{"id":344,"date":"2009-05-29T12:34:19","date_gmt":"2009-05-29T18:34:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/?p=344"},"modified":"2009-05-29T12:34:19","modified_gmt":"2009-05-29T18:34:19","slug":"below-the-phreatic-level","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/2009\/05\/below-the-phreatic-level\/","title":{"rendered":"below the phreatic level"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pruned asks<\/a>: “<\/em>Has there ever been an ideas competition of any kind for Mexico City and its water crisis?”, in response to this post<\/a> at the Guardian outlining that crisis.\u00a0 While I’m not aware of a competition, the unrealized project that immediately comes to mind is Kalach<\/a> and de Leon’s <\/em>The City and the Lakes, which I first read about in Megan Miller’s article “In the Nature of the Valley”, published in Praxis: Mexico City<\/a>.\u00a0 Unattributed quotes in the following piece are from that article.\u00a0 I don’t use twitter (poll: should I?\u00a0 Now that I’m blogging something I read on twitter, maybe I have to reevalute my distaste for twitter), so I’m blogging this.<\/em>
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Lake Texcoco, from 1847 Bruff\/Disturnell map.\u00a0 When the Aztecs settled Tenochtitlan in 1245, the valley held<\/a> a lacustrine complex of four connected waterbodies (Zumpango, Xaltocan, Texcoco, and Xochimilco), descended from the original single water body (Texcoco) and separated by the Aztecs into a total of seven lakes.<\/div>\n

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In 1998, Mexican architect Alberto Kalach and his colleague Teodoro Gonzalez de Leon published La Ciudad y sus Lagos<\/strong>, a bold proposal that examined the potential resurrection of Lake Texcoco<\/a>, the largest of the lakes which Mexico City’s predecessor Tenochtitilan was founded on. The revitalization of the lake would serve to both benefit Mexico City ecologically and to invigorate the practice of urbanism in Mexico.<\/p>\n

Overlay of the historic limits of the lakes with current satellite imagery of Mexico City, from this article, A Brief History of how Mexican Lakes Dried Up<\/a>, which presents a detailed and fascinating look at centuries of battle between the inhabitants of Mexico City and the water table. If this topic is as fascinating to you as it is to me, you must read that article.<\/div>\n

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The idea behind the Lakes Project descends from a report written by a soils expert and professor, Nabor Carillo, in the 1960s. Carillo held that the centuries of attempts to drain the lakes of Mexico City (intiated by the Spaniards shortly after conquering Tenochtitilan) were in error.\u00a0 Those centuries of efforts — perhaps most impressively represented by the 1789 completion of the Nochistongo ravine<\/a> and the networks of canals such as Huehuetoca<\/a> — had left Mexico City lying below the phreatic level<\/a> (the natural surface of the static water table) and consequently in constant state of war with floodwaters.\u00a0 Carillo’s program was radical because, rather than continuing and expanding efforts to funnel water away from the city, he suggested \u201creconstructing the city’s original lakes as natural detention ponds for controlled flooding and containment of treated wastewater\u201d.<\/p>\n

Repairs on the Drenaje Profundo (via Flickr user Felipe Leon<\/a>)<\/div>\n

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Unfortunately, Carillo’s proposal was, in addition to being rather ahead of its time in seeing stormwater and wastewater as resources rather than problems, rather ignored.\u00a0 Mexico City pressed ahead with the construction of the Drenaje Profundo<\/a>, a network of sixty miles of deep underground drainage tunnels, which were completed in the 1970s and ominously dubbed the \u201cfinal solution\u201d.\u00a0 Until Kalach and Gonzalez de Leon dusted off Carillo’s work to inspire their own, Carillo’s primary and somewhat ironic legacy was that the artificially-sustained shallow pool of water<\/a> that is all that remains of Lago Texcoco has been named Lago Nabor Carillo.<\/p>\n

Lago Nabor Carillo<\/a> and the surrounding landscape of saltmarshes, which include this 800-ha solar evaporator for collecting salt<\/a>.<\/div>\n

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Kalach and Gonzalez de Leon adopted Carillo’s suggestion, but developed it further. Their proposal reorganizes the Drenaje Profundo into a recycling system that recharges Mexico City’s aquifers, rather than conveying water away to the Gulf Mexico, as the current system does. The proposed system would recharge the aquifer with filtration from rain as well as treated wastewater collected in new lakes, adding moisture to Mexico City’s notoriously polluted air and ameliorating water supply and soil subsidence problems that currently plague the city. Vegetated ravines would be preserved on the perimeter of the lake, providing for the cleansing of stormwater and rainfall making its way down the slopes into Texcoco.<\/p>\n

The Lakes Project, via Alberto Kalach’s website<\/a>. Unfortunately the images from the Praxis article referenced earlier, which make the relationship of the project to both the urban system and the Drenaje Profundo much clearer, are not on the website. I’ll try and upload some scans of them at some point, but don’t have the issue handy at the moment.<\/div>\n

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The revitalized Lake Texcoco would be the largest of the new lakes (just as it was once the largest lake in the valley). From its position on the periphery of Mexico City’s rampant, disorganized growth, the lake would serve as a powerful ordering mechanism, redirecting growth to its edges. It would also provide \u201ca literal and operational platform for new transportation infrastructure, including expressways, transit lines, and a much needed new airport\u201d. Kalach explains the urban potential of the project:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are proposing a new airport on an island in the Texcoco Lake, twenty-two kilometers from the historic center. This would function as the new entrance to the city. The proposed airport and associated rapid-transit systems would stimulate urban growth on the low hills to the east of the city, which an area well-suited for urbanization. Concurrently, growth would be slowed on the shores of the lake and on the forested side to the west, which is now an area for the natural recharge of the aquifers. The project really functions at two scales. At the metropolitan level it deals with access roads and the airport. At the local level it addresses the area around the lake, revitalizing the low-income settlements that are currently there. In this way the larger project would foster both a local and metropolitan connection between the city and its lake\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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The Lakes Project exemplifies the potential for the design of infrastructures to function on two levels, the first of which would be the immediate functional potential of the infrastructure (the thing which the infrastructure enables<\/em>) and the second of which would be the potential for the infrastructure of affect the growth of the urban entity it is embedded in (the infrastructure’s potential to generate <\/em>the city). Kalach’s proposal treats the enabling function of the regenerated Lago Texcoco (its ecological and hydrological function) equally with its potential to generate a more positive urbanism for Mexico City. Moreover, though Kalach claims the project develops out of geography, not history (a claim which might be criticized for creating a dichotomy between two intimately intertwinned ways of understanding), the poetic impact of rebuilding a piece of Tenochtitilan within Mexico City’s limits is not difficult to discern. As Kalach states:<\/p>\n

\u201cI have always felt that Mexico City somehow lost its reason for being. The city had been founded here for specific reasons, but no longer responded to its origin. It seemed that, through the Lakes Project, the basin could recuperate its lacustrine character, and life and sense could be returned to a place that had lost its form or transformed itself to the extreme\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pruned asks: “Has there ever been an ideas competition of any kind for Mexico City and its water crisis?”, in response to this post at the Guardian outlining that crisis.\u00a0 While I’m not aware of a competition, the unrealized project that immediately comes to mind is Kalach and de Leon’s The City and the Lakes, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,43,5],"tags":[103,848,102,844],"class_list":["post-344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-infrastructure","category-landscape-architecture","category-urbanism","tag-alberto-kalach","tag-infrastructure","tag-mexico-city","tag-urbanism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=344"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":373,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344\/revisions\/373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}