Text description provided by the architects. Bicentennial Park is a twenty-hectare intervention in Ecatepec, the second most populous municipality in Mexico and part of the metropolitan area of Mexico City. It’s built on a formerly enclosed and abandoned public space. Its transformation combines soft infrastructure strategies for water management through public space, addressing social and environmental needs.
The design results from an efficient construction system to build water retention terraces and control erosion on sloped terrain. L-shaped concrete retaining walls and a very limited number of architectural details, such as bleachers and ramps, do the job. The project integrates landscape, water management, and urban design into a typology where the project functions as an active agent for the better functioning of both environmental and urban contexts.
To address insecurity and crime, the surrounding fence was removed. The project now connects the neighborhoods to the north and south of the park, extending former dead-end streets and designing them as elements of pedestrian mobility and programming, which traverse the intervention and allow for connectivity. A lookout tower was added in the least visited area, enhancing its use by the public while also becoming an important surveillance element. A lighting system allows for nighttime use of the space. Low-lying vegetation was removed to favor cross views, while the number of trees was multiplied to provide shaded areas.
The project introduced activities on the new cross streets: play areas, calisthenics, and parkour zones were added. A series of new rest areas and kiosks were placed in different parts of the park. Pre-existing and deteriorated sanitary structures were recycled, becoming buildings that allow for sound permeability, natural light, and ventilation.
Bicentennial Park is deeply connected to its environmental context, favoring the territory’s water management capacity. Its design responds to its location on a hillside, providing an ideal environment for the natural infiltration of rainwater and runoff, replenishing the aquifer in the overexploited Mexico City basin. Therefore, the main design strategy consisted of transforming the hillside into terraced land, a historical method to mitigate erosion, retain soil, and promote water retention. All the park’s terraces are filled with tezontle, a local porous volcanic gravel that retains water and acts as a sponge, slowly channeling rain and runoff into the subsoil. This method has also proven effective in mitigating floods and preventing erosion throughout the park area. Additionally, it has facilitated the growth of 450 trees planted to improve the canopy cover. Furthermore, a 17,500 m³ regulating basin was built to capture runoff from a seasonal stream that used to flood the urban area downstream, with the water intended for the urban drainage system.
This intervention has transformed the conditions of the former park, whose high-maintenance design created a negative perception among the community. Today, it has become an important soft infrastructure for water management that has decisively improved the community’s relationship with its immediate environmental and urban surroundings.
Bicentennial Park is an excellent example of how architecture, landscape, and urban design projects can retroactively and positively transform space. It was designed for an informal area of the city already settled: disconnected within itself, prototypical of insecurity, lacking good quality open spaces, and with enormous water management problems. The design considered this, shaping the proposal to respond to these issues directly.
We are convinced of architecture’s power to become an agent of urban transformation, reestablishing a harmonious relationship with the environment and providing safe places for human encounters. Our profession is capable of and needs to deeply commit to solutions for the world’s current ecological and social problems. Architecture has always been a catalyst for environmental transformation. Under current conditions, it must become a powerful tool to restore balance.
