Cities Initiatives
Mexico City

About
Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism
Mota-Engil México
MIT SA+P

COLLECTIVES: New Forms of Sharing, Mexico City’s Urban Innovation Playground


2023
Class Report
Department of ArchitectureRafi Segal, Instructor
Gabriela Degetau, TA

Mota Engil México | LabCiudadesOnésimo Flores 
Sergio Haua
OverviewThe site of Mexico City’s iconic La Feria was re-designed as Parque Aztlan—an urban ‘innovation playground’—a new park/expo typology that combined recreation and education-demonstration programs to celebrate the city’s past and help shape its future. Parque Aztlan, located in the heart of Chapultepec, one of the largest urban parks in Latin America, combined attractions, public/community programs, and demonstration and prototyping sites of diverse scales and kinds (landscapes, objects/structures, short film, VR, and more) to raise awareness and inform about Mexico City’s environmental and socio-economic challenges and explore its future urban life and culture.

The spring’s COLLECTIVES class was structured as a collaborative research-design workshop involving prominent Mexican architects, planners, city government - ministry of environment, developers, journalists, and community members. Building off the MIT SA+P and Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU) engagement to set up a future city lab for Mexico City, the COLLECTIVES workshop was organized in two parts: an exposé of present and future challenges the city faced and a design exercise to envision possible interventions, architecture-urban-landscape elements within the park.

The course included travel to Mexico City between March 19-24, 2022, to visit the site, city-selected public projects, and engage in discussions with collaborators. The work was showcased as part of Mextropoli in September 2022.Invited Guests Yury Zagoryn
Marisa Morán-Jahn
Lorena Bello
Eli Keller
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the team Mota-Engil’s Parque Aztlán for their support during our visits and the class.
Images
Rafi Segal and LCAU.

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