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About Landscape

T he multic ult ur a l me a nings of l a ndsc a pe China A ffore station progr a m for de ser t s Canada a f t er oil sa nds e x t r ac t ion
indonesia ore mining l a ndsc a pes Egypt g ated cit y in the desert Australia plundering the kimberle y region Europe l a ndsc a pe
a nd legends USA l a nd a r t at t he columbi a ri ver Mexico ecologic a l pa rk for me x ico c i t y Tajikistan pa rk in a n remot e
mounta in r a nge India re viving a desert japan preserving cult ur a l l a ndsc a pes South Africa Fa rml a nd versus de velopment

Iaki Echeverria, Jonathan Hajar

TeXcoco Lake, Mexico City:

Landscape as Infrastructure
The Texcoco Lake
Ecological Park in
Mexico City is a work
in progress. Step-bystep, a large park is
developing through a
flexible masterplan.

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Page 79: Human activity (shown by flow lines) links a new

layer with the existing natural system.
Below: Eco-recreational, cultural and sports infrastructure is
embedded around Nabor Carillo Lake.

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By the year 2050, over 30 cities in the world

will have reached the status of megacity with
populations of at least 10 million inhabitants.
Only three of these cities will be located in the
so-called developed world: Tokyo (34.5 million), New York (21.5 million) and Los Angeles (17.6 million). The rest will require new viable paradigms to manage not only growth
but inhabitability, sustainability, energy and
mobility; v isions that may no longer follow a
purely western model, a hybrid of American
and European influences.
In the growing discourse of urbanism today,
it is difficult to find a more forceful case study,
relative to the causes of its recent hypergrowth,
than the Metropolitan Zone of the Valley of
Mexico (ZMVM). Borne out of rapid hyper-
migration in the 1970s during which the metropolitan area absorbed 10,000 immigrants daily,
the ZMVM offers 30 years of experience in managing and inhabiting the megacity. The size and
complexity of the ZMVM demonstrate that the
future of the urban must venture beyond the
conventions of design and professional practice.
Around the world the rise of megacities has
brought the reappearance of planning projects
of a huge scale, such as Fosters West Kowloon
Cultural District in China, James Corner Field
Operations Fresh Kills in New York, or the
Toronto Waterfront. When built, the Texcoco
Lake Ecological Park will become the largest
urban park in the world, representing 11 per
cent of the entire metropolitan area of the
ZMVM and extending over 14,000 hectares
(35,000 acres). This space is 23 times the size of
Bosque de Chapultepec in Mexico City, 49 times
the size of Hyde Park in London, and 43 times
the size of Central Park in New York.
Conventional architecture can no longer
confront this condition. Master planning strategies are impotent in apprehending the complexity of 21st-century post-industrial cities. New
paradigms become indispensable: strategies

that are open to change over time and with the

capacity to react to the discontinuous structure
of new cities. The Texcoco Lake Ecological
Park project is an effort to imagine and image
the future of the mega-city, and of Mexico City
in particular.

The team of Iaki Echeverria designed a flexible strategy for Texcoco Lake Ecological Park.
The park creates a hard edge with Mexico City and integrates itself more softly with Texcocos rural areas. The red dotted line shows Mexico Citys political border; white frames indicate the Citys districts.

Opportunity as project. Stigmatized for more

than 30 years, the Metropolitan ZMVM has an
opportunity to reinvent itself. In 1971, a presidential decree ordered the creation of the Texcoco Lake Commission, and was successful in
creating and protecting a large territorial reserve
which today may be considered a non-renewable urban resource. This reserve, located in the
eastern outskirts of the ZMVM, and formerly
occupied by Texcoco Lake, can be reclaimed as
an ecological edge for the megacity a new territory that incorporates n
ature, culture, and
infrastructure: a cultural ecology.
The main objective of the project is to
reclaim the site as the most important

infrastructure in the valley, one with the capacity to reconcile the city with its geography,
incorporate hydrological cycles, eliminate the
threat of floods, provide better health conditions for human population and contribute to
the re-establishment of the native biota. It will
jump-start a process to redirect 500 years of historical conflict between the city, water and the
ecology of the valley as the first stage of a larger
and longer process. It could, over time, bring
back the obliterated lake landscape.
This large area will promote activities seldom performed in urban Mexico City: It will
provide multiple sports fields, lakes and canals
for boating and sailing, mountain biking, and
walking trails, as well as areas for the observation of flora and fauna. This zone, infamous
for its significant shortage of social, cultural
and educational networks, will be revitalized.
It will become an act of historic justice that
will provide quality public space to the most

