A thoughtful ecosystem restoration and urban design concept led by Loreta Castro Reguera & Manuel Perló Cohen won a Holcim Foundation Award.
Loreta Castro Reguera (pictured) talks to the Holcim Foundation about a project that weaves water management with public amenities in Mexico City’s most populous borough.
“Today we can see the advantages of really having given a lot of thought about how to get the community into the project,” remarks Loreta Castro Reguera.
In Mexico City, water management is an increasingly pressing issue. The Mexican capital is often beset by both droughts and flooding, and largely lacks sufficient infrastructure to tackle either challenge.
It was with this in mind that Manuel Perló Cohen, director of the Institute for Social Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and architect Loreta Castro Reguera set about designing La Quebradora Waterpark for the densely-populated neighborhood of Iztapalapa.
The ingenuity of their resulting proposal propelled the project to win a Holcim Foundation Award in 2018. The timing of the award proved particularly fortunate, as a change in local leadership threatened the completion of the waterpark.
“Winning the award really helped us convince the people that had to make the decision about continuing its construction about the benefits of the project,” says Castro Reguera. “Having the credibility that this prize gives to projects, we were able to really make the government understand that they were making the correct decision.”
The waterpark functions by diverting rainwater that flows into the city from the Sierra de Santa Catarina mountain range away from Ermita Iztapalpa Avenue, which is prone to flooding. Two roads serve as stormwater channels to carry the runoff water to La Quebradora, where it seeps through a series of screens and filters into two permeable basins and eventually infiltrates the underlying soil and groundwater.
Around these basins are a series of sloping, tree-studded terraces and community buildings designed to encourage locals to use the space. There’s an open-air theater, a skate park and various other sporting facilities and plazas where people from the neighborhood can socialize.
“During the design of the project, we were going into many workshops to understand how we could help communities engage with it,” explains Castro Reguera.
In an underprivileged urban neighborhood like Iztapalapa, where open public space is scarce, projects like La Quebradora are particularly vital. The opening of the new waterpark not only doubles the amount of public recreational space available to locals, but triples the number of trees.
“Instead of having a lawn that is always very expensive to maintain because it needs a lot of water, we decided to create a lot of hardscapes with trees,” explains Castro Reguera.
Read more about the project on the Holcim Foundation website.
“In Mexico City, these kinds of spaces are very important.”
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