Restoring an ancient lake from the rubble of an unfinished airport in Mexico City

When the Mexica radical near their ancestral onshore of Aztlán successful hunt of a caller home, they were pursuing orders from the prima deity Huitzilopochtli. In 1325, the god’s prophecy brought them to a salty swamp astatine the lowest dip of the Valley of Mexico. “Among the reeds and bushes they spotted an eagle perched connected a cactus devouring a snake,” writes the writer Homero Aridjis. “This was the motion they were looking for, and there, among the brackish and saccharine h2o lagoons, their priests took possession of the spot with a ritual immersion successful the waters.”

By the accomplishment of Hernán Cortés successful 1520, the floating metropolis they’d built successful the marshlands of Lake Texcoco had boomed to a colonisation of 200,000—larger than the Old World capitals of Lisbon oregon Paris. The metropolis of Tenochtitlan grew done a analyzable strategy of artificial islands dissimilar thing the Spanish had seen, a feat of hydraulic engineering pioneered by Nezahualcóyotl, the city’s philosopher king. 

Five centuries later, this water strategy has astir vanished—drained by colonists who razed Tenochtitlan, tapped its tributaries for farms, and paved its water furniture to physique the 2nd largest metropolis successful the Americas: Mexico City, location to much than 21 million. 

Today, Lake Texcoco has lost much than 95% of its historical expanse. It faced extinction erstwhile the $13 cardinal Nuevo Aeropuerto Internacional de la Ciudad de México (NAICM) began operation successful 2015 connected its desiccated bed. Building an airdrome determination would person required expanding the gargantuan strategy of pipes, pumps, and canals that had already buried the valley’s lakes and rivers. Instead, Texcoco’s deserted ex-lake has go location to an immense ecological experimentation adjacent to the bosom of Mexico City. 

Weeks aft President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took bureau successful 2018, the combative leftist person enraged planetary investors and Mexico’s concern assemblage by canceling the airport, which was already astir one-third complete. During his campaign, López Obrador had railed against the project’s absorption for overspending and corruption. Then, successful a post-election referendum launched by López Obrador’s party, the nationalist had voted to scrap it (though critics claimed the results were unrepresentative, with just 1 successful 90 Mexican voters casting a vote). 

Left down was an eerily bare scenery bigger than Paris, circled by the sprawl of Greater Mexico City. In this immense footprint, the president decreed, the metropolis would physique 1 of the world’s biggest municipality parks, a task helium dubbed a “new Tenochtitlan.” To oversee what would go known arsenic Lake Texcoco Ecological Park (PELT), helium appointed Iñaki Echeverria, a Mexican designer and scenery decorator who had spent implicit 2 decades advocating for the site’s restoration. 

Echeverria’s imaginativeness for the parkland is portion of a question of projects that person upended the accepted extremity of ecosystem restoration: returning ecosystems to the authorities they were successful earlier humans damaged them. Instead of seeking to rotation backmost the clock, Echeverria is creating an artificial wetland that aims to alteration the aboriginal of the full Valley region, drafting lessons from some Tenochtitlan and modern Mexico City connected however thriving cities tin coexist with flourishing ecosystems. 

With a fund of $1 billion, Texcoco Park is repurposing the structural skeletons and factual gorges near down by the airdrome operation to make artificial lakes and habitats intended to big quality visitors and an unprecedented premix of species. And Echeverria’s squad hopes the parkland tin besides assistance foster economical improvement by processing autochthonal works nurseries and reviving taste practices facing extinction, including the harvest of spirulina algae. While the extremity effect would look small similar Texcoco’s past, it could revive thing much fundamental: the Valley of Mexico’s long-dormant past of gathering successful measurement with earthy systems.

Yet today, miles of Texcoco Park stay ringed by a perimeter fence, manned by guards successful subject uniforms. As the task races toward 2024, erstwhile López Obrador’s word ends (he’s vowed not to question a 2nd one), overmuch remains inaccessible to the nationalist and besieged by controversy. The plans for Lake Texcoco’s rebirth could yet vanish.

Lake Texcoco returns

Edged by upland ranges and 2 volcanoes, the Valley of Mexico has historically formed an “endorheic basin,” wherever h2o cannot travel retired but alternatively diffuses into the ground. This process concentrates brackish astatine the lowest spot, wherever Lake Texcoco sits—the plug successful the Valley’s bathtub. Through history, the area’s mixed salty and caller waters person served arsenic a petri crockery for the improvement of antithetic organisms, including an full ecosystem of now-extinct food taxon and the axolotl, an amphibian with the quality to regenerate limbs, named for 1 of the Mexica’s gods. 

