Courtyards, Streets, and Plazas: Urban Design in Mexico

There are a lot of beautiful things about Mexico, and a lot of hard ones. But if there is one single thing that keeps me coming back it may be the clever urban design and intense sense of public culture.

I speak fluent though accented Spanish, which over the years has allowed me to comfortably visit several Mexican cities and numerous smaller towns (owing to its fabulous name I feel compelled to mention Oxkutzcab, Yucatán here). I have been to Mérida, to San Cristobal de Las Casas, to Oaxaca, to Mexico City, and to Guanajuato (twice). On my most recent trip this summer I went to Guadalajara, a city considered by some, and certainly by the local Tapatios, to be the most quintessentially Mexican of all Mexican places. I am proud to say I have only taken the bus through Cancún on the way somewhere else, only stayed in Puerto Vallarta for a night on the way back from the nearby hippie/surf town Sayulita, never been to Mazatlán, and never been to Cabo even though I hear it’s pretty cool.

In any case, just like I did on my trip last summer, I want to report back on the physical design elements in Mexican cities that I admire.

Courtyard Housing

This summer my family and I were lucky enough to stay in a carefully restored Mexican urban row house in one of the oldest neighborhoods of Guadalajara. Airbnb may have upsides and downsides for local economies, but the platform undoubtedly opens up certain kinds of tourist experiences that would have been nearly inaccessible in the past.

I’m going to let the pictures do most of the talking here, but notice the long outdoor courtyard to the house where we stayed in the photo above. This courtyard provides an intensely private yet also theatrical outdoor sphere for family life. Also notice the long wall at right, which is shared with another home in the line of row houses, and the front door visible at the end of the long covered hallway, which opens out hard on the street.

Finally, notice the clean lines, lack of red ceiling tile, and flat rooftops. This roughly century old home was built within an ancient, cross-cultural tradition of courtyard housing design. But it was also built within a very particularly Mexican local vernacular, by local artisans, and responding to particular local site conditions. The look is completely distinct from the “Spanish Revival” or “Californio” architectural style reviled, according to this LA Times article, by architects within Mexico.

As you can see in the photo below, the interior rooms have been restored with careful attention to historical detail. In fact, the restoration of this home, dubbed Casa Tlali by its owner, garnered a well-deserved design award.

Perhaps more universally relevant than the period details are the high ceilings, thick walls, and the fact that all the rooms are on the first story. It turned out that we stayed in this home during what locals described as the worst heatwave in 15 years. While the interior rooms inevitably got stuffy during the heat of the day, the existence of the shady courtyard made the living experience more than bearable without air conditioning. The passive energy efficiency features embedded in this kind of traditional courtyard housing design strike me as important, highly relevant, and too little applied in housing constructed today.

For context, it may be worth remembering that the intensely quiet, private space visible in the photos of Casa Tlali above exists in the center of a big city. Guadalajara boasts 1.5 million inhabitants within a metro area of more than 5 million.

This article by Pasadena-based architect Stephanos Polyzoides proposes the following question: “How is it possible then, that common Mexican patio houses, produced by illiterate builders, are so beautifully simple, elegantly proportioned and constructed, so environmentally sensitive and so livable?” For one answer to this provocative question, I suggest you read the article. Polyzoides’ 1996 book Courtyard Housing in Los Angeles is also a must read if you care about courtyard housing design, or think like I do that this kind of traditional housing form deserves a prominent future in the contemporary world, especially in Mediterranean climates like California.

Streets

One of the prettiest cities I have visited in Mexico, a long time ago in 1994, is San Cristobal de Las Casas, a small colonial era city in the high mountain pine forests of the southern state of Chiapas. I mention this because in researching what I wanted to say here, I came across a handful of compelling watercolors of San Cristobal in this “urban sketchers” post by French architecture student Perrine Philippe.

