Weeks after President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took workplace in 2018, the combative leftist chief enraged worldwide traders and Mexico’s enterprise neighborhood by canceling the airport, which was already round one-third full. Throughout his marketing campaign, López Obrador had railed towards the undertaking’s administration for overspending and corruption. Then, in a post-election referendum launched by López Obrador’s get together, the general public had voted to scrap it (although critics claimed the outcomes have been unrepresentative, with only one in 90 Mexican voters casting a vote).
Left behind was an eerily empty panorama greater than Paris, circled by the sprawl of Higher Mexico Metropolis. On this huge footprint, the president decreed, the town would construct one of many world’s greatest city parks, a undertaking he dubbed a “new Tenochtitlan.” To supervise what would turn into often called Lake Texcoco Ecological Park (PELT), he appointed Iñaki Echeverria, a Mexican architect and panorama designer who had spent over twenty years advocating for the location’s restoration.
Echeverria’s imaginative and prescient for the park is a part of a wave of initiatives which have upended the standard aim of ecosystem restoration: returning ecosystems to the state they have been in earlier than people broken them. As an alternative of looking for to roll again the clock, Echeverria is creating a synthetic wetland that goals to rework the way forward for all the Valley area, drawing classes from each Tenochtitlan and trendy Mexico Metropolis on how thriving cities can coexist with flourishing ecosystems.
With a price range of $1 billion, Texcoco Park is repurposing the structural skeletons and concrete gorges left behind by the airport building to create synthetic lakes and habitats meant to host human guests and an unprecedented mixture of species. And Echeverria’s crew hopes the park can even assist foster financial growth by creating native plant nurseries and reviving cultural practices going through extinction, together with the harvest of spirulina algae. Whereas the top outcome would look little like Texcoco’s previous, it may revive one thing extra elementary: the Valley of Mexico’s long-dormant historical past of constructing in line with pure techniques.
But at the moment, miles of Texcoco Park stay ringed by a fringe fence, manned by guards in navy uniforms. Because the undertaking races towards 2024, when López Obrador’s time period ends (he’s vowed to not search a second one), a lot stays inaccessible to the general public and besieged by controversy. The plans for Lake Texcoco’s rebirth may but vanish.
Lake Texcoco returns
Edged by mountain ranges and two volcanoes, the Valley of Mexico has traditionally fashioned an “endorheic basin,” the place water can not stream out however as a substitute diffuses into the bottom. This course of concentrates salt on the lowest spot, the place Lake Texcoco sits—the plug within the Valley’s bathtub. Via historical past, the world’s combined salty and recent waters have served as a petri dish for the evolution of bizarre organisms, together with a whole ecosystem of now-extinct fish species and the axolotl, an amphibian with the power to regenerate limbs, named for one of many Mexica’s gods.
