Workshop Brief Armando Oliver Suinaga & Jose ParralArchitectural Association Visiting School Mexico City “Atlas of Mexico City”, July 20-31 2015

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"Alles ist Wechselwirkung"

Abstract:Alexander von Humboldt criticism and research of the endorheic basin drainage system in Mexico City whiletraveling through the Americas, is maybe a perception that led him to eventually lay the basis to understandingsocial and economical dynamics within ecological environments. Humboldt’s research Influenced Darwin´sexploration which eventually coalesced into research of evolution by natural selection. Both ideas: ecologicalsystems and evolutionary processes have not been incorporated into urban design or architecture as exemplifiedby the dichotomizing idea of architecture's autonomy or the incapacity to accommodate urban infrastructures.The effects of rapid development through the 20th century and environmental awareness has led to superficiallydesigned “ecological” projects that sustain this dichotomy.We argue for the modeling of cities as sensitive ecologies subject to evolutionary processes. We will approachthis idea through the research of the territorial space between Chalco-Xochimilco as a sedimentation of diverseecologies inverting Georges Perec´s idea of species of spaces into a space of species. Humboldt´s critique ofthe drainage procedures are actualized through unintentional effects of infrastructures recovering lacustrinelandscapes and ecologies in Chalco´s new lake. By understanding the hydrological conditions of Mexico City´sendorheic basin and uncertain future scenarios, the projects should lead to new proposals that are able to adaptand accommodate uncertainty.Following Daniel Dennett´s idea of “design space” we propose to develop urban components which are subjectto evolutionary processes advancing from simplicity to complexity. We take as an example of robustness andresilience the “chinampa” as a component of an agricultural system which has emerged in a particular landscapecoevolving with the environment and persisting in time.Urban organisations are problems of organized complexity which need to be approached with new tools ofdesign as an investigation. Dennett´s algorithmically designed complexity and John H Holland´s investigationinto complex adaptive systems offer solutions to construct models which exhibit emergence as an aggregateentity that is more complex than its constituting elements and not easily deducible from its simple interactions,hence the need to build models. Capillarity is a condition “discovered” by biological systems allowing for the construction of structures thatenhance and exploit it as a phenomenological process of emergent complexities as exemplified throughevapotranspiration in a forest ecosystem. The workshop incorporates these ideas to build a model, game orsimulation where digitally constructed and 3d printed components operate according to certain rules that allowfor an interconnected structure exhibiting emergent behavior.

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"Alles ist Wechselwirkung"1

Alexander Von Humboldt wrote the Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain after visiting Mexico City in1803 during his exploration voyage lasting 5 years across South America, Central America, México and the US.In the essay, besides describing the systems of lakes that formed the Mexican basin, he illustrates thoroughly theextraordinary efforts constructed to protect the city from periodic flooding occurring since the Aztec period.Humboldt narrates with admiration the works being executed in Huehuetoca and Tajo de Nochistongo, alreadytwo centuries old. Even though he recognizes them necessary, he criticizes the infrastructure works for their lackof understanding of the hydrological potentials that form the valley.2 The works will extend up to the Porfiriato erain the 20th century and certainly form the thinking underneath politically executed works of infrastructure whichprevail currently, in the drenaje profundo (deep sewage) strategy.

Humboldt confronts two forms of relationship with the hydraulic systems of the closed basin. In his essay he isextraordinarily critical of the idea of the continuous drainage procedures and its edification process based oncontingent political decisions, plagued with mistakes, accidents and modification projects. Simultaneously hedescribes the freshwater lakes of Chalco and Xochimilco where the chinampas allow for growth of vegetation, ina fertile agricultural system, providing series of products to supply the city through a system of water canalsconnecting both areas .3 Alternatively he proposes to utilize the drainage channels for internal navigation andirrigation, recognizing the existence of a different way of inhabiting the Mexican Basin through a betterrelationship with the existing environment.4

Humboldt´s essay is not only relevant because of its specific description of Mexico City but also because of itsvast research of different geographical areas of the Americas, allowing him to form certain ideas of his thinkingtowards the idea of interconnectedness. Influenced by the experience of George Forster in the explorationvoyages of Cook, between idealism and romanticism, Humboldt embarks his voyage in order to synthesize andrelate different disciplines. 5 Fluctuating between an aesthetic vision of nature and a detailed analysis of itsconditions.6 he is the first to describe a systematic relationship between geography, meteorology and botanics.Aspiring to find a single vision that relates different knowledges through his general physics he prefigures themodern idea of landscape and ecological systems. 7 In some moment in his trip through Mexico he writes in hisdiary Everything is interconnected (Alles ist Wechselwirkung8).