Today, the Valley’s situation bears the marks of destructive degradation and makeshift repairs. Twentieth-century hydraulic engineering projects punctured this basin with monolithic pipes that sent some h2o and discarded retired to the sea. In caller decades, Lake Texcoco has go a level shrubland dominated by non-­native spicata writer and brackish cedar bushes, with lone intermittently flooded pools oregon artificial ponds. (The shrubs were introduced successful the 1970s to halt particulate storms from scattering disease-­causing particles that had washed into the water furniture from sewage and landfills.) 

A outer presumption of Lake Texcoco Ecological Park, located connected the northwest borderline of Mexico City. Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador canceled the airdrome task successful the autumn of 2018 portion it was successful the mediate of construction.

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More than 40 times the size of New York’s Central Park, the undeveloped water furniture that makes up Texcoco Park is astir dramatically scarred astatine its occidental edge, successful an country of astir 40 quadrate kilometers wherever operation of the airdrome began successful 2015. When operation stopped successful November 2018, the spider-shaped megastructure fell rapidly into ruin. In a tract designed by the British architecture steadfast Foster + Partners to beryllium the Americas’ largest airport, the astir noticeable features near contiguous are immense chasms successful the world that would person formed the foundations of the main terminal, bordered by alloy columns twisting respective stories toward the sky. 

Across the scenery prevarication expanses of tezontle rock, a reddish volcanic gravel that was mined adjacent to supply a sturdy substrate for the airport, leaving unfastened wounds successful the hills of bluish Mexico State. Since the airport’s cancellation, countless tons of tezontle person been hauled distant from what would person been the airstrip arsenic the country starts to beryllium reshaped backmost into a wetland.

From the restoration project’s outset, says Echeverria, determination were signs that a surviving strategy laic conscionable nether this polluted surface. 

A erstwhile world astatine the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design with a estimation for thoughtful writings connected greenish urbanism, Echeverria has sometimes recovered himself unsocial amid immense expanses of Texcoco’s water bed, but for the occasional workfellow oregon 1 of his 3 children, who similar to tag along. He recalls being caught driving a pickup motortruck done 3 feet of h2o arsenic a rainstorm refilled expanses of Lake Texcoco. “This is simply a lake,” helium says. “And it wants to beryllium a lake; it wants to travel back.” 

Sinking city 

In August 2020, Echeverria announced 3 priorities for the park’s construction: gathering visitant infrastructure, restoring vegetation, and making country for water. When complete, the parkland volition person features similar a sports analyzable and motorcycle trails for the 8.7 cardinal visitors expected each year. So far, these amenities person been the park’s astir costly additions, costing $175 cardinal of the $230 cardinal spent, but they volition marque up conscionable 0.5% of the full parkland area, estimates Echeverria. 

More wide-reaching volition beryllium efforts to reconstruct the water system’s vegetation; 1.8 cardinal plants, representing immoderate of the implicit 200 taxon of autochthonal flora, are presently being grown to re-green the park. Garden stores don’t typically merchantability the halophilic, oregon salt-loving, vegetation that thrives here, explains Echeverria, truthful overmuch of what volition yet beryllium planted is present being cultivated successful a 10-hectare nursery connected site. 

Yet possibly the astir melodramatic alteration volition beryllium to invited h2o back. The task aims to reconstruct the topography and hydrology of the tract via immense earthworks and originative recycling of materials near down by the airport. 

These works should assistance to code 1 of Mexico City’s biggest challenges: the superior is sinking, and unevenly. It sits atop a immense underground aquifer that has been overexploited to quench the city’s thirst, meaning streets successful the adjacent metropolis halfway undulate arsenic if built atop a deflating waterbed. Parts of Texcoco Park are sinking astatine a complaint of betwixt 20 and 40 centimeters a year, the fastest anyplace successful the city. 

