Topographic Urban Expansion

The majority of urban expansion is happening in metropolitan peripheries of developing countries. Mexico City is one that has followed similar urbanization path. As it continues to add its population, geologic, economic, social, and historical factors and constraints have pushed development to the hillsides of peripheries. Most of these developments are self-built irregular settlements.

Because of the incompletion and unsustainability of current informal urbanization model on hillsides, people frequently lack basic services, such as water supply, sanitation, accessibility and other amenities. Six case study sites are analyzed and ranked to find the priority site to be further urbanized soon. Among them, Cerro el Pino would be the priority to be intervened because of its good access to public transportation and services. Based on current development model, irregular settlements will further creep up and cover the mountain, lack of trees put this place at high risk of mudslides during the rainy season. People need to pay a quarter of their salary relying on trucks and donkeys to transport water due to poor water supply. All these issues plague hillside neighborhoods and make it inconvenient and unsuitable to live.

In response to this informal urbanization pattern lacking infrastructural provision and open space which increases social inequality, the project introduces a topographic landscape framework that acts as an open space armature, manages informal growth and addresses needs of people in existing and future neighborhoods through insertion of social-economic and ecological amenities.

Through connecting and planting hydraulic buffers along steep slopes and introducing topographic interventions in connected belts of open space, this piece of landscape takes simple moves that relate terrain, water, vegetation and people. Along intersection of green belts and major roads, sharp different feelings are experienced along various nodes. They provide water and food resource, in the meantime conserve the environmentally sensitive and open space.

This project strives to find a pre-emptive way to support and sustain the inevitability of future informal growth and create an armature system that would be beneficial to self-built neighborhoods and the mountain ecosystem in the long run.