Many years afterwards Charles Darwin embarked on his own exploration voyage with a copy of Humboldt´sbooks on The Beagle. On his trip, in many ways parallel to Humboldt's journey, as a member of a cartographicexpedition, he investigates the coasts of South America and the islands of the Pacific. During the voyage hemakes numerous terrestrial incursions finding different ecosystems as for example in the Brazilian jungle, theArgentinian pampas and Tierra del Fuego. He witnesses the effects of a devastating earthquake and tsunami inthe south coast of Chile, crosses the Andes and visits the Galapagos, Australia and the Islands of the Pacific.Darwin gives a detailed description of landscapes, geography and organisms utilizing Humboldt´s methodology.Recognizing his admiration and influence, Humboldt is one of the first to receive a copy of The Voyages of theBeagle by Darwin. Humboldt is one of the first to recognize the magnitude of Darwin's discoveries even thoughhe publishes The Origin of Species 23 years afterwards. Their investigations are complementary,correspondence and later publications denote influence and mutual recognition.9

Some of Humboldt’s texts describe the environmental, geographical and botanical conditions that define theAmerican continent while in others, like The Essay describe the social and economical conditions of the territoryof New Spain. Humboldt was advancing the study of human conditions and the social and economicalrelationships to the environment. Darwin was investigating the morphological differences of local organisms andtheir relationship to the environment, establishing the foundation to understanding this specific interconnectionbetween spatial form and the organisms that occupy it. While Humboldt catalogs and clarifies the correlationbetween the different elements of an ecological system, Darwin defines the origin of those relationships and theform how they modify in time through evolutionary processes. Humboldt describes the geographical andtopographical conditions that allow for certain species to be distributed in space, while Darwin defines thosedistributions in time. Ultimately, it is Humboldt describing the physical conditions of the americas, and Darwin isdescribing the effects on living organisms.

Humboldt utilized the term paysage10 when he was referring to a series of relationships that occurred in ageographical space with different scales of conditions, meaning ecologies. In the same way Darwin defined

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natural selection as the series of forces that determined the way certain organisms are distributed in time,explaining the functional and morphological differences as adaptations to those conditions. Both were trying toexplain that interconnected whole, that affects the living conditions of the its inhabitants and feeds back as amanipulation of the environment.

With Humboldt´s and Darwin´s synthesized knowledge and presentation of interconnectedness, we can establisha contemporary understanding of processes occurring in space and time that form the natural environment,therefore, it is our argument, fundamental to understand the artificial environment. Constructions like language,technology, culture, history, architecture are subject to the same evolutionary processes within the samegeographical spaces interacting and conforming ecologies.

Ecology and evolution are two concepts assimilated in biological sciences and incorporated, in general terms,into contemporary culture. However, in certain disciplines, the implications of these concepts have not beentotally integrated. Charles Percy Snow in The Two Cultures 11 criticized both scientists on one side andhumanist/artists on the other because of the lack of knowledge transfer, as if they pertained to two different andtotally separated cultures.

“It is bizarre how very little of twentieth-century science has been assimilated into twentieth-century art.”12

Architecture and Urbanism do not avoid Snow´s critique. As architects, we tend to think that our ideas generatespaces. Academically, the architectural discipline teaches us to invent concepts that construct urban space insuccessive and unconnected acts of creation. This is a current train of thought exemplified by Pier Vittorio Aureli,through the Archaeology of Modern Architecture ,13 he proposes for a nonfigurative architecture as backgroundfor an urban life to happen. Again Aureli, “It is possible to argue that, by denying formal redundancy, the latentproject of nonfigurative architecture ran parallel to the reduction of inhabitable space to the common forms of thegeneric city”. Further on, his discussion of Mies van der Rohe plinths in numerous buildings(p19) which establisha limit and separation to the urban condition conforming “architectural states of exception ” in contrast to an ideawe would like to pursue: rather the opportunity of creating sensitive, interconnected relationships betweenarchitecture and the urban and natural environments they occupy. Through this dualist vision exemplified by theidea that architecture is somehow autonomous, and cultural innovations are an abstract entity distinct from thematerial world from which they emerge, we end up thinking ideas precede mater.

