Okay, I know I said I was more-or-less done with resorts. Cancún is misleading here. I’m starting a week traveling around the Yucatan peninsula, mostly to see some Mayan ruins, and it turns out all of it — Cancún, Cozumel, Tulum, and Valladolid — are a couple hours bus rides away from each other. So I found cheap flights in to one of those, and I’m currently on a bus heading to Valladolid, where I’m spending a couple days, mainly to see Chichen Itza and chill in a colonial town.

As usual, I just bounced through the third of four short stops in Mexico City. I got in late and left early. The connected hotel worked a charm; a 15 minute walk from the plane to the check-in desk is a miracle, and being able to checkout from the hotel at 10:30 for a 12:15 flight and still get to the gate a full hour-and-a-quarter before it took off was painless. And not having to take the time for public transit or the cost of cabs to and from is a huge amount of stress just gone. I’d still prefer flying in and out the same day, but if that’s not an option, this has its advantages.

I’m starting to notice something in my travels. There’s a sameness to a lot of cities. Zitácuaro felt a lot like İzmir, with wider roads, more colorful architecture, and better sidewalks. Mexico City¹ felt like Bangalore minus the crowds. Puerto Vallarta felt like a slightly upscale Hilton Head. I could go on — Zagreb felt comfortable because the city center felt like Madrid, with the cosmopolitan street traffic and restaurant scene. The Dubai Mall felt like any number of upscale malls in Las Vegas squashed together.

A pessimist might throw up their hands in despair at this, say it’s all been done before² and what’s the point? I don’t feel that way; if anything, the similarities are comforting, and not in the “I can find a Burger King everywhere I go!” way. Knowing how a basic city is designed tells you a lot about how to navigate it, what alleys look sketchy and what alleys are sketchy, what the likelihood is you’ll need cash-in-hand to buy some food, what’s likely to be a grocery store or a convenience store or the local equivalent of a dollar store. A decade in New York has taught me, plopped down on any street corner, what restaurants look solid and which ones look iffy and whether you’ll be able to hail a cab or if you’re likely to need to go an avenue over. I’m not claiming that facility in any foreign countries, but I’m starting to get a kind of intuitive sense about some of this, and while I’m sure it’s often misleading — I’ve been caught on NYC street corners dead certain a cab was due any minute now — there’s a surprising amount that carries over, in bits and pieces.³

The question remains why these places replicate each other. And I think it is largely unintentional. There’s a dozen reasons which pop to mind: intentional copying, or maybe construction techniques coming into vogue and dictating certain development patterns.

I’ve got a more optimistic view on the whole thing. I think humans are fundamentally the same, everywhere in the world. Give them roughly the same environmental factors — access to capital and construction tools, population density, a certain baseline infrastructure — and they’re going to naturally build the same kind of buildings. Sure, there’s regional differences: stores are open to the elements in hot climates, closed to them in cold ones; Mexican buildings have a lot more colorful, whimsical elements than most other cities; Zitácuaro, developed largely after cars, has far wider streets and well defined sidewalks than İzmir does, developed before.

But I’m remarkably cheered by this revelation. We might want different things. Some people love cities, others love farms, some people are happiest surrounded by family, other people want to be surrounded by strangers. But left to our own devices, unburdened by ideologies imposed upon us, constrained by very similar factors, we mostly end up wanting the same sorts of things. And I think there’s a broad, implicit agreement in what those things are and what they look like.

Next: Cozumel (CZM) to Guadalajara (GDL)
Prev: Puerto Vallarta (PVR) to Mexico City (MEX)

Footnotes

¹ The limited part I’ve seen of it, so far, anyway

² And, I mean, it basically has. Haven’t been a lot of new notes added to the piano in the past 200 years, folks.

³ I guess that’s the “seasoning” in “seasoned traveller.”