The Logistics of a Sustainable Slum

In the mid-1990s, fifteen million Mexicans lived in extreme poverty in slums in urban areas such as Mexico City. A group of twenty NGOs formed a group called ANADEGES and launched a project to help improve living conditions of these incredibly poor people. They recognized the importance of the development of urban agriculture and started encouraging it through various programs. Since then, residents have developed their own ways of implementing sustainable urban agricultural systems.

With a population of approximately 22 million people living in an area of 100 000 hectares, Mexico City is now one of the largest urban areas in the world. Although the city has followed the western urbanization model; the residents of the city have retained their old traditions and incorporated the use of the city's organic wastes into their agricultural system, resulting in a sustainable agricultural model.

In the urban zone of the city, rooftop vegetable gardens and backyard farming have become popular examples of self-sufficiency. Homemade vegetable gardens constructed from reclaimed containers use leaves as soil and human urine as fertilizer. They are cheap, require minimal maintenance and are effective. Farming is technically illegal within the city but most officials have chosen to ignore this practice, which has allowed urban agriculture to flourish. Animals kept as livestock have become socially and culturally linked to the city to the point where it is common to see the cattle grazing in public gardens or on sidewalks. Many of the low, flat roofs that characterize the slums have been fenced in and transformed into animal pens. The increasing popularity of backyard farming has resulted in families producing on average three pigs and twenty-six chickens with the extreme of some producers caring for as many as sixty pigs at once.

These seemingly degrading methods of farming are actually quite effective. This success is accredited to the availability of vegetable wastes from large city markets and food-processing plants. These wastes that would otherwise have become landfill are used to feed cattle and pigs. The waste produced by the livestock is in turn used as organic material for more conventional suburban farming, producing some of the food sold in the large city markets.

More traditional ecosystem. Even, ancient production methods, such as those of the Aztec chinampas, have been rescued. The floating gardens of Xochimilco in the southern part of the city have been revitalized and turned into self-conserving agricultural models that grow maize for food and grass for urban gardens. The farmers operate them while considering pollution and ecosystem degradation prevention in a way that allows for an increased generation of income. This permits both the environment and farmers to prosper. The mud found at the bottom of the riverbed and algae from the water’s surface are also used as organic fertilizers, preventing the use of toxic pesticides, which would pollute the water and damage the ecosystem.

Even with all of this urban agriculture, it is difficult to sustain a growing population where urbanization consumes 700 hectares of agricultural land a year. The problem of providing enough shelter and food for all of the new inhabitants of this land becomes quite daunting. Reclamation has been used for new housing in many ways, such as the use of lumber reclaimed from shipping pallets as roof trusses for housing. Another proposed solution has been to mass-produce steel shipping container homes, like those erected in the urban slum of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. This would provide safe, cheap, prefabricated homes, which could easily be installed in an orderly and efficient manner. This idea could be applied in other areas and embellished upon in order to make larger, more expensive homes, which are still created from these modular and abundant reclaimed containers.

The applications of sustainable urban agriculture and housing in Mexico provide basic models for developing countries around the world. Armed with these ideas in their tool kits, architects and urban planners could expand upon them in order to design completely self-sufficient urban communities all over the world.

Sources:
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"Organic Food Production in the Slums of Mexico City." http://journeytoforever.org/garden_con-mexico.html (accessed November 3, 2009).
Sih Christensen, Jeanine ."Natural Building and Building Community." http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:E2wUG5iUGkMJ:www.greenhomebuilding.com/pdf/NaturalBuilding.pdf+trusses+made+of+reclaimed+mexico&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca&client=firefox-a (accessed November 4, 2009).
"Urban Agriculture Notes." http://www.cityfarmer.org/mexico.html#mexico(accessed November 3, 2009)
"Xochimilco Gardens." http://www.transitionsabroad.com/publications/magazine/0411/xochimilco_gardens_in_mexico_city.shtml (accessed November 4, 2009).

Posted By : Katherine Kovalcik