CDMX Resilient Code: Water Commons in Mexico City CDMX Código Resiliente: Aqua-Commons en Ciudad de Méjico

Using Mexico City (CDMX) as a paradigmatic example of seriously unbalanced water regimes, our project Resilient Code helps strengthen and communicate CDMX’s government implementation efforts toward risk reduction and water resilience in marginal communities. Our project does so by bridging otherwise separate agents in the government towards a common goal: equitable resilience. Resilient Code provides design solutions that link the social infrastructure of PILARES (a network of 300 vocational schools distributed throughout the city) to CDMX’s environmental and risk reduction initiatives, to promote water commoning among citizens. This strategic program of soft-bottom up infrastructural solutions began with “water resilience” as a Pilot to enhance public space throughout underserved barrios as a network of “water-commons.  ̈ Resilient Code is designed to implement such solutions and reduce environmental risks by complementing socio-economic programs, and to foster the “water-commons” network as result. Resilient Code is socialized through an action driven participatory game-based workshop, and through an online Atlas of Risk Reduction.

Objectives: Infrastructure as Reading Framework Architects and urbanists have found infrastructure useful as a framework to read, design and adapt urbanized territories. One framework for reading infrastructure is through its use as a parameter determining different levels of urbanization and equity. For instance, infrastructural obsolescence is a recurrent scene in postindustrial shrinking cities in the global north. Abandonment, rust and pollution abound here in the form of ruins, soils and water with high levels of heavy metals that require long and costly cleanup to be repurposed. 1 Flint in the US, Duisburg in Germany or Tangshan in China show very different approaches to this process. On the other hand, in today's global south megalopolis, water infrastructure is absent or controlled by mafias in these cities' rurban, informally urbanized areas. We discover this in places such as Mexico City, Mumbai, or Cape Town. Unmanaged water there becomes a risk vector exacerbated by climate change, causing landslides, subsidence, floods, extended droughts, or infection diseases for newly landed citizens who do not own the soil they inhabit. 2 Another contrast is presented by cutting-edge infrastructure, the driver that rich social-democracies in the global north use to adapt to our present health/climate condition such as COVID-19 early testing or flood mitigation programs. Tokyo in Japan, Boston in the US or Amsterdam in the Netherlands are good examples. In these cities, the hydrological cycle is efficiently managed to enhance city life with water while reducing the risks caused by it. 3 Even in this quick read, water infrastructure allows us to project a concerned x-ray of our inequitable, risky and unpredictable present territories, not only between north and south, but also within each locale. 4 It also speaks for the absence of designed circular processes that change our culture and relationship to water, while achieving a most needed socio-hydrological equilibrium.
In this paper, we describe a recent project conducted in partnership between the City of Mexico and a team of MIT graduate students. Our project was conceived through the concept of water commons, described later in this paper. We sought to realize water resilient communities through innovative design practices and procedures centered in a low-income Mexico City neighborhood, Iztapalapa. This neighborhood is characterized by extreme income and environmental inequality, as well as insecurity. Our projection of water commons was designed to mitigate this inequality through the development of water retention and absorption systems that simultaneously engaged collective community capacity and development of collective public space, thereby promoting commons through water. Our project sought to recall historical practices of water commons through indigenous urban practices, practices that were ignored or suppressed in the colonial era but that remain effective means of achieving mitigation of flooding and accommodation of water scarcity. Our project approach is also designed as a response to rapid urban growth in the developing world and as a scalable, government-sponsored strategy for improving sustainability in tandem with community capacity.

