WATER CITY, AMPHIBIAN CITY, MEXICO CITY
Rescue and renaturation of water substrates
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5821/qru.11891Abstract
The search for water has always been one of the greatest challenges facing humanity. Mexico City (CDMX), intimately linked to water since its foundation, is today one of the cities with the greatest water stress in the world and faces a paradox of abundance and scarcity, of cyclical floods while its inhabitants die of thirst. There are those who dream of bringing back the city’s lost ecosystem, but is it possible to recover the idea of a lake city?
Rescuing Mexico City’s water substrates is possible; but, above all, it is extremely urgent and necessary for the survival –social, environmental, and economic– of the city.
Following from that hypothesis, this work studies the historical relationship between the city and the water, it x-rays the metropolis in search of the remaining water substrates, and it also explores the most significant projects that tried to recover the lacustrine condition of the city, either in real or utopian ways, to elaborate a critical analysis of them.
Mexico City needs a new water culture, and this work constitutes a document that invites us to re-imagine, re-think, re-discover and re-invent the relationship between Mexico City and its water legacy. To achieve this, a series of urban plans have been drawn up in such a way that, by using the very same frame and scale, they all show the essential water-related aspects as well as the whole water spatial dimension; this allows us to build a cartographic analysis tool which, like an atlas, makes it possible to visualize and relate the main water issues of the city. The opacity game created by superimposing some cartographies on others allows establishing relationships between them, interconnecting layers, analyzing them, and drawing conclusions through the graphic parallel generated –always trying to promote, as far as possible, the rescue and renaturation of the water substrates of the city.
The goal is to define the challenge of a Mexico City potentially sensitive to water, sensing that the rain will be the only one capable of rescuing it.
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