To exemplify this dichotomy we can analyze the impact of science through technologies in urban space and howthe city has been constructed within the last 150 years. In the 19th Century, open spaces at the edge of cities,liberated by the agricultural systems, ceded great territorial extensions to the processes of the industrialrevolution, fragmenting the landscape through new supply lines of extraction, accumulation, production andconsumption centers. In a short time the city incorporated new and diverse structures, establishing newrelationships over great distances. 14 Pierre Belanger describes the development and impact of variousinfrastructures in the urban and territorial landscapes starting in the 19th century but consolidating in the first halfof the 20th century where railroads, sewer and electricity lines, highways and eventually airports have beenincorporated in the city generating typologies of a scale escaping the traditional notions of urban space.15

Urban planning has not always found relationships to flows of these engineering structures, traditional ways ofimagining urban space have been rendered obsolete some time ago. It’s enough to think of the combined effectof the container and supermarket model having effects of global flows, consumption patterns and localization ofactivities within the city, totally unpredictable by the urban manifestos of the 20th century.

The scientific advance of this same period, implemented through technological progress, has not only resulted ina physically modified city through the new infrastructures, but also incremented population dynamics of migrationand exponential growth, surpassing the ability to plan the city. This incapacity to design the city in relationship tonew infrastructures and its negative effects of fast development have generated a disenchantment andgeneralized unconformity of the contemporary city. Undoubtedly the processes of industrialization has had deepeffects on environmental deterioration, physically palpable on cities since the beginning of the industrialrevolution, but every day more symptomatic of global systems, where global warming menaces withunpredictable change of the current landscape.

From this disenchantment and awareness on the environment, new projects have emerged with approximation to

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nature. However the majority of these proposals continue to approach the relationship of the city and theenvironment from a dichotomy that separates architecture and urbanism from the material processes from whichit emerges. In these projects, nature is perceived as a condition to conserve intact, or as an idyllic historicalimage to be recovered, as if our contemporary condition was undesirable. In other cases environmentparameters are partially incorporated, as hostile conditions we need to protect from in order to achieve asustainable equilibrium through green camouflage. Achieving this without questioning processes or the outcomeof the structures. Architectures and projects typically assigned to the ecological or sustainable label are ultimatelymetaphors of an intention devoid of content.16

Designing the landscape as an infrastructure, even though it recognizes the capacity of integrating systems,continues tied to a dualist conception attempting to apply mechanistic ideas to understand complex systems thatare evidently convoluted. It is no longer possible to to design the landscape as another infrastructure, rather it isimperative, we argue, to model the city, its architecture and infrastructures as sensitive ecologies subject toevolutionary processes.

It is precisely this two concepts of ecological systems and evolutionary processes we would like to approachthrough the capillarity workshop. We propose to explore the rapidly fluctuating margins of Mexico City wherevarious urban scales coexist within agricultural conditions related to water systems. Understanding thegeographical space of Chalco-Xochimilco as Humboldt perceived, as different ecologies within diverse degreesof interconnection, we should understand the material processes that generate existing and new forms ofintervention in the landscape. Through this understanding of ecologies, the workshop will construct novelorganisations that maintain and enhance existing conditions, presenting alternatives to the current depredatoryurbanization occurring in these areas.

In his essay Species of Spaces Georges Perec, in a progression of scales, describes the physical qualities ofdifferent spaces from a subjective experience.17 Perec defines a neighborhood through its inhabitants and trades,at the same time that he questions why a city generates areas of commercial specialization. Trying to define atown or city, Perec talks about pre existing structures and processes that modify the notion of what constitutes acity through time in the same way as it is defined in different scales. We propose to explore this subjectiveperception of what constitutes a neighborhood as social, economic and cultural ecologies. We would like tounderstand the processes that define the city and particularly the morphology of the lacustrine zones through theinteraction of these ecologies.

The workgroup following Georges Perec essay will explore two kind of spaces; The material space through thespecific scale where the project will be located, trying to define what constitutes a neighborhood, or town, in therapidly changing borders between Chalco, Tlaltenco, Xochimilco and Mixquic. We will investigate the differenturban conditions and agricultural systems that have emerged, and learn how they work and function, aspiring togenerate diverse fields of information. The second space which will be virtual will constitute a parallelinvestigation through the concept of design space in evolutionary thought, as defined by Daniel Dennett. First wewill tackle some ideas about the site as material space, later on, we will look into ideas about actions in thatparallel virtual space.

