The skyscraper apartment buildings (and some other distinctive features) of Panama City

I spent a few days in Panama City at the end of January. I had been there only once before, in 2012, before the Metro opened. It’s a surprisingly distinctive place.

Part of Panama City’s skyline, from Amador Causeway. The highway that takes a water route around the Casco Viejo is visible in the foreground.

Panama City’s most astonishing feature is surely its skyline, one of the world’s most impressive. Curiously, more than 80% of its tallest buildings are residential structures. Among cities of the Western Hemisphere, only New York, Chicago, Miami, and Toronto have a larger number of tall (> 150 m) apartment buildings, and Panama City has so many new towers under construction that it could easily pass Miami and Toronto soon. Here’s a chart of tall residential buildings in the whole world, compiled from data assembled by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat:

This chart, based on data generated on February 24, 2018, ranks urban areas by the number of finished buildings that were classed by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat as “residential” including multiuse buildings with a “residential” component. Only urban areas with more than ten such buildings are included. Note that Council on Tall Buildings data are compiled by political municipality, not by urban area, and I’ve done some consolidation. This process as always raises some questions, such as: If Seoul and Incheon are put into the same urban area, why not Tokyo and Yokohama? And why not join, for example, Hong Kong and Shenzhen or maybe even all the Pearl River Delta cities? I acknowledge the arbitrariness of some of my decisions and have added notes about the underlying data to the last column. For a similar chart that includes hotels along with residential buildings, click here.

Consider, for the moment, how extraordinary Panama City’s position is. Its urban area has a population of only a million and half. It’s smaller than every single one of the other urban areas on this list with the exception of resort town Pattaya, in many cases by an order of magnitude. All the urban areas with anything like as many tall residential buildings as Panama City are much larger. Panama City is definitely punching above its weight when it comes to tall apartment buildings.¹

Why were all these buildings built? The reasons are not completely clear. Many of the apartment dwellers are no doubt well-off Panamanians of whom there are quite a few,² but it’s quite clear that a large proportion of the units are only occupied part time and that a good number of the inhabitants of the buildings are foreigners. Numerous Latin Americans feel a need to acquire property in a relatively safe foreign country, and Panama fits the bill. Like the United States, Panama uses the U.S. dollar as its currency; it lacks burdensome foreign-exchange controls; and it’s felt to have a reasonably stable political system. Even more than the United States, it welcomes well-off part-time foreign residents, including many North American retirees. Furthermore, costs are lower than in the United States (Panama City has sometimes been characterized as a cheaper alternative to Miami for Latin Americans in search of foreign real estate). Also, there’s no getting around the fact that the Panamanian authorities are generally considered not to be particularly interested in how well-off people have acquired their fortunes. Some people say that Panama City’s apartment buildings were built at least in part with profits from the Latin American drug trade, or with the proceeds of various kinds of corruption. I have no way to judge the accuracy of this widely-held view.

It’s actually quite difficult to get precise data on who’s living in the apartment buildings, since the Panamanian census doesn’t seem to gather data at anything comparable to the U.S. census’s tract or block level and only provides very basic socioeconomic information. The most detailed easily available data are for corregimientos (districts). Corregimientos in Panama City cover too large an area to be useful in looking closely at the apartment districts alone, but it’s easy enough to get a good sense of Panama City’s social geography from these data. The apartment buildings are nearly all located close to the Pacific, in predominantly upper-middle class neighborhoods (see the map).

Panama City and vicinity showing both the location of tall apartment buildings and the distribution of mean monthly household income in 2010 by corregimiento. Base GIS data are from the BBBike.org version of OpenStreetMap, modified somewhat. GIS political boundaries are from GADM (and don’t jibe perfectly with the OpenStreetMap data). Data on income are from the 2010 Panama census (no corregimiento data are available for the area west of the Panama Canal). Data on tall buildings are from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. Mapping software: QGIS.

You’d think when you see Panama City’s skyline that the streets of the city would feel a bit like those in Manhattan. They don’t. The buildings are surprisingly automobile-oriented. They come with a great deal of parking, and there’s bumper-to-bumper traffic for much of the day on some of the streets in the apartment districts. There are sidewalks just about everywhere, but they’re not very well maintained, and they’re generally not all that busy, although they’re not empty either. At corners, sidewalk users run into the usual Third World problems. Some drivers simply won’t stop for pedestrians no matter what. Crossing streets on foot isn’t something you do casually.