Background: Infrastructure as Design Framework
When using infrastructure as a framework to design, the promise exists to use our cities as living laboratories not just focused on technologies, but on issues of consumption, behavior and lifestyles to become more responsive to our environment. 5 Design can be used to make these most needed new values visible.
This seems more pertinent today than the use of costly infrastructures linked to 'smart', perhaps programmed-for-obsolescence, technology. That is to say, those infrastructures that are designed to become overshadowed by tomorrow's even more profiteering, 'smarter' devices. Instead, it is important to introduce other approaches that find fitness between our re-evaluated needs, technology, and our projective imagination to design infrastructure that supports equitable and resilient territories. approach to degrowth seems extremely useful as a design framework. We should learn to re-evaluate (reassess), re-conceptualize (reframe), re-structure, re-locate, redistribute, re-duce, re-use, and/or re-cycle when designing. According to Latouche, this 8Rs are needed when developing a resilience of societies, that is, their ability to transform positively and without trauma. 7 Towards this, we should enhance flexibility in our designs to accept change and transformation by re-circulating, re-purposing or re-using parts. We could recall, for instance, Ildefonso Cerdá's street network in Barcelona designed for horse carts, and its flexible adaptation to cars in the last century. We might also think of the pedestrian and cycling-friendly super-blocks vigorously used during the pandemic, or even their potential to become linear parks in a post-COVID scenario. 8 Another commonly known example is the Trevi Fountain in Rome and its water plaza network that celebrate and reveal water's arrival into the city. Katherine Rinne meticulously allows us to understand the intricacy of such a complex and invisible system, as well as its indispensable role in making metropolitan life possible. 9 Closer to home in Granada, Dede Fairchild Ruggles marvelously studies the Acequia Real irrigating the artful Alhambra gardens, but also the parallel cistern network such as the Aljibe del Rey, filled by the Aynadaman Acequia that provided common water in the Albaicín, still needing women as water carriers of freely provided water. 10 As public ways and collective artifacts, these examples tell of resilient networks that have lasted from centuries to millennia enhancing urbs and ex-urbs life. They find the right fit between available technology, design and imagination, providing common services through collective public spaces, as a right that comes with our citizenship.
To be sure, when well-designed, infrastructure moves beyond an engineered service to become a cultural platform for our collective use and well-being. Exemplary networks allow us to understand infrastructure as multipurpose public platforms affecting scales that move beyond its area of passage or location.

