Weeks after President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took workplace in 2018, the combative leftist chief enraged worldwide buyers and Mexico’s enterprise group by canceling the airport, which was already round one-third full. During his marketing campaign, López Obrador had railed in opposition to the challenge’s administration for overspending and corruption. Then, in a post-election referendum launched by López Obrador’s social gathering, 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 larger than Paris, circled by the sprawl of Greater Mexico City. In this huge footprint, the president decreed, the town would construct one of many world’s largest city parks, a challenge he dubbed a “new Tenochtitlan.” To oversee what would develop into often 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 tasks which have upended the normal aim of ecosystem restoration: returning ecosystems to the state they have been in earlier than people broken them. Instead of in search of to roll again the clock, Echeverria is creating a man-made wetland that goals to remodel the way forward for your complete Valley area, drawing classes from each Tenochtitlan and fashionable Mexico City on how thriving cities can coexist with flourishing ecosystems.
With a funds of $1 billion, Texcoco Park is repurposing the structural skeletons and concrete gorges left behind by the airport development to create synthetic lakes and habitats supposed to host human guests and an unprecedented mixture of species. And Echeverria’s workforce hopes the park may assist foster financial growth by creating native plant nurseries and reviving cultural practices dealing with extinction, together with the harvest of spirulina algae. While the tip end result would look little like Texcoco’s previous, it might revive one thing extra elementary: the Valley of Mexico’s long-dormant historical past of constructing in line with pure techniques.
Yet right this moment, miles of Texcoco Park stay ringed by a fringe fence, manned by guards in army uniforms. As the challenge 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 shaped 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. Through historical past, the realm’s blended salty and recent waters have served as a petri dish for the evolution of surprising 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.