The geographical space of Chalco-Xochimilco is formed by material accumulations through historical processes,not only physical but also economic, biological or linguistic as Manuel de Landa proposes in A Thousand Yearsof Non-Linear History .18 We will explore this sedimentations as fields of information that condition a series ofecologies so we can dissect and understand the forces that generate natural and human structures that conformthis territorial space.

To understand the potentials of interaction between ecologies and constructed infrastructures we can analyze thecase that Elena Burns19 describes where the New Lake of Chalco has been unintentionally recovered in the areawhere it was desiccated at the beginning of the 20th century through the construction of the Canal de laCompañia. The reason is water is being extracted from the subsoil aquifer, provoking in recent times soilsubsidence of up to 40 cm annually as the area contains the deepest layers of clay in the valley and as suchmost subject to compression. The result of this unintentional subsidence replicates the technique Nabor Carrillo20

utilized in Texcoco to construct the artificial lake that now bears his name. In Chalco the effects of thisinfrastructure are constructing a new lacustrine surface of up to 4 km2, recovering ecosystems and previousconditions. Unfortunately the subsidence also generates negative slopes in the sewer networks, in such a way

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that pumping stations have been installed in the Canal. Even confronting this issues annually, the city continuesto build drainage and extraction systems that could go through the same obsolescence processes because of alack of understanding of the geographical and hydrological systems that have the potential to guide urbanorganisations in this areas.

The endorheic basin that forms Mexico City Valley has gone through diverse moments of higher or lowerhumidity in which the lakes fluctuated in depth, surface and structure acquiring higher or lower salinity. 21 Sincethe pre-hispanic era the city has been subject to periodic flooding and it is probable that global warming willincrease the frequency and intensity of these cycles in the future. For example during the 20th century annualprecipitation has increased in Mexico City from 600 mm to 900 mm as well as intense precipitation events. 22

Under this scenarios, while authorities continue constructing infrastructure works to drain the valley, it is morenecessary than ever to think in alternative systems of urb an organisations that allow for adaptability to uncertainfuture conditions.

We propose to handle critically previous proposals around different ideas for lake recovery in Mexico City. 23

However our objective will be to present alternative projects in which urban ecologies are proposed thatincorporate flexible systems with capacity for adaptation and resilience. The projects should avoid the dichotomywith which the previous proposals have been constructed where urban and natural environments are presentedas two opposed conditions, even though they appear in coexistence.

We plan to explore the construction of these systems through a second virtual space through the concept ofdesign space in evolutionary thought, as defined by Daniel Dennett. In Darwin´s Dangerous Idea 24Dennettproposes that evolutionary mechanisms are algorithmical processes that progress from simplicity to complexityfollowing rules that eventually, through adaptation to the environment, construct complex behavior leading evento conscience and culture. For Dennett design space is not designed and progression is without an aim, designspace is somehow a virtual landscape where the organism navigates through a series of instructions that thegenetic code allows in order to adapt to external conditions, resulting in lateral variations of peaks or valleys thatconfer evolutionary advantages.

In this parallel investigation, we will attempt to understand that our cultural constructions, like architecture andurban structures, behave as complex organisations with adaptation capacities, in the same way that biologicalstructures are subject to evolutionary processes. In this sense we will explore urban organisations that are ableto adapt through the concepts of population variation, replication, combination, cooperation and competition. As aspecific example we could take the idea chinampa and argument it is subject to evolutionary pressures in thesame way an organism evolves under certain ecological conditions.

The chinampa as an agricultural organization emerged from previous adaptations to the lacustrine landscape. Ithas been modified through time, incorporating cultural innovations, generating variations and larger scalestructures through self-organization. It is interesting to think of the chinampas system from an evolutionaryperspective because it behaves as a complex organization that has maintained its consistency as a social,economic and urban system persisting in time despite different structural changes in its context. Avoiding theromantic rhetoric or the nationalistic discourse about the chinampas 25 we can understand it as a model thatpersists even faced with reorganization pressures from later agricultural systems like the encomienda, thehaciendas or mechanization. We can think of other pre-hispanic cultural elements that during the same timehave been abandoned, substituted or have extinguished as ideas, as in other meso-american geographicalspaces that had the same agricultural systems based on chinampas.26