Even arsenic the metropolis struggles with excessively small h2o underfoot, it indispensable besides woody with excessively overmuch supra ground, suffering flooding during storms arsenic a effect of the impermeable layers of factual and asphalt present dispersed implicit the erstwhile water bed. Restored pools successful Texcoco Park tin assistance forestall flooding successful adjacent neighborhoods by acting arsenic the city’s overflow tank, portion h2o concentrated determination tin seep backmost into the aquifers, slowing municipality subsidence. Echeverria besides plans to rearrange 30-ton, eight-
foot-high precast factual structures (originally intended to incorporate the airport’s drainage and sewer system) to signifier a labyrinthine play country for visitors—humans and, helium hopes, others.

Echeverria makes wide the park’s different benefits: it’s expected to importantly amended section aerial quality, supply implicit 7,600 jobs, and seizure astir 1.5 cardinal tons of c emissions per year. But determination is an adjacent greater mission: “The existent task is simply a betterment of the full Mexico Valley basin,” helium says. “[The project] tin run arsenic a impervious of conception … due to the fact that the full hydraulic strategy is connected.”

To that end, he’s constructing artificial lakes of assorted depths to make habitats for galore species. He aims to reconstruct nesting and overwintering grounds for much than 150 kinds of birds on a migratory corridor from Alaska down to South America. 

Early signs look promising. In the years since the airdrome was canceled, Lake Nabor Carrillo—the oblong vestige of Lake Texcoco that was drained for its construction—has grown bluish again, and it’s already hosting herons and shorebirds.The terminal’s foundations—bounded connected the basal and sides by concrete—flooded truthful rapidly that it’s hard to judge they weren’t built to beryllium h2o tanks, says Echeverria. 

New ephemeral ponds emergence successful the rainy play and slice successful the dry. “Every h2o assemblage that we retrieve becomes an oasis for birds,” helium says. “Two weeks aft they filled with immoderate h2o during the rainy season, we recovered 9 nests successful an country of 7 hectares.” 

The tract is besides changing successful ways that are open-ended, creating possibilities for aboriginal interpretation, arsenic good arsenic recently emerging issues. The tremendous excavation that formed successful the foundations of the terminal gathering provided thing that did not different exist—a freshwater water without the salinity of the surrounding landscape. For a while, Echeverria was intrigued by the imaginable of these freshwater pools to enactment taxon similar the axolotl, freshwater-dwelling survivors of the wider water strategy that present cling connected successful reserves oregon captivity. Yet salty h2o has present crept in, turning it brackish and unsuitable for the delicate amphibian. It’s not imaginable to re-create Lake Texcoco’s marshes precisely arsenic they were, Echeverria explains, nor is it presently imaginable to dictate precisely however the restoration volition extremity up. “I deliberation that 1 should look astatine past arsenic a confirmation of what’s imaginable oregon what’s desirable,” says Echeverria. “But we should not look astatine it with nostalgia.” 

Restoration 2.0

Eric Higgs, erstwhile seat of the US-based Society for Ecological Restoration, explains that breathtaking originative initiatives similar Texcoco Park tin besides show the risks that originate arsenic restoration projects determination beyond trying to reproduce historical conditions. For decades, Higgs has observed a displacement from comparatively straightforward “classical” restoration ecology to newer forms that began emerging successful the mid-2000s. 

Perhaps the astir important alteration was successful however humanities cognition was treated: Restoration 2.0, arsenic helium has labeled it, considers a site’s past arsenic conscionable 1 cardinal anchor to beryllium understood alongside different values—ecological and cultural—that tin conscionable arsenic powerfully signifier a project’s design.

This alteration successful attack was driven by necessity. Sometime astir 2003, Higgs explains, “all hell” began to interruption escaped arsenic the tract began to reckon with the information that immoderate ecosystems are present practically unrestorable, truthful profoundly person they been altered by the rapidly warming climate, quality disturbance, and invasions of alien species. 

The Valley of Mexico’s water strategy has been truthful wide built implicit that restoring it successful a accepted consciousness would mean displacing thousands of people, portion galore food and birds that flourished astir Tenochtitlan are extinct. But others person taken over, with 48 protected taxon present surviving successful Texcoco Park. Such ecosystems person value. More restoration projects present instrumentality that into account, on with services similar flood extortion and taste values, including an area’s quality to supply livelihoods done important materials, foods, and medicines. 

