Some outside analysts are skeptical that the project can attract Guatemalans beyond the capital’s small, prosperous elite and that it can thrive over the long term in a country with one of the world’s highest homicide rates and roughly half of its 14 million people in poverty.

They point out that in 2002, a group of private investors converted a nearby area into a pedestrian mall. Although it attracted hundreds, the experiment was abandoned two years later because of drug trafficking and prostitution.

Spending money is “pointless if people in the city are starving, or cannot find stable sources of employment,’’ said Eduardo Mendieta, a philosophy professor at Stony Brook University in New York who writes about modern urbanism in Latin America.

But the young architects and businessmen running the Zone One project say they are confident that they have only begun to tap into the pent-up demand for the type of urban experience associated with wealthier cities in Latin America, Europe and the U.S.

Alvaro Veliz, the head of Urbanistica, said a million people a month visit the heart of the redeveloped zone, the 12 million queztal ($1.5 million) pedestrian plaza known as Camino Real, or the Royal Path, which was the site of the Spanish colonial government’s most important buildings and an economic engine of Guatemala City until the 1970s.

When “spaces change, people behave differently and this increases security,’’ he said.

Above the Eccentrico bistro, a developer has torn down walls to create six airy, white-painted loft-style apartments.

Emiliano Valdes, a curator and gallery owner, moved in three years ago for an urban lifestyle that would allow him “to walk around, get the newspaper and go out for dinner without the inconveniences of driving.’’