Photo Essay
Located in Guadalajara, Mexico’s third largest metropolitan area, La Perla District aims to be “a city within a city”— a sustainable community where residents thrive, prosperity exudes in the air, and creativity sparks (Distrito La Perla, 2020). The masterplan was designed by SOM architects for the real estate developer Grupo Ouest. The vision is to transform 43-hectares of an old industrial site, what was once a Kodak manufacturing facility (SOM, 2021), to a mixed-use space filled with “green areas with an avant-garde design where nature and civilization merge to offer a quality of family, personal, and professional life to its inhabitants” (Ouest, n.d.). The redevelopment plan includes residential buildings, a park, hotels, a shopping center, a medical center, and a smart “Office Campus” (Distrito La Perla, 2020; El Informador, 2018).
As of today, the Office Campus and shopping center have been constructed. During a fieldwork period in 2023, I visited the mall. The feeling I got is that the place embodies the desires that residents in Guadalajara have about urban space. La Perla Shopping Center materializes these desires through a sanitized and middle-class lens – reminding me of Cassián-Yde’s (2019) work on the interplay between public space and colonial power-knowledge relations. From the point of view of these middle-class imaginaries, La Perla mall stands in sharp contrast to, for example, the maladies of the historic city center: dirty, abandoned, dangerous, and congested by cars and street vendors. (Descriptions I heard from research participants). While different on the discursive level, La Perla District reminds me of Ciudad Creativa Digital, Guadalajara’s smart and creative city, and perhaps are worth studying under the same conceptual umbrella.
The desires of a “city within a city”
References
- Cassián-Yde N (2019) Descolonizar las epistemologías urbanas: Saber experto y colectivos por el derecho a la ciudad, ¿quién puede decir ‘la verdad’ sobre los problemas de la ciudad? Journal of Latin American Geography 18(3): 54–84.
- Distrito La Perla (2020). Available at: https://www.distritolaperla.com/ (accessed 12 January 2024).
- El Informador (2018) Ven en Distrito La Perla un nuevo ícono arquitectónico. Available at: https://www.informador.mx/jalisco/Ven-en-Distrito-La-Perla-un-nuevo-icono-arquitectonico-20180604-0025.html (accessed 12 January 2024).
- Ouest (n.d.) Distrito La Perla. Available at: https://ouest.com.mx/distrito-la-perla/ (accessed 12 January 2024). SOM (2021) Distrito La Perla Master Plan. Available at: https://www.som.com/projects/distrito-la-perla-master-plan/ (accessed 12 January 2024).
All pictures taken by Claudia Fonseca Alfaro 2023.
Smart cities in the global south 