The outcomes of Restoration 2.0 whitethorn beryllium much pragmatic successful their equilibrium of values. But, Higgs emphasizes, that does not mean that thing goes. Creative projects besides request “handrails”—guiding principles and goals. Left to their ain devices, designers oregon ecological engineers mightiness travel up with “a beauteous unbridled presumption of what that spot ought to be,” helium says. So it is captious to anchor the process successful “consultation, deliberation, conversation, assemblage engagement,” helium says. “It’s dilatory and tedious and sometimes fractious,” but it provides a antiauthoritarian statement that tin foster semipermanent protection. 

Texcoco Park is not the lone effort to reconstruct landscapes connected a monolithic scale—there’s a 35-year maestro program for 47,000 quadrate kilometers of the Everglades successful South Florida, for one. But portion restoration megaprojects are progressively common, Texcoco Park is unsocial for its size and its relevance to a nationalist identity, says biology historiographer Laura Martin.

In specified culturally important and contested places arsenic this, a park’s plan cannot beryllium reduced to a method solution for a city’s problems. The People’s Front successful Defense of the Land (Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra, oregon FPDT)—an enactment led by indigenous Nahua farmers from Lake Texcoco’s east, among them immoderate of the 1.5 cardinal Nahuatl-speaking descendants of the Mexica who built Tenochtitlan—saw NAICM and the hydraulic strategy that has drained Lake Texcoco arsenic a modern signifier of colonialism. 

The FPDT has argued that the translation of environments by designers and engineers tin magnitude to “genocide.” In 2020, it listed the 17th-century assemblage hydraulic technologist Enrico Martínez and NAICM’s backers and designers alongside Hernán Cortés successful a database of “murderers and municipality planners who tried to eradicate our mode of surviving with the land, the mountains, and the water.” 

Lake Texcoco’s restoration is by nary means immune from the ethical concerns that dogged NAICM. “Restoration projects perfectly transportation akin risks of exclusionary outcomes arsenic commercialized developments,” says Martin, whose past of restoration, Wild by Design, explains however some the extermination and the restoration of the bison were means by which achromatic settlers dispossessed Native peoples of their accepted lands and of the animals themselves, a cardinal root of nutrient and hides. 

“The past of ecological restoration reveals that caring for chaotic taxon has often gone manus successful manus with harming marginalized people,” she says. 

A twist connected history 

Ecosystem restoration is progressively wrestling with projects sitting atop sites that, similar Texcoco Park, person already undergone extremist changes. Today, specified projects’ designers are emboldened to delve done the “laminations of history” alternatively of concealing periods erstwhile these sites hosted soiled manufacture and infrastructure, says Higgs. “What I’m attracted to ... is this thought that we tin recognize places arsenic having these analyzable histories that necessitate america to unpack them,” helium says. 

Higgs cites Rocky Flats, a atomic weapons probe installation adjacent Denver, which had a past of indigenous stewardship and assemblage expropriation followed by a play arsenic a Cold War atomic arsenal and a radioactively contaminated Superfund tract before—billions of dollars later—beginning its afterlife arsenic a National Wildlife Refuge. “To spot it successful immoderate 1 of those stages is misleading,” says Higgs. “To accidental ‘Look astatine this beauteous wildlife area’ without knowing its intricate and layered past makes nary sense.”

Texcoco, Echeverria has written, “acknowledges that making scenery infrastructure is simply a amended mode to negociate the quality request for inhabitation.”

REUTERS/CARLOS JASSO VIA ALAMY

We’re present opening to spot the types of bold outcomes that Restoration 2.0 tin produce. In the Netherlands, Higgs points to Marker Wadden, a concatenation of 5 artificial islands built successful the past decennary to service arsenic a vertebrate sanctuary, rising up retired of a murky water that was the unintended effect of an aborted onshore reclamation scheme. The task was conceived by Natuurmonumenten, a Dutch conservation charity, teaming up with the Dutch nationalist wood bureau and Boskalis, 1 of the world’s largest dredging companies. 

Marker Wadden is “an utmost example” successful its usage of dredging exertion to conception an full archipelago conscionable for birds, Higgs says, but it shows however innovative projects tin look from a “confluence of antithetic circumstances.”

In the lawsuit of Marker Wadden, the task harnesses sediment dredging expertise that the Dutch institution developed successful its enactment connected shipping canals and alternatively has directed it toward biology goals. 

“I would accidental that wasn’t similar a stepwise, truly cautiously planned, decade-long propulsion to make an artificial archipelago. That wasn’t however it started,” says Higgs. But “weird” combinations of circumstances tin travel unneurotic to bring astir “that originative ‘Aha!’ moment.”

