Huberto Juarez Nunez, an economics professor at the Benemerita Autonomous University of Puebla: "When it comes to the population in the municipalities around Ciudad Modelo, there has been no benefit for them from the Audi plant. Ciudad Modelo is not for the workers. Maybe for the foreign technicians."
Huberto Juarez Nunez, an economics professor at the Benemerita Autonomous University of Puebla: "When it comes to the population in the municipalities around Ciudad Modelo, there has been no benefit for them from the Audi plant. Ciudad Modelo is not for the workers. Maybe for the foreign technicians."
Photo credit: Erick Emmanuel Almanza Ferrer
Photo credit: Erick Emmanuel Almanza Ferrer
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SAN JOSE CHIAPA, Mexico — Just beyond the gray cinderblock homes and thick brown dust of tiny San Jose Chiapa lies the promise of a shining new city where there once was only farmland, thanks to a $1.3 billion Audi plant built in the middle of nowhere.
As San Jose Chiapa recedes from view along the highway to Vera-cruz, the pavement becomes smoother at the exit for Ciudad Modelo, or Model City, a master-planned community being developed by the government next to the 1,000-acre Audi plant and accompanying supplier park.
While President Donald Trump continues to threaten the Mexican auto industry with a trade war, officials in the surrounding state of Puebla are making their biggest bet ever that auto production is here to stay, and that it can be leveraged to bring forth not only manufacturing jobs but also a more orderly transition to an urban, industrialized economy.
“What’s going on in the United States is something that interests us and worries us, but we know that these big corporations make their plans thinking over the next 25 years,” said Michel Chain Carrillo, Puebla’s secretary of economic development. “While there are implications in the short term, these don’t change the way in which the world functions.”
No one lives in Ciudad Modelo yet, except at the newly opened LQ Hotel. The city feels like a construction site during the week and a ghost town on weekends, with completed buildings scattered amid vast open fields.
The evolving skyline is a stark contrast to the humble farming and canning towns that surround it. There are colorful condos, a convention center, school towers offering kindergarten through college education, and the outlines of a supermarket and shopping mall.
Audi, which buses most of its workers to the Q5 plant from the state capital, about 40 miles away, isn’t funding the model city, government officials said.
The automaker has promised 4,000 direct jobs at the factory, which will make about 150,000 Q5 crossovers per year. Tens of thousands more jobs will come from auto suppliers and the service industry. There is also room on Audi’s footprint to grow.
But having wooed Audi to one of the poorest areas of Puebla, the government and its private partners are determined to create a surrounding urban infrastructure in the hope that the engineers, line workers, service firms and everything else needed for a vibrant, modern metropolis will follow.
A promotional video from the state government and Spanish engineering firm IDOM, contracted to design Phase 1 of Ciudad Modelo, said it will have about 5,000 homes — 1,500 subsidized by the government — to support 69,000 new jobs in the region by 2030. Health centers, parks, shopping centers, a transportation hub and university campuses are all part of this “city for the future.”
The city is expected to eventually grow to 100,000 residents or more, becoming perhaps the second-largest city in Puebla state — after the state capital, also called Puebla — and a model for Latin America.
Building the model
Ciudad Modelo, the "model city" being built around the Audi plant in San Jose Chiapa, Mexico, is planned in 3 major phases taking several decades. The first phase, which is under construction, is projected to be finished in 2030 and will include:
- 50-acre strip of parkland running 4 miles through the city center, providing a "green belt"
- 90-acre university campus, with a federal research facility and a sports center
- Educational campus for students in kindergarten through high school
- About 5,000 apartments and houses to start; 1,500 with government subsidies
- Shopping center with supermarket, movie theater, stores and restaurants
- Public hospital and doctors' offices, about 100,000 square feet
- Conference/convention center and ground-transportation hub/bus station
- 3-star and 4-star hotels with a combined 400 rooms
Sources: Puebla state government and engineering firm IDOM
Photo credit: Erick Emmanuel Almanza Ferrer
Not everyone is on board with Ciudad Modelo. Mayors in this rural area of Puebla complain about limited development funds being used on a fancy new city rather than on the needs of their impoverished residents for paved roads and basic health clinics.
Indigenous groups are protesting attempted state control over local resources such as water and land; they won a court injunction against an agency set up to administer Ciudad Modelo without input from the communities that it directly affects.
And some local residents express resentment that the arrival of a global powerhouse such as Audi has had little positive impact on their lives, because the skilled workers who will operate and staff the plant are brought in from elsewhere.
Ciudad Modelo's modern apartment buildings will transform the landscape around rural San Jose Chiapa.
Photo credit: Laurence Iliff
Photo credit: Laurence Iliff
In San Jose Chiapa’s town plaza on a recent Sunday, Francisco Flores, a 46-year-old laborer, said he was torn about the arrival of Audi and the planned model city. He’ll likely never work for the German automaker, and he certainly can’t afford a new house in Ciudad Modelo.
“I’m a native of this town, and I don’t see any benefit here,” he said, pointing to the unpaved roads and crumbling homes of San Jose Chiapa.
At the same time, his young daughter and son both attend those new Ciudad Modelo schools — she plays in the orchestra sponsored by Audi, and he sings in the school choir.
“My kids are small and we want to give them a better life outside of farming,” Flores said. “I do see the benefits for them.”
State officials insist that the impact of Ciudad Modelo will radiate into the traditional towns surrounding it, stimulating their own real estate markets, small shops and restaurants, and providing steady service jobs that are relatively well-paid.
“Is this going to be a good thing? I’m convinced it is,” said Chain, the economic development director. “Is it going to be a watershed for the way things are done in Latin America? I’m convinced of that too. Is it going to solve absolutely all the problems of absolutely all the workers in the region? No, we can’t be that naive.”
Chain said he didn’t have figures on how much the government has spent or will spend on Ciudad Modelo. He said the state is putting in the infrastructure, and private firms are investing the rest, in things such as hotels, housing and shops.
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