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Alternative energy generation through wind power harvesting is proposed and also water-related activities like fishing
in flood zones of the park.

f orgotten, economically depressed and s ocially

disadvantaged region in the meta-metropol
itan region of Mexico City.

Architecture is process. Texcoco Park is an

ongoing investigation, constantly re-evaluated
across multiple scenarios, where fixed designs are only understood as necessary means
for communication. It is a cknowledged that
landscape is never still but an active matter.
Just like a photograph of a fire, fixed images
are only a reference to many processes that
change over time.
Form is allowed to be transformed continuously through research. The water bodies change
radically through dry and rainy seasons. Over
time the current ecology of the valley will evolve
and the design will adapt to it. It is closer to an
algorithm than to a garden or a building; it sets
up a procedure, a behavioural logic and formal
results with a certain degree of speculation.
The project does not design an image. Even
once the park is built, it is a work in progress, a
vision of a remarkable place in a permanent state
of change, conceived by a collaborative group of
scientists, engineers, biologists, chemists, ecologists, designers, architects, urban planners, landscapers, physicians, lawyers, and even politicians.
For such a collaborative effort, a bottomup approach is essential. It has proven the better way to provide the unique and specific solutions demanded by such complex conditions.
Also necessary is the reformulation of certain
conventions, for example: size is not scale; landscape isnt nature; city is not architecture and
landscaping isnt gardening.
Texcoco lake ecological park, mexico city
Client: Mexicos Federal Government
Architect: Iaki Echeverria
Realisation: 2010 ongoing
Area: 14,000 hectares

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Architecture beyond the problem. For some

time, architecture has become a simple image:
pure form, a technique. From disegnare it became design, the science of design even. Today,
it is arguable that the megacity condition and
the stress of the environment no longer support

this possibility. Therefore landscape urbanism,

design engineering and other apparently contradictory approaches emerge.
The undefined, the interstitial and the
ambiguous become possible, more complete
realms for design. In such an ambitious environmental-remediation and public-reclamation
proposal, architecture as a problem-solving tool
cannot suffice, it has to re-emerge as a series of
strategies, as a notion of potentials.
Rather than the self-referential techniques
of the recent past, the Texcoco Park project also
explores architecture as negotiation. The aim is
to nurture relations and dialogics instead of
confrontation or opposition between the city,
the environment and the social realm. It
becomes the mediator of four basic systems that
are acknowledged as essential: habitat, program,
mobility/accessibility and energy.
The architecture of the park embraces dialogics rather than dialectics as a tool (dialectics
engage dialog through partial or total opposite
ideas, dialogics engage dialog from non-homogenous ideas). It proposes the notion of fields of
conscience, referring to the design of a horizontal
view as a valuable alternative to conceptual
thinking that is closer to a vertical model. A more
flexible mental construct will establish the
future city as a more robust, resilient, self-sustainable, adaptable and flexible landscape.
It operates on multiple scales simultaneously, to become specific, sensible and variable yet
vast, integrated and continuous: a way for multiple publics to be considered in the decision-process and for size to become one main advantage.
Texcoco is a soft engineering project on a
megacity scale, one that acknowledges that
making landscape infrastructure is a better way
to negotiate the human need for inhabitation
and the capacity of the planet to sustain it; capable of maximizing human comfort while reducing to a minimum its impact on the planet and
the wellbeing of future generations.

At Nabor Carrillo Lake a museum will provide information about the landscape and the
park amidst an economically and socially depressed region in the meta-metropolitan area of
Mexico City. Floating walkways and exterior exhibition areas surround the museum.

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