Tenochtitlan’s past gives clues to however artificial structures tin enactment earthy species. For example, chinampas—the water system’s artificial islands, built from reeds—created tiny canals wherever taxon similar the axolotl thrived. “The halfway of Mexico City is wholly manmade, anchored successful conscionable a mates of silt islands,” explains anthropologist Gerardo Gutiérrez of the University of Colorado, Boulder. Yet adjacent arsenic it has been overlaid with concrete, it has retained astonishing biodiversity; 2% of the world’s taxon unrecorded wrong its metropolis limits today. 

Since the cancellation of NAICM, communities that situation Lake Texcoco person voiced concerns that restoration efforts would forestall locals’ entree to the site, and they person demanded the close to proceed practices determination that they’ve conducted for generations. 

Some proceed to excavation up tequesquite, a grayish earthy mineral brackish made up of the salty sediments near connected the Texcoco water bed, portion a fistful of locals cultivate ahuautle, a benignant of insect eggs sometimes called “Mexican caviar.” North of the site, the snail-shaped pond known arsenic El Caracol has astatine times been employed for brackish accumulation and harvesting of spirulina, the present fashionable “superfood” algae that’s been gathered successful Lake Texcoco’s alkaline waters since the clip of the Mexica. 

The authorities has begun issuing permits to locals and has promised to let these practices to continue. In the future, Echeverria says, determination is imaginable to standard these cottage industries—for example, by establishing spirulina farms. 

The decorator points to palmy experiments that are already showing however sustainable economies tin beryllium built into restoration projects. The on-site works nursery is present increasing autochthonal flora for restoration—and someday, maybe, to sell—while employing section people. 

“We already person similar 70 cardinal pesos ($3.6 million) [worth of] plants successful the nursery,” says Echeverria. Building it and cultivating them outgo conscionable 40 million. “So we already person 30 cardinal pesos successful plants, which are axenic upside, which is astonishing aft 2 years.” 

Livelihoods astatine stake 

Talk to the radical who unrecorded connected the borderline of Texcoco Park, and fewer respond with specified optimism. 

In March 2022, Mexico’s national authorities designated Lake Texcoco arsenic a Protected Natural Area, and successful June an planetary conjugation recognized it arsenic a Ramsar site, oregon a wetland of planetary importance. 

Yet heavy-duty operation successful Texcoco Park continues, with the task falling acold down the 2022 opening day Echeverria had fixed erstwhile we archetypal spoke successful January of that year. 

That day was conditional connected effects of the covid pandemic, but further delays person resulted from lengthy negotiations with section communities and the unconventional process of gathering 1 task and demolishing different connected a tract that is people reflooding. Before Echeverria was appointed, the alloy columns bordering the main terminal were sold arsenic scrap to recoup a fraction of the $5 cardinal spent connected the airport’s construction. Local media study that these salvage efforts person made achingly dilatory progress. Meanwhile, efforts to pump each h2o from the tract person halted, causing reflooding.

Today, Texcoco’s protected reserve spans an country that was erstwhile each portion of the lake, from the shantytown of Nezahualcóyotl (named for Lake Texcoco’s pre-Hispanic person and metropolis builder) connected the occidental borderline to the eastbound ejidos, collectively owned lands that were granted to communities for their enactment of the Mexican Revolution and are present location to galore indigenous radical with a beardown transportation to Lake Texcoco’s history. 

For many, the project’s secrecy remains its biggest flaw. Homero Aridjis, wide regarded arsenic Mexico’s top surviving poet, who has besides led its astir influential biology advocates, the Group of 100, says the parkland could beryllium a “significant achievement.” But speech from the occasional promotional video showing drone footage of construction, “it’s intolerable to spot what has been done truthful far, arsenic the nationalist is not allowed entree to the site.” 

Juanita Fonseca, a shorebird specializer astatine the conservation NGO Manomet, which has worked to reconstruct Texcoco’s lakes for migratory birds, echoes this concern, saying that “information is confidential and the permissions to entree it are limited.”

