Fueling ecological neglect in a manufactured tourist city: planning, disaster mapping, and environmental art in Cancun, Mexico

Abstract

This article explores how tourism urban governance fuels patterns of ecological neglect. It turns a critical eye on Cancun, a leading Caribbean beach tourist destination and battered epicenter of anthropogenic climate change. First, the article contextualizes Cancun’s design and construction as a state development project and manufactured tourist city. It describes the city’s socio-spatial segregation and highlights the role of hurricanes in processes of beach enclosure. Second, it explores a series of risk maps elaborated as responses to international demands on coastal disaster mitigation and beach erosion. I show how local authorities, academics, and the Mexican state are bound to disregard risk maps to further enclose the Caribbean beach and keep the city productive for tourism. Finally, I look at the adoption of anthropogenic narratives on climate change as tourist attractions in Cancun’s Underwater Museum of Art, a unique coalition between conservation, art and tour-operators in the city. I show that turning sea level rise and ocean acidification into tourist spectacles through copyrighted art, this attraction depoliticizes tourism’s responsibility in patterns of environmental degradation. The article serves to reflect on the tacit paradoxes that plague efforts to imagine alternative environmental politics and sustainable tourism urbanisms outside neoliberal trends.

Keywords:

• Climate change
• environmental art
• disaster mapping
• manufactured cities
• tourism urban governance

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge the support from researchers at the Centro de Información Geográfica, Universidad de Quintana Roo (UqRoo), Cancun’s Municipal Planning Institute and the Departments of Ecologia Humana and Recursos del Mar, Centro de Investigación y Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politécnico Nacional de Merida (CINVESTAV). An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2017 American Geographers Association Meeting’s session “The Geopolitics of Tourism” that the author co-organized with Mary Mostafanezhad and Roger Norum. Special thanks to Jennie Germann Molz, Liz Montegary, Javier Caletrío, Elana Zilberg, Kathryn Kopinak, Fernando D. Rubio, and the anonymous reviewers for their generosity in their comments to this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This research is the basis of a book in progress on the Mexican state’s use of mass tourism, ecotourism, indigenous luxury tourism, and domestic souvenir production as state development tools in the Yucatan Peninsula. Part of this research and fieldwork in Cancun was done under the auspices of two international and interdisciplinary research projects: “Understanding the Dynamics of Urban Flexibility and Reconstruction”, Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities, University of Oxford (2010–2012) and “Tourism and Mobilities in Times of Crisis”, Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain (CSO2011-26527).

2 Maquiladoras are also referred to as maquila factories, factories under foreign ownership where products are processed for export under labor intensive practices. See Kopinak (1996) for a comprehensive history of the origins and organization of maquiladoras in Mexico and their relationship with the USA.

3 Tourism represents almost 9% of the gross domestic product in Mexico. Tourism ranks as the 4th largest source of foreign exchange in the country, 50% of which is estimated to come from the estate of Quintana Roo where Cancun located (The World Tourism and Trade Council, 2015). Since the dismantling of the henequen industry and Cancun’s creation, tourism is the driving economic force of the Mexican Yucatan Peninsula.

4 The Saffir–Simpson Hurricane Scale estimates the potential property damage and life loss of hurricanes based on a scale of 1–5 rating hurricane’s sustained winds speed (NOOA).

5 A comparison could be elaborated here with how disaster mapping took place in Grenada also through the UN mandates and the National Disaster Management Agency (NaDMA) right after the hurricane. Differently from Cancun where emphasis was placed on the reconstruction of the hotel zone despite the city, in Grenada authorities used reconstruction efforts to strengthen a social understanding of disasters. The state built a partnership with UNICEF and elaborated a teaching guide and workbook to raise preparedness awareness among children, parents and teachers in all public schools. The initiative has been summarized by the United Nations ISDR Towards a Culture of Prevention Manual (2007).

6 MUSA and the artist’s environmental art has been featured in a multiplicity of media, including The New York Times, The National Geographic, CNN, BBC, Smithsonian.com and travel magazines like Caribbean travel and life, the Lonely Planet. The Anthropocene sculpture figures too in the front image of the South Atlantic Quarterly Journal special issue Autonomía on the Anthropocene (Nelson & Braun, 2017) although none of the articles studies the museum in question.

7 Another interesting comparison could be drawn here with Grenada where the artist’s museum has been classified as one of the Top 25 Wonders of the World by National Geographic and the artist’s work has been used by the local government to get approval and resources to establish a Marine Natural Protected Area.

8 The Management Plan of this marine protected area was published in August 2015 but it is still not operative. The Plan aims to control the number of diving authorizations and tourists that can access the reserve for diving and snorkeling.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matilde Córdoba Azcárate

Dr. Matilde Córdoba Azcárate is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. Her research lies at the intersection between tourism development and political ecology in contemporary Southern Mexico. Webpage: https://quote.ucsd.edu/mcazcarate/.