Sidewalk in El Cangrejo, Panama City’s most pedestrian-friendly well-off neighborhood.

Many of the commercial areas in the apartment districts are quite suburban in form too, with huge amounts of parking. There are several large vertical shopping centers. There is also a major inland commercial center along the Via España in El Cangrejo, which has a form I haven’t seen anywhere else in the world. There is a reasonable amount of space for both pedestrians–and parking.

The Via España, where an attempt has been made to accommodate both pedestrians and cars (the main roadway is to the right). Note the entrance to the Iglesia del Carmen Metro station.

The conversion of this street from a very wide two-way boulevard into a slightly narrower one-way street, which occurred when the subway was being built, was what allowed this form to be created. Dogmatic urbanists would hate the accommodation to automobiles, but merchants on the street would probably argue that there was no choice. El Cangrejo is certainly the closest thing Panama City possesses to a traditional middle-class residential and shopping district; it’s also a major banking center. It’s a reasonably congenial place for pedestrians, except at street corners. It’s not a coincidence that most of Panama City’s mid-range hotels are located nearby and that this area is the only place in Panama City where tall apartment buildings have been built away from the coast.

Panama City and vicinity showing the location of the Metro, roads, pedestrian facilities, and tall apartment buildings. Base GIS data are from the BBBike.org version of OpenStreetMap, modified somewhat. “U/C” = under construction. Data on tall buildings are from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. Mapping software: QGIS.

Panama City does provide pedestrians with one truly outstanding experience. There’s a recreational path along the Bay which (like the highway it parallels) is known as the Cinta Costera. The Cinta Costera path takes you from the Punta Pacifica, where many of the high-rise apartments are located, to Panama’s 17th-century core, the Casco Viejo. Because of the curve in the Bay, you can see from one end to the other. The views are really wonderful. The Cinta Costera path gets quite a bit of use, which varies enormously depending on the time of day and the day of the week. In the morning, the path seems to be populated almost entirely by more or less serious runners, cyclists, and walkers.

The Cinta Costera walkway on a weekday morning.

At midday it’s nearly empty except for a few foreigners. Late in the afternoon, the path gets crowded with people of all sorts, and on weekend afternoons it can feel as though all Panama City is there.

The Cinta Costera walkway on a Sunday afternoon.

It’s a successful space, but I don’t want to exaggerate its virtues. It’s only 4 km long (and I suspect that the distance between kilometers 3 and 4 is short). It’s also not too far from the Cinta Costera highway, and you can hear traffic every second.³

Panama City also offers another high-quality walking and bicycling experience, along the Amador Causeway. This causeway came into being as a breakwater for the Panama Canal’s Pacific entrance. Because it adjoins the low-density former Canal Zone, the Amador Causeway is not easily accessible to as many people as the Cinta Costera, but it still attracts numerous users, especially on weekends.

The Amador Causeway during a Sunday morning ciclovía, when the middle lanes of several Panama City highways are reserved for cyclists (and a few skaters). Note the container ship exiting the Panama Canal in the background.

Panama City’s Metro is also quite impressive considering Panama City’s modest size. It’s true that the Metro itself is not that long—16 km, of which 7 km  are in a subway—but a second 22 km line is under construction, and additional lines are planned. The current route runs from Albrook (the site of Panama City’s major bus terminal and what is said to be Latin America’s largest shopping mall),

The heavily used pedestrian bridge between the Metro Albrook terminus and Panama City’s major bus terminal and an enormous shopping mall. It’s surely the most impressive piece of pedestrian infrastructure in Panama City. 

through the old downtown around the 5 de Mayo Plaza, then along Via España through El Cangrejo, and finally on an elevated line north/northeast through some heavily populated, relatively poor neighborhoods.

The San Isidro Metro station, the northern terminus of the Metro.

Trains are short—only three cars long—but the stations were built to handle five-car trains, and it’s planned that they will when Line 2 opens. Trains operate quite frequently during the day, and are often jammed. Approximately 260,000 persons a day have been riding Panama City’s Metro, which isn’t bad for a small system in a city that is not exactly gigantic.

For a medium-sized city in a medium-income country, Panama City has acquired an impressive set of modern big-city features. I wouldn’t say that it always feels like a traditional big city when you’re down on the ground—but neither do most other Third World cities. Their major growth period occurred when accommodating automobiles seemed more important than anything else, and autocentric habits have become thoroughly embedded in the structure of class privilege. It wouldn’t be easy to reverse this.