The original lacustrine ecology has been modified by human organisations that have occupied the landscape andtransformed it into a new ecology, where not only the natural processes intervene the form of its landscape butsocial and economical structures combined to conform new territorial structures. In this sense the previousecology is in a coevolution with the new organization. This processes are not dissimilar to the form in whichcertain animal populations evolve along certain ecologies or geographical spaces, for example, the coevolutionof grasses and large herbivores that consume them has generated in a specific moment new ecologies like thesavannah, the pampas or the american prairies. 27 The lacustrine ecosystem, and particularly the chinampasexemplify, the potential of co-evolution between environment and urban organisations, or how interconnectionsand mutual influences generate emergent systems and have shown to be robust and consistent organisations.

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Warren Weaver identified the difficulties of tackling these issues. In his 1948 text “Science and Complexity" 28

Weaver proposes three different problems science is confronted with: problems of simplicity, problems ofunorganized complexity and problems of organized complexity. For Weaver problems of simplicity are those withfew variables, solved by simple equations, as in physics prior to the 20th century. Biological sciences in the 19thcentury, through Humboldt and Darwin, approached and composed problems of complexity, although only startedto catalog, collect and describe the phenomena, as the first steps of a scientific method to understandcomplexity. For Weaver the second problem of unorganized complexity involved an infinitude of variables butultimately approachable through statistics and probability. The third is that of organized complexity whichgenerates structures that persist in time and operate between few and infinite variables. Weaver recognizes thatthe future of science will consist in the research of organized complexity through computation andmultidisciplinary approach.

Even though certain urban relationships can be analyzed quantitatively through statistical tools, It is ourperception that urban structures pertain to the last kind of problems and should be understood as organizedcomplexities that persist in time, as the chinampas that we have described. Both ecological systems andevolutionary processes, are complexity problems we need to incorporate if we want to design urban structuresthat integrate seamlessly with the environment or even better transform into new and enhanced symbionts. Wewould like to go beyond sustainability, which does not question the state of relationships, or even worse aspiresto some sort of homeostatic/holistic condition which is erroneously perceived to have existed in the past. 29 Webelieve urban structures are capable of transforming and enhancing the environmental conditions into far morecomplex systems.

We recognize the difficulty of the task since urban design is in many ways approached as architecturally definedpublic space and landscape design is in many ways approached as a poetic and picturesque art rather than amodern science and all our tools are in effect obsolete. We need new tools to research urban organizationsthrough landscape urbanism that exhibit consistency and robustness through design as an investigation.30

In a very interesting experiment researchers in Japan have recreated the Tokyo bay railroad structure utilizingslime mold, usually a unicellular organism which behaves as a multicellular entity when confronted with scarcity.31

In a surface that replicates Tokyo Bay placing food where cities are located, slime mold grows evenly until itbegins to establish certain networks that become persistent. At the end of the experiment the slime moldreplicated in far less time the decisions of multiple engineers constructing the railroad lines through decades ofdevelopment. So is the slime mold rationalizing decisions in the same way that people building infrastructuresdo? Is it performing computations in order to achieve certain structures to procure its feeding?

Daniel Dennett argues in Darwin´s Dangerous Idea 32 that algorithmical processes performed in living organismsgive them these capacities for adaptation both internally and collectively as a behavior. So in a certain wayrailroad engineers have replicated the same algorithmic mechanisms as the slime mold while thinking theirdecisions are another order of thinking. Or else have we both, slime mold and engineers, found throughadaptation, some sort of organization that is efficient under certain environmental circumstances? Or are we bothjust mechanisms processing energy, matter and information in continuous feedback loops, exhibiting fancyorganisations in the process?

This algorithmically derived design or organized complexity is what Dennett defines as the good moves in designspace. The good moves allow the organism to solve certain adaptive co nditions, so eventually thosemechanisms exhibit some level of recurrence and reinforcement, even between different species. Echolocation isa good move which in certain environments can have evolutionary advantages. Bats and cetaceans, throughconvergent evolution, have arrived to the same solution following different genealogical paths. What is interestingis that this process affects the same set of genes, even in this two different species, finding in a way the samealgorithmic solutions to the same evolutionary challenges.33

In order to understand how very simple rules at lower scales of organization are able to generate complexbehavior in larger hierarchies we can look into John H Holland research of complex adaptive systems. ForHolland different phenomena like the immune system, ant colonies or economical decisions in share-marketscan be understood by modeling the components and feedback mechanisms between an organism or agent andits environment. In his book Hidden Order, How Adaptation Builds Complexity 34 identifies four properties;aggregation, nonlinearity, flows and diversity and three mechanisms; labeling, internal models, and building

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blocks by which we can build complex systems.

