Restoring an historical lake from the rubble of an unfinished airport in Mexico Metropolis

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 in opposition to the mission’s administration for overspending and corruption. Then, in a post-election referendum launched by López Obrador’s celebration, 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 Larger Mexico Metropolis. On this huge footprint, the president decreed, the town would construct one of many world’s greatest city parks, a mission he dubbed a “new Tenochtitlan.” To supervise what would grow to be generally known as Lake Texcoco Ecological Park (PELT), he appointed Iñaki Echeverria, a Mexican architect and panorama designer who had spent over 20 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 purpose of ecosystem restoration: returning ecosystems to the state they have been in earlier than people broken them. As a substitute of looking for to roll again the clock, Echeverria is creating a man-made wetland that goals to rework the way forward for the complete Valley area, drawing classes from each Tenochtitlan and fashionable 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 group hopes the park also can assist foster financial growth by growing native plant nurseries and reviving cultural practices going through extinction, together with the harvest of spirulina algae. Whereas the top consequence would look little like Texcoco’s previous, it might revive one thing extra basic: the Valley of Mexico’s long-dormant historical past of constructing in line with pure programs.

But right this moment, miles of Texcoco Park stay ringed by a fringe fence, manned by guards in navy uniforms. Because the mission 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 might 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 movement 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. By means of historical past, the realm’s blended salty and recent waters have served as a petri dish for the evolution of bizarre organisms, together with a complete 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.