This proposal for a water infrastructure park responds to the combined intensity of development pressure and water crisis in the the fringes of the Mexico City Metropolitan Area (MCMA), the second largest megacity in the world. The park works within the planned development of a new urban corridor north of Mexico City, which intends to house an incoming population of seven million new residents. The developer’s proposal calls for a traditional, closed, chemical based water treatment plant and an adjacent, vaguely defined expanse of “open space”. We propose an alternative to this monolithic approach, finding ways for this infrastructure to hybridize into resources for public space, ecological habitat and economic stimulus to bolster an existing town and integrate an influx of new residents.

Basin of Mexico: a Landscape of duality
The landscape identity of this arid place is inseparable from its oscillation between dual characters. It is half a parched place with subtle traces of seasonal wetness, waiting, waiting for the rain. In this dry season, the rain comes suddenly, sweeping through the valley in powerful storms. During these months green colors become latent, leaving muted shades of sand. Month by month the rains return. Wetness becomes dependable, a daily event, leaving behind watercourses and pools, rendering the soil softer, allowing crops to grow. The city’s hydraulic endeavors over the course of its history have addressed this dual character as a dangerous problem, using huge infrastructural feats to fight its threatening floods and droughts. In developing Zumpango as a “new way of making a city,” as its planners intend, this dramatic flux can be recognized as critical to the Basin’s health and identity. The lake, reformed as a cultural, ecological system, could reconnect inhabitants to the cycles of water upon which they depend.

The Town: historic city / fouled reputation
The town of Zumpango has a vibrant, historic center, yet it has lost nearly all connection to the lake that spurred its original settlement and offered it a name. In the Federal District, many residents know little of its active zocalo and expansive lake, associating it instead with the course of the sewage laden Gran Canal.

The Lake: remnant / tank
Lake Zumpango links the area to the Basin of Mexico’s unique history, as it is one of the last three remnants of the once powerful lacustrine system. The lake has been named a “Water Sanctuary” by the government, but steps have not been taken to define or investigate this status. Rather, the lake is better known for its role as a massive piece of infrastructure, a flood-control “tank.” While the lake provides a habitat for diverse flocks of migrating birds, its impenetrable edges raise questions of access, visibility, and missed opportunities. And yet people find ways to overcome these barriers, to precariously occupy the lake and its edges.

The Gran Canal: barrier to the lake / connection to the basin
Multiple linear barriers currently separate the town from the lake. The Gran Canal is the key culprit. The Canal, a ten-meter deep ravine, was heralded on the day of its opening as Mexico City’s savior, emptying waste and floodwaters from the basin. The deep channel carries the sewage of Mexico City north through Zumpango, running parallel to the eastern edge of the Lake, defining an extreme, uncrossable boundary. The blackwater is dropped into two grand ‘water boxes’ at the northeast corner of the lake. These inverted pyramids mark the entrances to a tunnel that shunts the effluent north, where it irrigates the agricultural fields of Hidalgo, the food source of the region. We see the canal as another missed opportunity, a monument in its own right, connecting the city, if now negatively, to the water system of the entire basin.

The Pachuca River: eroded arroyo / potential corridor
The Pachuca River emerges at the summit of Mt. Pachuca and runs its course through the agricultural fields east of Zumpango. The seasonal watercourse has been described as the sewer line of the lands that flank its eroded banks. When it reaches Zumpango it is channeled in a concrete bed and dismissed from the life of the city, released into the fissure of the canal.


Above: Living machines create a structure of pathways with a permanent flow of nutrient rich water
Below: Study models project ideas for connecting the to the lakeshore

Left: Bas relief model expresses elements of the proposed system. A spillway draws floodwater from the lake toward the town, flooding seasonal play fields and irrigating crops. The sequence of potable water treatment structures a procession from the town zocalo to a pumphouse in the lake. Wastewater treatment through living machines and wetland systems forms an armature for recreation and agriculture fields. Aquatic hedgrows make a more ecologically complex shoreline, while, on the city side, pocket parks create thresholds between existing neighborhoods, new infill housing and the park. Jacaranda hedgerows mark lateral pathways for stormwater and pedestrian access across the canal to the lake. The Pachuca river gains access to a wide, dense floodplain corridor.



Design Intentions
1. Connect the new and proposed city to the lake edge.
2. Celebrate the flood control function of the lake, creating public engagement with both the infrastructural role and seasonal fluctuations of the local water system. Direct floodwaters to support irrigation for intensive productivity.
3. Use public space as a way to connect the existing city of Zumpango and its residents with their neighbors arriving to the new urban corridor.
4. Increase the complexity of the lake edge to create diverse wildlife and human habitats.
5. Provide opportunities for citizen connection to wastewater processes within an experiential, productive, shared landscape.
6. Provide collective recreational opportunities to reinforce the identity of the city, both existing and new.
7. Increase the lake’s local and regional significance by providing a destination along its shores.
8. Strengthen the ecology of the lake as aquatic habitat, the Pachuca and the Gran Canal as wildlife corridors.
9. Use an armature of hedgerows to channel, cleanse, and infiltrate stormwater while also creating access routes between local neighborhoods, the park and the lake.
10. Provide economic opportunities for production based on the resource of water, and tourism.
11. Integrate facilities for public use: schools, environmental education, and recreational centers.
12. Provide potable water to the city, making its processes of treatment visible with a linked procession from the center of Zumpango to the lake.

Above: Section perspective at lake edge through potable water promenade, and restored aquatic habitat.
Below: Detailed model of transect from the urban grain of Zumpango center reconnected to the lake edge.