But oh my goodness are there advantages to urban density! The narrow streets and color and walkability of Guanajuato are so profoundly wonderful and refreshing.

I’ll note parenthetically here that the Yglesias post above contains a fascinating section on creating a market for parking passes in Washington, DC. I’m not sure if I agree with this plan or not (markets for parking passes, like markets for pricing carbon credits, strike me as vulnerable to gaming and corruption). But cultural expectations and zoning requirements around parking, certainly, act as a non-trivial barrier to creating the kind of urban density I think is prerequisite to living well together in cities. Just here in Sacramento, for instance, look at the lack of parking lots next to light rail stops. Or look at the other half of the same phenomenon; namely, the enforcement of parking rules near said light rail stops designed to allow single family homeowners to cling to the unrealistic expectation that they ought to be able to park their private car in front of their private house. More on this, hopefully, in a later post.

Staginess

Earlier I mentioned the desire to live on ridge tops and see out, but not be seen. Perhaps this is a natural human desire. But, as Shakespeare said, all the world is a stage. Public life in the wealthy US is appallingly impoverished for its lack of staginess (New York City, like Mexico, might be seen as a giant inverse to the US norm on this trait).

This was the thing I perhaps most had in mind when I came up with the title for this post. There’s something about what it actually takes to make a city charming that I think we find somehow embarrassing. Who among us wants to be seen, to have the opportunity to look beautiful in public? I would venture to say practically all of us. But this is not something we talk about or even admit to ourselves. Certainly it’s not something that people come to public hearings to demand. Instead they demand stuff like the ability to park their car in front of their house, or the desire to not live next door to rental housing. We should be far more careful about our cultural wish for privacy, and far more self conscious about our profound need, as obligate social primates, for a sense of stage.

As a related side note, one Vox article I found especially interesting and surprising this month related to the arts, and what it might take to encourage more in the way of high quality cultural production. The article’s answer? It’s not internet algorithms, which tend to redound to an ugly combination of mediocrity and ginned up moral outrage.

Instead, the article suggests, the key might be in something old fashioned. Very wealthy people, of which we have an unprecedented number in the US, need to start thinking of themselves as wealthy and not as “middle class.” Then they need to start acting as patrons of the arts, donating to truly high quality visual artists and theater producers and, perhaps, architects building public spaces. I don’t know. Maybe this amounts to “trickle down economics.” But the Vox piece by Rebecca Jennings is certainly interesting and controversial in a good way and maybe even fun. So is the Twitter thread by Northwestern University Professor Kate Compton on which the piece was partly based.

Here’s one opposite of what I suspect Compton and Jennings would wish for, a real story so appalling it almost works as a fable. So, here it is in fable form:

I was talking with a man recently. This man did business with contractor who in turn did business with an extremely rich person. We’ll call the rich person a prince. Why not? The man, a multi-billionaire, had money like royalty.

This prince desired a house in the fire-prone forest near Lake Tahoe. The prince liked to ski and snowboard, liked to avoid the public perceiving him as a prince, and liked to avoid taxes (taking responsibility for his impoverished subjects) by claiming residence in Nevada.

But what’s especially curious is the nature of the house in the forest the prince desired. The house would be huge, of course, but hidden away from prying eyes. It would be designed explicitly for the prince to see out from a high spot, but not to be seen by almost any others. Most strangely, it would be designed with a full size basketball court 50 feet underground, a kind of combined little boy’s fantasy and bomb shelter. (Perhaps it’s useful to note that this prince did not make his riches in the NBA.)

The end of the fable, the part that’s not more or less exactly what my buddy told me, is this:

The prince’s house eventually burned down. No lovely city like Guanajuato was ever built by the extremely wealthy society the prince lived within. Instead, archaeologists centuries later found the basketball court/bomb shelter, perfectly preserved underground. The strange underground play court became a source for academic debate. But none of the eminent professors could ever do more than theorize about the odd mindset of the builder.

Urban Edges with Nature

One thing I noticed in the City of Guanajuato, though not, I will admit, in what little I saw of the rest of Guanajuato state, was the way the city stops abruptly at the urban edge. There is no doubt a practical piece to this (see the steepness of the mountains in the background). But government policy is also almost certainly involved.

A thorough investigation of Mexican zoning regulations is well beyond my capacity for this blog post. But can we create better incentives for sharper urban edges here in the US? The obvious answer is yes. See for instance this piece by Paul Boudreaux in the Maine Law Review on how large lot sizes increase segregation and sprawl, and act as financial bonus for existing residents while excluding newcomers. Or see this article from the Proceedings on the National Academy of Sciences on the (to me ridiculous, unacceptable) growth of housing at the so-called “wildland urban interface.”

This issue of hard edges with nature is one, like health care policy, that I sometimes avoid. My passions run too high. Otherwise perfectly good people have legitimate desires for their acre or two acres or five acres on the edge of the city.

But while I don’t support the government “taking” people’s property rights at the wildland urban interface, I do support an unwinding of subsidies (large lot zoning regulations, expensive road building projects, even fire protection infrastructure outside of densely built villages) that make it easier to privatize the wild.

Most importantly, I want to show that there is another way. It’s true – a place like Guanajuato is not free from darkness or problems. But it’s a city that should be profoundly instructive for us here in the US. To be in a position to learn the lessons Guanajuato has to offer; however, we first need to get clearer on the “pursuit of happiness.” Such a pursuit can mean wanting things we don’t usually say or even understand as desires. It can mean wanting density, wanting what I’m calling “staginess,” wanting unscripted interactions with surprising others, wanting wildness at urban edges, and wanting those things that may not just exist in the eyes of the beholder, things like beauty and charm.