In a second book Emergence, From Chaos to Order 35 Holland defines further how this mechanisms constructwhat we understand for emergence where the resulting organizations are more complex that the individualentities that compose them. His argument is that the construction of models or simulations, even though they area necessary reduction of the real phenomena, are essential to understand behavior between different systemssince the emergent complexity is not easily deducible from the simple rules of the components. He argues forrule generated models that can be applied across disciplines to understand the diverse phenomena we havementioned, trying to understand what is essential, and what is contextual, to the feedback process so we candefine the applicability of a model. Holland ends his book asking: “How can the interactions of agents produce anaggregate entity that is more flexible and adaptive that its component agents?” 36 This is a question we would liketo address through the capillarity workshop.

Capillarity37 is a physical phenomenon exploited by biological organisations, capillary structures are generated bythe good moves Dennett has described and by the processes Holland theorizes. In plants and trees, branchingand evaporation enhance capillarity action, rising water along the tree structure so it can reach every part of theorganism. So it is logical, in a sense, that evolution by natural selection upon finding the possibilities of thisphenomena evolved xylem cells 38 allowing trees to grow upwards in competition. A physical force and simpleadaptation mechanisms allows for the emergence of more complex organisations that are not only adapting tothe environment but becoming the environment, we can think how the aggregated processes ofevapotranspiration in a forest and how they become an atmospheric condition to be dealt with, buildingecosystems.Better described by Simon Levin: “Ecosystems and the biosphere are complex adaptive systems, in whichpattern emerges from, and feeds back to affect, the actions of adaptive individual agents, and in whichcooperation and multicellularity can develop and provide the regulation of local environments, and indeed imposeregularity at higher levels. The history of the biosphere is a history of coevolution between organisms and theirenvironments, across multiple scales of space, time, and complexity.”39

As a methodology, the capillarity workshop will present a common work formed by different urban proposals forthe lacustrine area of Chalco-Xochimilco. The individual proposals should be based on a strong understanding ofthe geographical space, studying the structures we have previously mentioned from a perspective of ecologicalsystems. T he result of these investigations will be presented through a physical model of the area thatrepresents the diverse fields of information. Understanding the limitations of a short workshop our aim as a teamwill be to build a map, a game, a virtual model or an experiment by which we can investigate the ideas we havepresented, not dissimilar to the slime mold investigation we have described. Students will be introduced to thisideas building simple components progressing into rule derived systems in order to achieve complexity in higherlevels of organization.

We will achieve this through a parallel investigation, the students will present alternative urban systems that arecapable of conforming emergent organisations with a capacity to adapt and establish relationships, orinterconnections if you will, in the same way as we have described the chinampa as an urban system. Thesecomponents will be developed as 3d printed formal organisations that operate on the cartographic model. Inaddition, supplemental drawings will explain how fields and components inform and develop the projects.

The objective of the capillarity workshop will be to present a series of proposals that explore ecological systemsand evolutionary processes and present alternatives that are able to accommodate adaptation and resilience tounderstand culture and urban systems as another emergent phenomena of evolution.

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WORKSHOP BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burns, Elena (Coord), 2011. “Plan Hídrico para las Subcuencas Amecameca, La Compañia y Tlahuac Xico”. México D.F.:Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana

Coen, Enrico, 2012. Cells to Civilizations, The Principles of Change that Shape Life. New Jersey: Princeton University Press

De Landa, Manuel, 1997. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. NY: Zone Books

De Landa, Manuel, 2011. Philosophy and Simulation, the Emergence of Synthetic Reason, NY: Continuum Intl. Pub. Group

Dennett, Daniel, 1995. Darwin´s Dangerous Idea, Evolution and the Meanings of Life, London: Penguin

Glez de Leon, Teodoro & Kalach, Alberto, et. Alt. 1998. La Ciudad y sus Lagos, México City: Editorial Clio

Holland, John H, 2004. El Orden Oculto, De Como la Adaptación crea la Complejidad, México City: FCE

