- Advertisement -
- Advertisement -
The small urban farms of Mexico City – locally known as Chinampas – practice a kind of agriculture in reverse: instead of bringing water to land, as most farms do, bring Chinampa’s land into water.
The Chinampas that are in use today will go back about a thousand years today, until then Aztec farmers started to build rectangular fields on top of huge lakes and food for what was the city of Tenochtitlan when. At one point there were tens of thousands of Chinampas, arranged in strict grilles with narrow channels in between, although many were destroyed or abandoned (together with the rest of the Meso -Mamic metropolis) after Hernán Cortés and his invading Spanish soldiers had interrupted the civilian order in 1521.
But working Chinampas continue to exist in the Xochimilco district in southern Mexico city – despite the constant attack by developers and competition from factory farms – usually operating as family businesses that produce heetpiece SLA, Radijs, Dahlias and other crops. Recently, the irrigation -friendly ways of the farms have received new attention in a world that is startled by climate change and suffers from widespread drought.
Can other places all over the world borrow the idea of creating ‘floating islands’, as the fields are sometimes called, which are flooded by water? A team of Mexican designers, landscape architecture and farmers believe that the old technology can be on a large scale, enough that they will recreate a Chinampa for the pavilion of their country during this year’s architecture biennial in Venice.
“Chinampas have a simple and intelligent design, created in a collective way that not only benefits people, but also all surrounding living things,” said Lucio Usobiaga, a team member who has defended the remaining Chinampas in the last 15 years by a non -profit he has founded Arca Tierra.
The Mexico pavilion is just suitable for the most important exhibition of the biennial, “intelligen. Of course. Artificial. Collective”, which is intended to show design projects that tackle climate change in creative ways. The Chinampas are immediately made by humans and can only succeed if there is cooperation between farmers, policy makers and the growing number of tourists who float on popular canoe trips, staring at corners of corn and herds of egrets and pelicans.
Promoting the Chinampa as an inspiration for environmentally friendly design was an obvious choice for the Biennale, team members said. “Venice is also built on water and has the same kind of vulnerabilities that Xochimilco has,” said Ana Paula Ruiz Galindo, a founder of the design agency Pedro Y Juana.
They pointed out that Venice and Xochimilco have been added to the UNESCO World Heritage Locations list in the same year, 1987, and both places are island communities that are ordered by boats and work to balance the positive and negative aspects of tourism.
Venice has its iconic gondolas, while Xochimilco has its trajinera’s, flat bottoms, decorated in bright colors and fake flowers that visit visitors on excursions with a party theme. Both boats are managed by pilots who push them over channels with the help of long posts.
Regarding how you could recreate a Chinampa on the spot, that cost some imagination. And compromise.
The Aztecs built their islands over time, with the help of reeds and branches to make fences in the bottom of the Mucky Lake. These were borders for several layers of sediment and rotting vegetation (and sometimes human sewerage) until the islands rose far enough above water to be grown. In addition to growing crops such as corn, beans and pumpkin – using the traditional Milpa Agricultural method that naturally stores nutrients in the soil – they planted trees on the corners of the islands to stabilize the land.
The pavilion of Mexico, in the arsenal complex of the Biennale, will have a stripped version, much smaller than the 500 square meters (0.12 hectare) of a typical Chinampa. The exhibition will be enhanced by videos produced in Mexico City with real Chinamperos, as the farmers are called, and grandstands will be installed along the walls. Art lighting will replace the sun.
In the middle, a work garden will be planted with vegetables, flowers and medicinal herbs. (The crops started in an Italian nursery and transferred by boat to the Arsenale in mid -April.) They will mature during the Biennale, which will continue until November 23.
“By the end of the Biennial we will be able to harvest corn and make tortillas,” said Mr. Usobiaga. “For that we can harvest beans, pumpkin, tomatoes and chili.”
Visitors learn about special techniques for cultivation of seeds that are unique to Chinampas and get the chance to plant seedlings themselves.
In a nod to local agriculture, the Chinampa will also use a version of Vite Maritata“ A practice that has been established in old Etruscan agriculture that calls on planting grapes around trees, which serve as a natural Trellis system for the vines. The exhibition team sees a connection between the two forms of agro-forest, combining trees and crops in one ecosystem.
“We’re going to see this dialogue between two old cultures that both have to say much about how we can move forward,” said Mr. Usobiaga.
The members of the exhibition team said they wanted to be careful not to romantize overlooked Chinampas, because they are not easy to duplicate on a scale that could feed a large population today. The farms work in Mexico city because they are sitting on a lake that an outlet is lacking in another water body, making the water level relatively easy to control. The opposite is of course where in Venice, which is located on a lagoon close to the sea and is always threatened by floods.
The economy of small farms – high production costs, low yields because of their size – also makes it difficult to make a profit. The wages of the agricultural worker are generally too low to support people in urban areas, and the broken work of plants and harvesting has lost prestige.
“This is a big problem here that people, especially young people, no longer want to work on Chinampas,” said María Marín de BuenThe graphic designer of the team.
Even in Xochimilco there are a lot of Chinampa’s fallow because their owners cannot earn a living. Some have been converted into football fields that are rented to the community; Others are event locations where people celebrate weddings or birthday parties. The country is officially limited from development, as well as the grazing of cattle and the hunting of endangered species, although these things happen with alarming frequency.
Yet the team sees something inspiring in the game: a connection between nature and the built environment, between existing water stocks and the need to build houses and schools. Architects who visit the Biennale may not design large parts of agricultural land, but they can replicate the idea on a smaller scale with the help of any circumstances, said Jachen Schleich, a team member who is director of the Mexico City architectural company Dellekamp + Schleich.
“Even if someone does this in his backyard, he can at least feed his family, or the people on the four floors of his building, Mr Schleich said.” It could be as a micro intervention in the landscape or a public space. “
- Advertisement -