Early successful 2022, the announcement of the protected country was delayed amid claims that officials had not adequately consulted section ejidos. These communities person been cardinal to the endurance of Lake Texcoco, having fought the improvement of an airdrome since the crook of the millennium, erstwhile then-president Vicente Fox archetypal projected 1 that would person expropriated astir 5,000 hectares of land, chiefly from ejidos. FPDT, led by indigenous Nahuatl farmers from Lake Texcoco’s east, turned retired by the hundreds, brandishing machetes, to artifact these plans. Two FPDT members were killed successful 2006 successful clashes with authorities forces. 

Today, determination is nary statement among these communities. Many request the instrumentality of lands expropriated from the ejidos by the Fox government. Members of the FPDT person supported the restoration, getting progressive successful government-led consultation and hands-on efforts to revive h2o systems, with immoderate urging a bigger relation for section communities successful the park’s improvement arsenic portion of a run called “Manos a La Cuenca” (“Hands to the Basin”). As a effect of the consultation, an cultivation portion astatine the park’s eastbound borderline is present legally designated for accepted farming and cannot beryllium urbanized. 

Texcoco Park present has the highest signifier of extortion Mexico’s national authorities tin give. But nary 1 believes that this is capable to guarantee the reserve’s survival, says anthropologist Gabriela González, manager of the Lake Texcoco Natural Resources Protection Area. “[We] can’t trust connected the declaration of ineligible status,” she says. 

REUTERS/CARLOS JASSO VIA ALAMY

In July 2024, Mexico volition elite a caller president, who volition beryllium escaped to determine whether oregon not to enactment the project. For each the enactment that has been done, Texcoco Park’s aboriginal whitethorn beryllium uncertain. López Obrador’s successor whitethorn beryllium keen to spot an airport—with its committedness of jobs and economical growth—back connected the table.

Deadline pressure

Echeverria admits that consulting with the nationalist “was not my beardown point” passim the park’s readying stages. Instead, situation caput María Luisa Albores led the effort to negociate the presumption of the protected area. Although Echeverria accepts that slow-paced process is the astir effectual mode to reconstruct ecosystems, it won’t beryllium imaginable here: “We don’t person time,” helium says. 

Instead, helium explains, helium is seizing a once-in-a-lifetime accidental earlier it vanishes. “In the beginning, we decided—or I decided—to go a machine: conscionable bash arsenic overmuch arsenic we tin and grow, let’s say, beyond a tenable constituent of nary return” portion the parkland has governmental support. “Meaning,” helium adds, “that we bash truthful overmuch that it volition beryllium silly not to continue.” 

Critics person a much straightforward mentation for the haste and secrecy with which the task has been carried out, citing the progressively hierarchical and authoritarian quality of Mexican nine nether López Obrador. To many, the restoration is simply a governmental shot archetypal and an biology task second.

If capable h2o tin beryllium diverted to the site, helium says, it is imaginable “to make a wetland scenery that is inactive precise almighty and inactive precise rich,” if not rather the tremendous water it erstwhile was. 

For now, Texcoco Park is welcoming its archetypal visitors, groups of cyclists and birdwatchers. Echeverria is wide that Texcoco volition ne'er go a expansive landscaping task similar Central Park oregon the city’s ain Chapultepec. Today, restored areas stay pinpricks amid the monolithic landscape. And the imaginativeness of this spot arsenic a reborn Tenochtitlan is not apt to beryllium afloat realized adjacent erstwhile it opens astatine the extremity of the year; Echeverria likens his enactment to restorative “acupuncture” that helium hopes is taken further by locals and successors who volition usher the country done a decades-long process of betterment and evolution. 

From opening day, Echeverria whitethorn person little than a twelvemonth to physique a constituency of supporters connected which the project’s endurance volition rest. With truthful small spot gained truthful far, a batch is riding connected the months ahead. After decades of neglect, galore Mexico City residents spot this monolithic scenery arsenic a mysterious wasteland they’d ne'er visit. Echeverria is hoping that erstwhile it is opened backmost up to the public, those who unrecorded successful this metropolis tin erstwhile much presume ownership of this place—taking possession successful their ain way, arsenic societies since the Mexica person done.

He sees the site’s restoration arsenic an ecosystem and its instrumentality to being portion of metropolis beingness arsenic 1 and the same—a alteration successful “consciousness” to travel a alteration successful environment. But some transformations volition yet beryllium retired of his hands. “It’s not a task that you commencement and finish,” helium says. “It’s a surviving process. It has to beryllium ever increasing and ever evolving.”

Matthew Ponsford is simply a freelance newsman based successful London.