Rivers could be among our most nourishing existential metaphors: "Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river that snatches me, but I am the river," wrote Borges. And it is evident that human beings share a natural attraction to water, as Melville said in Moby Dick: "All the paths of man lead to water, and the reason why no one can resist its course is the same reason why Narcissus drowned in his own face: because in water the elusive ghost of life is drawn". In Mexico City our rivers are ghosts because they have been piped. But although none of us who are alive ever saw them, there they are, flowing beside us or under the cars that take Viaducto Río de la Piedad or Río Churubusco.
Since the rivers were piped, the scenery in which the drama of the capital unfolds has been almost completely transformed - but it can always be transformed again; that is the premise of projects such as the Viaduct Ecoduct, from Workshop 13 and Cuatro al Cubo, which seeks to bring the city back to living with its rivers.
"When the Spaniards arrived in 1519, the landscape was a city living on and from water," says Aleida Rueda in the program La ciudad de los ríos ocultos (The city of hidden rivers). Rivers ran between the houses, which, although it is hard to imagine, is enough to look for a return. After the conquest of Tenochtitlán everything changed. The Spaniards decided to build a new city there, one in their own way: on stones and with roads. The albarradón (a stone structure that served to separate fresh and salt water and prevent flooding) was cut in two and the canals were filled in to build houses. "It was ignored that the city was sitting on a lake and the process of urbanization began. It was almost completely forgotten that transportation, housing, food and world view depended on water,"Rueda points out.
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Then came the regime of Porfirio Díaz and the hydraulic policy began: the one that proposed the construction of a canal that (it was supposed) would be a symbol of progress -like everything Díaz intended- that would help expel water from the city. The mentality of the landowners also changed. They put a price on the land and the more space they had, the better. "The important thing," says Aleida, "was to gain land from the water, ignoring the chinampas agricultural system that had been used for years and that combined the coexistence of land and water, unlike what the new settlers were trying to do".
Although the canal solved problems for a short period, sanitation problems continued to increase. People used the rivers as public and sanitary waste. "Let the river take it away," people shouted. In addition, the urban sprawl was beginning to eat away at the city, generating overpopulation and a lack of basic public services. "This city," wrote Ibargüengoitia, "is like the metaphor of the baby that is growing up in the city.he metaphor of the baby that grew and grew until it degenerated into an adorable monstrosity".
The bad use of the rivers, the pollution and the bad smell were some of the reasons why it was seen as a focus of infection and that is where the policy of piping the main rivers of Mexico City began. Aleida Rueda summarizes:
"From 1937 to 1975, dozens of rivers and canals were piped, such as Mixcoac and Becerra; the Canal de la Viga was closed and kilometers of water were emptied from the Piedad, Magdalena, Tacuba and San Angel rivers. The city went from being a self-sufficient water city to not knowing how to manage its rivers, its lakes, to wanting to hide them". The lack of vegetation accumulated a heat that was difficult to bear, a heat of cement and dust. If these sources had been preserved, we would probably live a cooler day-to-day life, with less heat exhaustion.
Today, 45 rivers run under the asphalt and, although the main problems for which the government decided to pipe them have disappeared, there is a bigger problem: the contamination of what could be a source (literally) of water supply. We are not ready to have a body of water and take care of it. But that is also considered in the Taller 13 project, led by architect Elias Cattan.
The damage, Cattan says, is reversible.
"The process is and should be mostly cultural, with a clearly technical and a biological (water treatment) component. But above all, the process must be one of understanding; of establishing lines of action." To this he added that "a city will have no place in the future if it is not well adapted to its environment. There is a great cost in not doing so, and besides, doing so is cheaper than piping the rivers".
The Ecoduct was built on the median that divides the Viaducto Miguel Alemán and is designed to treat 30,000 liters of wastewater from the Piedad River, which is piped. is designed to treat 30,000 liters of wastewater from the Piedad River, which is piped.
Los ríos están allí, debajo de las calles, entre nosotros, como fantasmas de una ciudad-paraíso que cambió de hábitos. Si nos están diciendo que el daño es hasta cierto punto reversible, no está demás enterarse de los proyectos que tienen esto en mente y apoyarlos.
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*Con información de La Ciudad de los Ríos Ocultos, elaborado por Aleida Rueda y transmitido por el Sistema de Radiodifusión Mexicana, hoy Canal 14*
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