The first of Philippe’s watercolors, especially, gets at another aspect of traditional Mexican urbanism that interests me. This is the way houses front straight onto the street. This style of building massing creates a sharply defined public sphere, and also a sharp boundary between the street and the intensely private, shady space of the private home. This boundary is completely unmediated by a “front yard” or other setback. 

One can see the kind of street wall I am talking about in the photo below, which shows the front door to an old house not far from where we stayed in the central part of Guadalajara. I love the blues and yellows and whites of this house, not to mention the “double bishop’s hat” shape to the door.

Housing that fronts directly on the street is also very visible in Guanajuato, the other city we visited (again) on our recent trip. See below, for example, for a photo of the street connecting the Museo Iconográfico Del Quijote (worth a visit) and the central Jardín Union.

Guanajuato draws tons of tourists, mostly Mexican nationals from nearby Mexico City and Guadalajara, together with serious-minded cultural tourists from the US and elsewhere interested in the local language academies. According to a local hiking guide we got to know, Guanajuato is also a favorite place within Mexico to host weddings. One can see why. Few cities in the Americas offer a more strongly articulated, colorful, visually compelling streetscape.

Plazas

The emotional and practical complement, perhaps, to the interior courtyard of the traditional Mexican house is the exterior plaza or zócalo. These spaces operate as the public living room(s) of a city or town.

Sometimes the plazas I am talking about are truly monumental. For instance there is the vast Zócalo in Mexico City, considered by some the spiritual heart of the nation. The photo above is of the huge central plaza next to the cathedral in Guadalajara, after an early morning fun run. Notice the blue and yellow flag for the state of Jalisco, which celebrates its 200th anniversary this year.

Then, of course, there are the many littler plazas. I often think back to the 1994 trip my wife and I took to the Yucatán, and to watching young people flirt and dance in the zócalo of the small city Valladolid, finally free, in the evening, from the brutal heat and humidity of summer daytime. 

But perhaps the best city in Mexico for small plazas, and maybe one of the best cities for small plazas anywhere, is Guanajuato.

Above, see a photograph of the Jardín Union, a plaza at the absolute center (and low point) of Guanajuato that reminds me personally of a miniaturized Place des Vosges. Within a half mile radius of the Jardín are at least a half dozen other small plazas. See for instance the picture of myself at the Baratillo, perhaps my favorite of these plazas, and of my wife at another lovely plaza along our early morning walk to the market.

These small plazas are true gems, and they work in part because of the urban density of Guanajuato, which as you can see in the photo below is set in a bowl surrounded by high desert mountains. From above all the little plazas are nearly invisible, but they are there, tucked in amongst narrow streets.

Political and Economic Developments

While I’m no expert on US-Mexico relations, I do try to pay attention because I find this relationship so important and so underreported. See for instance this recent Prospericity post, which touches on fentanyl, guns, and Mexico’s drift to populist authoritarianism under Andrés López Manuel Obradror (AMLO).

Here I wanted to include a couple of interesting new links related to recent changes in international migration. For instance this AP article reprinted in the Seattle Times talks about Mexico’s aggressive efforts to move migrants away from the US border to points south. These anti immigrant actions by the Mexican government seem to have won favor with the Biden administration, which for its part seems increasingly willing to play realpolitik with AMLO and ignore democratic backsliding. So long as AMLO keeps migrants away from the border, in other words, the US may willing to turn a blind eye to other problems. It’s a sad kind of bargain, I think, and both countries could do much better.

For readers interested in true stupidity, see this Atlantic article by David Frum describing the rhetorical drumbeat for a military attack against Mexico among Republican office seekers. Also curious, and sad, is this link from Adam Tooze’s always interesting Substack newsletter “Chartbook,” which shows a map detailing the geography of Mexico’s “cartel battlefields.” Tooze, a polymath if there ever was one, also speaks compellingly in this podcast episode about the US economic relationship with Mexico, including some of its fraught political dynamics.