Boston Flora

Tag: Mexico City

  • Thursday, February 23, 11:00 am – 12:00 noon EST – Estudio Ome: An Ode to the Land, Online

    On February 23 from 11 – noon online with the New York Botanical Garden, Susana Rojas Saviñón and Hortense Blanchard share what makes their Mexico City practice unique, including their use of aromatic, edible, medicinal, and native Mexican plants, some of which they propagate from wild seeds they collect. The pair will discuss their award-winning Forest Garden, a residential landscape located within an ecological reserve that features a vegetable garden, natural pool, and fern garden. They will also provide a look at Lava Garden, which turned a lawn-covered suburban backyard into a lush oasis that realigns the garden with the land’s original volcanic ecology and the house’s midcentury modernist architecture.

    Led by Susana Rojas Saviñón and Hortense Blanchard, Estudio Ome designs gardens that strike the perfect balance between what is built and what is alive. The recipient of Mexico’s 2020 Young Creators Grant and Professor at Mexico City’s Universidad Iberoamericana, Rojas Saviñón holds a MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design. A French landscape architect, Blanchard previously worked for Dan Pearson, Rozana Montiel, and Irène Djao Rakitine.

    The webinar is $35 and registration is at www.nybg.org

  • Tuesday, September 14, 5:00 pm – Xochimilco: An Introduction to the Floating Gardens of Mexico City, Online

    The neighborhood of Xochimilco offers us the opportunity to understand the original ecosystem of the Valley of Mexico. Designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, the unique region of Xochimilco is a popular day trip for Mexico City visitors and locals alike. This Context Learning seminar on September 14 at 5 pm ET offers a wonderful introduction to the ecology, geography, and history of this fascinating region.

    In this seminar, we will talk about some of the native species of plants and animals that helped form an identity for the present-day megalopolis of Mexico City. We will discuss the way the Aztecs created a lake city with canals instead of roads that helped them improve their agriculture. We’ll continue our trip through time to discuss the way in which the neighborhood came to symbolize Mexican folklore, and we’ll discuss some of the most outstanding pieces of colonial and modern architecture that it has to offer.

    Led by visual artist and Mexico City resident Julio Pastor, this seminar will explore the wonderful canals and architecture remnant of the Aztecs. Designed to inform curiosity as well as future travels, participants will come away with an increased understanding of the ecological diversity and intriguing history beyond Mexico City. $36.50. Register at www.contextlearning.com

  • Monday, September 21, 12:00 noon – 1:30 pm – Thinking Through Soil: Case Study from the Mezquital Valley

    The Harvard Graduate School of Design is pleased to present a series of talks and webinars broadcast to our audiences via Zoom. *This lecture will be ONLINE ONLY. For security reasons, virtual attendees must register. Scroll down to find complete instructions for how to register.

    Almost 200,000 acres of land in the fertile Mezquital Valley are irrigated with the untreated sewage of Mexico City. Every drop of rain, urban runoff, industrial effluent, and sewage in Mexico City is sent to the Mezquital Valley through a 60 kilometer pipe. Soils in this valley have been continuously irrigated with urban wastewater since 1901, longer than any other soil in the world. The capacity of these soils to produce conditions in which agriculture can be practiced safely and produce healthy crops depends on a complex negotiation between soil chemistry, farming practices, public policy, land management, and the urban design of Mexico City. Without this wastewater, the Mezquital Valley would be a desert, as it falls into the UN’s  “drylands” climate category, where rates of evapotranspiration exceed precipitation. Currently, more than 40% of the Earth’s surface is classified as “drylands.” In the context of a warming planet, the world simply cannot afford for urban wastewater reuse to fail. Water is scarce, and food security is fragile. In this context, the question becomes: what would the city look like if it needed to produce a fertile agricultural soil from its waste? What would the farm look like if it better anticipated its material connection to the bodies of 20 million people and the effluent of urban life?

    Seth Denizen is a researcher and design practitioner trained in landscape architecture and human geography. He has received design awards from the SOM Foundation, Urban Edge Awards, and Bauhaus Dessau Foundation (2013), while also publishing widely on art and design with the Asia Art Archive, LEAP International Art Magazine of Contemporary China, Volume, Fulcrum, among others. He is currently a member of the editorial board of Scapegoat Journal: Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy. Collaborations include scientific research on Hong Kong’s urban microbiome, as well as art exhibitions in the Blackwood Gallery (Toronto), The Kunsthal (Netherlands), and Para/Site Art Space (Hong Kong). After teaching Landscape Architecture at the University of Hong Kong and the University of Virginia, Seth recently completed a PhD in Geography at the University of California Berkeley. His doctoral research investigates the vertical geopolitics of urban soil in Mexico City, where he is working with geologists and soil scientists to characterize the material complexities and political forces that shape the distribution of geological risk in Mexico’s urban periphery.

    Follow Seth Denizen on Twitter.

    Register to attend the lecture here. Once you have registered, you will be provided with a link to join the lecture via Zoom. This link will also be emailed to you.

    The event will also be live streamed to the GSD’s YouTube page. Only viewers who are attending the lecture via Zoom will be able to submit questions for the Q+A. Live captioning will be provided during this event. After the event has ended, a transcript will be available upon request.

  • Friday, March 31, 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm – Mexico City at a Crossroads: Designing an Urban Future in the Era of Climate Change

    Join the Harvard Graduate School of Design on Friday, March 31 from 6:30 – 8:30 in Gund Hall’s Piper Auditorium, Quincy Street in Cambridge, for the Keynote Lecture for Mexico City at a Crossroads: Designing an Urban Future in the Era of Climate Change.

    Mexico City’s Mayor Miguel Mancera will discuss current challenges for the nation’s capital city, which was recently named the World Design Capital for 2018 by ICSID. The mayor will share lessons learned so far and engage in a dialogue about the built environmental future of CDMX (Ciudad de México) going forward. Mexico City has emerged out of a complex history to take a role as a leading global metropolis but is now in flux. Renowned for its architecture and design aesthetics, the city also faces major infrastructural scarcities in transportation, water supply, and affordable housing. Its enormous scale poses environmental, energy, and public health problems associated with pollution, carbon emissions, and urban sprawl. Recent efforts to write a new city constitution have amplified conflicts over how to build, govern, and finance its future. This keynote lecture—which launches a day-long conference on Harvard’s campus sponsored by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies that will include participation by governing officials and activists as well as leading researchers on CDMX—will highlight Mexico City’s tripartite identity as global leader, national powerhouse, and sovereign urban authority confronting the multi-scalar territorial and environmental challenges of the twenty-first century.

    Co-sponsored by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and the Interdisciplinary Urbanism Initiative, Department of Urban Planning and Design.

    Anyone requiring accessibility accommodations should contact the events office at (617) 496-2414 or events@gsd.harvard.edu.  Free and open to the public.  Image from www.planetsave.com.