Holland, John H, 1998. Emergence, From Chaos to Order. Ny: Basic Books / Perseus Books Group

Humboldt, Alexander Von, 1882. Ensayo Político sobre el reino de la Nueva-España, Trad.: Don Vicente Gonzalez Arnao1822, Tomo primero, Libro Tercero, cap. VIII

Mostafavi, Mohsen & Najle, Ciro, 2002. Landscape Urbanism, A Manual for the Machinic Landscape. London: Architectural Association Publications

Mostafavi, Mohsen & Doherty, Gareth, (Ed) 2010. Ecological Urbanism. Cambridge: Harvard University, GSD, Lars MüllerPublishers.

Noble, Denis, 2006. The Music of Life, Biology Beyond Genes. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Perec, George, 1974. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. London: Penguin

Reed, Chris & Lister, Nina Marie (Ed), 2014. Projective Ecologies. NY: Harvard University, GSD, Actar Publishers

Snow, Charles Percy, 1959. "The two cultures and the scientific revolution", NY: Cambridge University Press

Weaver, Warren, 1948. "Science and Complexity". NY: Rockefeller Foundation, American Scientist, 36: 536

Waldheim, Charles (Ed), 2006. The Landscape Urbanism Reader. NY: Princeton Architectural Press

West, Geoffrey “Scaling: The surprising mathematics of life and civilization”http://www.citymetric.com/horizons/geoffrey-west-theoretical-physicist-grand-unified-theory-cities-387https://medium.com/sfi-30-foundations-frontiers/scaling-the-surprising-mathematics-of-life-and-civilization-49ee18640a8

Yu, Kongjian, 2010. “Five Traditions for Landscape Urbanism Thinking”, Topos,2010(71):58-63

Compilation 1998 “Vuelta a la Ciudad Lacustre”, Memorias del Congreso, Instituto De Cultura de la Ciudad de México

http://www.avhumboldt.nethttp://darwin-online.org.uk

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1 Humboldt, Alexander Von, 1803. Reisetagebuch 1.-5. August 1803, Tal von Mexiko“Alles ist Wechselwirkung” is traduced as “everything is interconnected” although the word could also imply that everythinghas an effect on everything else.Cited in Baron, Frank and Doherr, Detlev. 2006, Exploring the Americas in a Humboldt DigitalLibrary: Problems and Solutions. Geographical Review 96 (2006): 439–50.

2 Humboldt, Alexander Von, 1822. Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain.Translated by: John Black 1822, Vol Ii, London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, And Brown,http://www.avhumboldt.net/humboldt/publications/books/did/26/title/Political-Essay-on-the-Kingdom-of-New-SpainPp128 “ In all the hydraulical (Sic) operations of the valley of Mexico, water has been always regarded as an enemy,against which it was necessary to be defended either by dikes or drains. We have already proved that this mode ofproceeding, especially the European method of artificial desiccation, has destroyed the germ of fertility in a great part ofthe plain of Tenochtitlan.”

3 Humboldt, Alexander Von, 1822 op. cit. Pp 75 “In proportion as the fresh-water lake has become more distant from the salt-water lake, the moveable chinampas (Mostlikely a myth, see Crossley note 24) have become fixed. We see this last class all along the canal de la Viga, in the marshyground between the lake of Chalco and the lake of Tezcuco(Sic). Every chinampa forms a parallelogram of 100 metres inlength, and from five to six metres in breadth. Narrow ditches, communicating symmetrically between them separate thesesquares. The mould fit for cultivation, purified from salt by frequent irrigations, rises nearly a metre above the surface of thesurrounding water.”

4 Humboldt, Alexander Von, 1822 op. cit. Pp 441“It would have been easy, however, to profit by the natural advantages of the ground, in applying the same canals for thedrawing of water from the lakes for watering of the arid plains, and for interior navigation. Large basins of water ranged asit were in stages above one another facilitate the execution of canals of irrigation.”