Motivation: Soft-Bottom-Up Infrastructure as Adaptation Framework
It is precisely its intrinsic relationship to growth that allows us to use infrastructure as an adaptation device. To keep transforming our urbanized territories, to become more resilient to change without trauma -as Latouche so well explains. 15 For that, depending on our geographies, we will need to adapt our cities to counterbalance more recurrent and polarized heat waves, droughts, and fires together with more floods, cyclones, and sea-level rise. This will affect population differently based on location and wealth, but both inequality and migrations are expected to increase due to climate crisis. 16 Many stellar projects exist that use infrastructure as an adaptation framework. The Riverway flood control design by Frederick Law Olmsted in Boston shows that design is a powerful agent in shaping infrastructure to diminish urbanization's environmental impacts. Anne Whiston Spirn explains that the Riverway became a linear park for its citizens allowing for the movement of people, cars, and the settling of many institutions along its sides, while managing the flow of the Muddy River. Just as important, this ambitious project was the result of a participatory process with public hearings together with public-private investors. 17 Like Olmsted, we will need to shape infrastructure to respond to, and adapt towards, more equitable and circular urban processes. This would ask for a reconceptualization strategy towards adaptation. For that, we could re-evaluate design projects to start counterweighing 'hard' top-down with 'soft' bottom-up infrastructures to reduce the gap between the polarized 1% and the other 99% in both our territories and society. As a re-distribution strategy we must embed equal access to services in our design as a way to deploy a most needed territorial equity, within persistent conflicts of environmental justice and ethics. 18 In other words, to reduce consumption by reusing and recirculating as much as possible! But we should also anticipate that risk-reduction and resilience ideologies could be used to displace and re-locate the already disempowered and that we could plan to protect them. 19 Therefore, adaptation infrastructure is not only green and grey, but the one that follows Latouche´s 8Rs! Our hypothesis is that we can propose and design this 8R soft-bottom-up infrastructure in this most needed adaptation and that we will test it through geographical embeddedness, evaluation and refinement. During the summer research, we studied many of the past and current city efforts to respond to CDMX risk-prone environmental conditions, now further stressed by and to facilitate access to otherwise "siloed" information such as the cadaster. 28 Mayor Sheibaum also launched the PILARES vocational schools to reduce violence and unemployment in the city's most underserved neighborhoods, through a social infrastructure of community spaces to provide access to health, education, culture and sports specifically for vulnerable populations. During her campaign, the Mayor also promised to enhance water resilience in the city by recovering a lost hydrological balance. 29 In sum, Mexico City has pursued a sincere and substantial push toward sustainable design and planning during the past decade, but much work remains. Our mission was to understand which urban design and infrastructure strategies could contribute best to enhancing equity and resilience to climate in CDMX underserviced communities.
[ Fig. 1 We were also interested in seeing which strategies might reduce barriers for resilience implementation. Could soft-bottom-up-infrastructure be the way to go?.
To continue our geographical embeddedness, we looked into the work of other scholars and prepared a two-week workshop in Mexico City with MIT students in Resilience) among others. Our team reviewed, assessed, and discussed all of these strategies as we formulated our own design and planning ideas.
[ Fig. 2 From our reading of these existing efforts, we targeted water resilience as a powerful vector to address inequality and environmental risks in CDMX's marginal underserviced communities. These risks include landslides, flooding, droughts, subsidence and socavones, or cracks in the earth. Due to the current climate regime these events have become more recurrent in Mexico City. Unfortunately, these calamities add to the fragile existence of marginal dwellers who already face socio-economic problems such as poverty, unemployment, violence, oppression from narcotic traffickers, land tenure insecurity, and more. The absence of water management and poor provision in these marginal communities not only makes visible the huge inequalities between rich and poor, but also a system that is in complete disequilibrium. As Bruno Latour mentions, it is important to land andwhile keeping the holistic view of the problem-start acting in these Critical Zones whose fragility has been pushed by the climate regime and that would be soon ruined if we did not intervene. 31 After much analysis and fieldwork, we "landed" as its citizens in the marginal communities of Mexico City to measure, make visible, and target solutions that provide actions to act and adapt to this new water regime.
Towards that end, we kept asking ourselves how to generate a cohesive urban strategy that respected past scholarship and practice, but that also introduced critical thinking about the feasibility of its implementation. We needed to reassess the water cycle. A decentralization strategy to re-distribute services while harvesting water seemed like a good option, but we found the existing city programs weak Code for the informal communities of Mexico City. The formal city, the "lettered city"-in Angel Rama's words-written by letrados and designed within the law, already had a código. 35 The informal city, one with exactly the same form but written outside the law, was also in need of a twenty first century code that would help restore water resilience. 36  Resilient Code helps ideate, design and communicate CDMX's common/private space potential to reduce environmental risk to water stress. It is intended as a water resilience program, providing design solutions that could be modified and implemented through several measures: participatory workshops at PILARES for adults; an online web interface; and a game-based workshop for children. Following the former idea of a soft-bottom-up infrastructure, the project proposes to start with a network of small interventions that would allow communities to start, by changing their water culture and behavior first. In this first phase, our project will ideally guarantee future public acceptance of these interventions, with the help of demonstration projects, communication strategies and participatory workshops. In a second, projected phase, our work will shift to an intermediate scale. These future projects will help bridge a hard-top down hydraulic infrastructure with a water-sensitive bottom up network to help restore the city's water cycle as a whole. In an acupunctural manner, we propose to begin the process of restoring a big problem, through small interventions that can be quickly implemented. We have named this soft-bottom-up water infrastructure strategy Water Commons. The term reminds us that water is a right for all, and that we all need to contribute to save it in one way or another.

