There are cities that have forgotten to integrate into their image one of the most important elements to guarantee their survival: water.
While entire cities were designed based on resource management, today we are content to open a faucet and watch it run without thinking about everything it takes to make it happen.
There is a break between inhabitants, city and water.
When it is visible, it is in the form of ornamental fountains, a symbol of luxury and waste.
It also appears aggressively in stormy seasons, creating floods.
This highlights the bad design of the contemporary city.
To mitigate the waste of an essential resource for human survival, creativity and effort are needed from professionals linked to the design of space.
This is what the Mexican architect Loreta Castro Reguera (Mexico City, 43 years old) has done, who has created 10 proposals for water prototypes to solve the water problem in Mexico.
Author of the book
The image of water in the city
(Arquine, 2022)
,
the architect graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and a Master in Urban Design from Harvard University is convinced that sustainable water management can be achieved through strategies such as the sponge city, an urban project that allows cities to store and make wastewater drinkable.
History shows a sustained race of several centuries between the urban fabric and the bodies of water.
In Mexico City, the fact of covering natural lands that had been occupied by water for millennia has had drastic consequences in the continuous floods.
The empty, soft and unstable land is devoured by urbanization.
The water, in any case, returns to take its place.
Today, the capital of Mexico is also prone to subsidence, water shortages and cracks.
“Mexico City may be the city with the most drastic transformation of its natural environment.
From having been a city settled on bodies of water, now there are very few traces of this water landscape.
The more than 20 million people who inhabit it are subjected to continuously living in the water paradox: scarcity of drinking water and excess of rainwater ”, Loreta Castro, recognized for her sustainable architecture projects, explains to EL PAÍS.
This condition is, however, her great strength.
Mexico City, affirms the architect, has all the possibilities of managing its own water through its thousands of public spaces.
The Mexican architect Loreta Castro Reguera.Courtesy
“I propose a decentralized system, pulverized throughout the length and breadth of the urban sprawl, which relieves the stress to which the current system is subjected, in such a way that the new way of managing water is a hybrid between traditional systems and infrastructures. gentle landscaping.
Mexico City, deeply rooted in its history but cosmopolitan and modern at the same time, is capable of continually reinventing itself.
What stops us from the possibility of generating a water system where water is once again the protagonist of our landscape?”, asks the architect.
In this sense, the architect has proposed ten prototypes to solve the water problem, which have already been put into operation in Ecatepec, a city of 1.8 million people adjacent to the capital and the second most populous city in Mexico.
Due to the rapid growth of Mexico City during the second half of the 20th century and the consequent expansion of its metropolitan area, the development of that city occurred without sufficient planning.
Farmland and farmland were sold and became the setting for Mexico's largest industrial zone during the 1960s.
“A great effort is required to change a system that has worked for more than 450 years.
The water we are looking for is the one that soaks the interiors and exteriors of the imagination”, affirms the Mexican architect.
These are the proposals proposed by Loreta Castro Reguera for better water management:
1. Public toilets
It has the characteristic of capturing rainwater through its roof, conducting it towards a cistern through gutters and reusing it for the operation of the toilets.
Design of public toilets.Courtesy
2. Water tower
The tower is a large rainwater collector.
Through the shaft, the water is filtered and stored in a cistern with the same diameter as the tower.
The water is accessed by hand pumps.
Design of the water tower with a drinking fountain. Courtesy
3. Public pool
It is planted on a piece of land surrounded by residential housing with the intention that it be cared for and used by the neighbors.
Design of the public pool.Courtesy
4. Public laundries
The roof can capture up to 70,000 cubic meters of water per year, enough to supply the public laundries of the surrounding community.
The project works with rainwater and has the characteristic of being mountable and removable.
Design of a public laundry. Courtesy
5. Filtering terrace
It is the landscape strategy for the intervention that was carried out in the Hank González Park, in Ecatepec, where the entire territory was
terraced
with the intention of stopping erosion and improving the natural infiltration of rainwater, taking advantage of the qualities of this soil, which is the best for this purpose.
The circulations between the terraces are given by the continuation of the streets that previously collided with the park wall, now removed.
The public space program is developed on these terraces.
Design of the filtering terrace.Courtesy
6. Green roof
The approach consists of making a large public green roof, which provides vegetated spaces for the surrounding population.
Under this roof, both people and vehicles can circulate and climb through stairwells.
The roof also stores the rainwater that falls on it in large water tanks.
Green roof design.Courtesy
7. Orchard wetland
Rainwater is collected at the ground level and pumped to the water tower.
From the water tower, the liquid is dropped so that it passes through three elevated channels, with vegetation, which function as wetlands.
The water has a last fall towards a reflecting pool that later distributes it through a system of canals for irrigation in an orchard of fruit trees.
Design of the orchard wetland.Courtesy
8. Cistern square
Helps mitigate downstream flooding.
In the dry season, this plaza functions as a soccer field, while the steps that in the rain are a hydrometer (an instrument to measure flow), in the dry season they are steps.
Design of the cistern square. Courtesy
9. Rain Fountain
Its function is to lead the runoff of rainwater towards an open cistern.
It stresses the need to let rainwater run and the possibility of retaining and using it.
Celebrate the paths of water through raised channels, waterfalls and cisterns.
Design for a rain fountain.Courtesy
10. Fish farming
Its function is to generate a wastewater treatment system through polishing wetlands and lagoons for fish farming.
These lagoons serve to give a final treatment to the water, in addition to becoming a source of food and work.
Design of the wetland for fish farming.Courtesy
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