Placemaking in the Shadows of Tulum’s Luxury Resorts

Some 1,500 years ago, the Mayan people built a city on what is now Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. They called it Zama, which refers to the sunrise at dawn. What was once an important trade port named for its natural beauty is now home to Tulum’s star-studded luxury eco-resorts where the price of a night’s stay rivals, if not exceeds, those of Manhattan hotels.

The rapid gentrification of this small coastal town has caused both gang squabbles and skyrocketing rates of poverty, tourism and population growth, with people coming to Tulum from across Mexico in search of service sector work.

“There’s a really niche market going [on in Tulum] that feels like they need to show off how eco-touristic they are. There’s been a big impact on the locals,” explains Guillermo Bernal, executive director of The Place Institute and founding director of Fundación Placemaking México. Despite booming construction and luxury real estate development destroying Tulum’s natural environment and evicting indigenous residents from their land, “it’s still a consumer’s perspective of going into nature, going into a resort environment, and taking from it and not giving so much back.”

Unable to afford the soaring local rents, informal settlements like La Invasión that house locals and workers have cropped up in Tulum. After cleaning luxury hotel rooms or whipping up expensive açai bowls for tourists at resorts all day, La Invasión residents retire to the small homes they’ve erected largely out of scrap materials.

But that doesn’t make La Invasión any less of a home. There, residents had accumulated a few picnic tables and some swings to create a gathering place for the neighborhood’s kids and families. “That location was intended to be a playground area, but it wasn’t used really — most of the swings were broken,” explains Dila Ozyazici, one of six designers who worked with the La Invasión community in 2020 to erect a co-designed playground called The Chillin’ Orange.

In an overrun tourist town that’s been flooded with the external values of luxury ecotourism, The Chillin’ Orange shows that a $1,000 co-designed project can make a difference for the local communities that actually call Tulum home.

Ozyazici explains that the project started with conversations with La Invasión residents. “They were like, we live here but we don’t really have a gathering area for us, for all the families,” she says. “So we came together with them and started talking about what they would need.” That was a place where kids could play but where others could also hang out.

The result of many community consultations throughout the design process was the spherical Chillin’ Orange, a tubular metal play structure with rope netting that was created by local makers, an intentional choice to support the local economy. The structure allows kids to climb and play on it while adults can hang out and relax on the netting.

“The orange was perfect because it was like wow, now we have a place to play with the children,” one resident says. “It has benefited us a lot.” A La Invasión kiddo agrees: “There’s more joy in the park because everyone goes.”

Read more: The Harlem Playground Co-Designed by Public Housing Residents

The six-week Design H(ij)ack program that resulted in The Chillin Orange stems from Brendan Warford’s BHI5, an interdisciplinary art and design program that focuses on public space. Six designers worked on three projects — in addition to the playground, designers created a giant rooftop slinky atop a shop and a futuristic food cart. By creating these eye-catching works of art in collaboration with the community, one of the goals is to bring members of Tulum’s formal and tourist communities to the neighborhood which the slinky and food car projects have done.

For Bernal, The Chillin’ Orange highlights the critical difference between place branding and placemaking.

“Doing a good project in Tulum implies understanding the community and respecting their values and also really leaving them room for innovation and creativity and ownership, because that’s the hardest part — not just imposing the U.S. or North American values onto the community, but leaving room for another way of seeing things,” he says.

Bernal notes that he’s worked in cities like Detroit where place branding makes sense. “I understand the value of street art and how important [it is] and how it actually helps portray the local community,” Bernal adds. But as The Chillin’ Orange shows, not every project calls for it.

He says that there’s certainly a value in place branding and its ability to portray a location as a great place and environment, but that a lot of that opportunity lies in new communities. “When there’s already a community in place and there’s a vision of branding and a special set of values that’s being determined by others, it’s going to become challenging.”

“For me,” he says, “that’s the making part — where you respect the local community and you keep the values that are already in place and transform together with the community. For me, that’s the big difference.”