Conceptual frame: Water Commons
Water Commons is the umbrella term for the first water resilience strategies proposed as the first Pilot of our Resilient Code program. These strategies, as previously public space. What are these urban design commons? We propose to co-design implementation strategies on the site of public buildings (hospitals, markets, schools, parks, and sports centers). These strategies will generate demonstration projects with high visibility to promote these types of interventions in the future. This network of projects will also create a critical infrastructure of logistics spaces and emergency shelters during a disaster. We propose for these projects to be co-created with community members based on the PILARES site with the help of a participatory design workshop. In parallel, an online Atlas of Solutions supports the network's actors (government, NGOs, community, multi-laterals)

Water Commons Interface: Atlas of Solutions
An online interface is designed in order to promote public access to information and to make available not only the designed solutions but to provide costs, organizations and experts at hand to implement water commons. Actions are [ Fig. 7

Discussion and Conclusions
While much attention has been placed in Mexico City to drain the region's rainwater as efficiently as possible, a new culture to harvest rainwater seems paramount.
The hydrological water system in the city has for long been dysfunctional. The consequences of this dysfunction have increased the risk of droughts, floods, and earthquake response, as well as caused health driven illnesses among the region's citizens. While the risks of earthquakes and earth cracks affect Mexico City as a whole, water provision makes visible the vast inequalities between rich and poor in the city. While access is key to fostering equality in the city, water resources have also shown the limits to growth in this megalopolis of 22 million dwellers. Growth through expansion or densification does not seem feasible amidst this heavily human-altered, or anthropic, condition of the valley. However, a more equitable and sustainable redistribution strategy of rainwater could alleviate the problems that the city currently faces due to droughts and floods, while also seizing the opportunity to implement public spaces in the most underserviced neighborhoods in the city. As result, the city´s water cycle could be improved as a whole, in a win-win-scenario.
Only if societies and territories are more equitable and sustainable, will they be able to survive more recurrent environmental crises.
In our water commoning project, we propose a soft bottom-up infrastructure as a first small step, on what is a long camino of future environmental and design challenges for Mexico City. Our project provides a major contribution to sustainability design and community practice in Mexico, through its meshing of top down and bottom up initiatives. Our partnership with multiple City of Mexico agencies leveraged government capacity to improve neighborhood conditions in partnership with developing community skills and organizations, to provide for sustainable maintenance and growth of water communing infrastructure. Different from past water infrastructure initiatives that were highly capital intensive, that suppressed or ignored community input, and that required fixed and continuous input from city agencies that could not be sustained, our project pilots a means by which communities can determine their own water future while mitigating risk and promoting growth of common spaces and facilities that promote collective democracy.
Our project is a significant contribution to sustainable community design practice for several reasons. First, risk is likely to increase; Mexico City is likely to experience increased water stresses in the future with climate change and increased desertification and exploitation of aquifer resources. Our project mitigates water stresses and places control of water resources in the hands of communities. Second, infrastructure limitations in Mexico City are likely to continue due to capacity and funding. Our project's soft infrastructure enables water retention and mitigation at the site level, without costly large-scale infrastructure requiring state support. Thirdly, governmental capacity, resources, and volition to achieve water goals are highly variable in Mexico due to ongoing political shifts and a political climate that favors short-term rather than long-term gain. Our water commoning project engaged highlevel government resources to catalyze a community-capacity driven project that could be sustained in the longer term at the local level, even if governmental interest flagged or was otherwise compromised. Lastly, continuing urbanization pressures in the Mexico City region mean that water stresses are likely to be exacerbated at ever greater scales due to urban expansion. Our project thus provides a model for future urbanization to incorporate sustainable design practice at the inception of a community rather than as a retrofit of a long-standing settlement.
Water commoning is very promising, but our project was not without its limitations and barriers. Due to capacity limitations on the MIT end, we were only able to sustain our engagement for a short period of six months before students assumed other responsibilities and faculty were taken up by other obligations. Attempts to institutionalize student involvement post-graduation through sponsorship by government agencies ran into funding and capacity limitations. The lack of followup due to COVID reduced our ability to continue engagement with the Iztapalapa community during the summer of 2020, and inhibited our ability to provide additional capacity after the immediate term of the project was complete. However, Mexico City´s Resilience Office has the children´s game ready and designed in a large format and is waiting for normalcy, post-COVID, to implement it in both PILARES and public spaces. In tandem, the Risk Secretary has continued advancing the Atlas of Solutions platform that now also includes pandemics. Therefore, we are confident that our multi-lateral implementation approach will enable local communities to continue development of water communing methods in the near future.