5 Humboldt, Alexander Von & Bonpland, Aimé, 1807. Essay on the Geography of Plants.2009,The University of Chicago Press, Edited and Introduction by Stephen T. Jackson, traduced by Sylvye Romanowski“Here I bring together all the physical phenomena that one can observe both on the surface of the earth and in thesurrounding atmosphere.” http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo6040531.html

6 Corbera Millán, Manuel, 2014. Ciencia, Naturaleza y Paisaje En Alexander Von Humboldt Boletín de la Asociación de Geógrafos Españoles N.º 64 - 2014,

7 Jackson, Stephen T., 1807. Introduction Essay on the Geography of Plants, op. Cit.“The central ecological and geographical ideas in Humboldt’s Essay are not original, in the same sense that little ofscientific progress is truly original—to paraphrase Newton, we see further by standing on the shoulders of giants.Botanical, biogeographical, and geographic ideas in the work derive in large part from Humboldt’s friends, Karl Willdenowand George Forster. Humboldt’s accomplishments were in synthesizing these ideas, portraying them graphically using theconcrete example of Chimborazo, and integrating them into a broader vision of science—a vision encompassing space,time, the physical and biotic elements of the earth, and human culture and perception.”

8 Humboldt, Alexander Von, 1803. Reisetagebuch 1.-5. August 1803, Tal von Mexiko

9 Baron, Frank, “ From Humboldt to Darwin: Influence and Evolution”http://www.avhumboldt.net/_publications/DarwinHumboldt.pdf

10 Chunglin Kwa in “Alexander von Humboldt's Invention of the Natural Landscape” speaks about the influence of landscape painting of the 17th and 18th centuries had on the perception of Humboldt. Even the specific influence that the paintings byWilliam Hodges (who travelled with Forster and Cook) which encourage him to make his exploration voyages, (which otherway could he imagine unknown lands). In the same way it highlights the artistic or infographic value of the “Tableauphysique des Andes et pays voisin” in the “Essay on the Geography of Plants” that synthesises divers information in anartistic fashion, calling it a first approximation but aspiring to a “painting of Nature” (Naturgemälde). The final argument oKwa is that Humboldt re-defines the term landscape (landshaft) as an abstract whole that tried to define his idea ofinterconnection-. This will eventually influence the romantic landscape paintings as a representation of that abstraction.

Kwa, Chunglin 2005. Alexander von Humboldt's Invention of the Natural Landscape(published in European Legacy, Vol. 10 (2005), 149-162)https://www.academia.edu/6543290/Alexander_von_Humboldts_invention_of_the_natural_landscape

11 Snow, Charles Percy,1956. The Two Cultures. NY: The New Stateman, 6 October 1956 Original text from which the 1959 lecture is derived.

12 Snow, Charles Percy, 1959. The two cultures and the scientific revolution. NY: Cambridge University Presshttp://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/students/envs_5110/snow_1959.pdf “That total incomprehension gives, much more pervasively than we realise, living in it, an unscientific flavour to the whole'traditional' culture, and that unscientific flavour is often, much more than we admit, on the point of turning anti-scientific.”

“They still like to pretend that the traditional culture is the whole of 'culture', as though the natural order didn't exist. Asthough the exploration of the natural order was of no interest either in its own value or its consequences. As though thescientific edifice of the physical world was not, in its intellectual depth, complexity and articulation, the most beautiful andwonderful collective work of the mind of man.”

13 Aureli, Pier Vittorio, 2009. More and More About Less and Less. NY: Log Spring/Summer 2009, page 7, Any Corporation

14 See Pierre Belanger essays about the U.S. infrastructure Bélanger, Pierre, 2006. “Synthetic Surfaces”. Included in The Landscape Urbanism Reader, Edit. Charles Waldheim, 2006.NY: Princeton Architectural Press

15 Bélanger, Pierre, 2010. “Redefining Infrastructure” en Ecological Urbanism. Edición de Mohsen Mostafavi & GarethDoherty, 2010. NY: Harvard University, Graduate School of Design, Lars Müller Publishers

16 Kwinter, Sanford, 2010. “Notes on the The Third Ecology” in: Ecological Urbanism. Mohsen Mostafavi & Gareth Doherty,2010. NY: Harvard University, Graduate School of Design, Lars Müller Publishers

Sanford Kwinter makes a very appropiate critique of how the idea of “sustainability” is not necessarily complementary tothe idea of ecology. “There can be no “ecological thinking” that does not place human social destiny at the heart of ourposture toward our environment context. We may well learn over the next years that cities, even megacities, actuallyrepresent dramatically efficient ecological solutions, but this fact alone does not make them sustainable, especially if theforces of social invention remain trapped in tyrannies that only ecological thinking in an ecumenical scale can free us from.For ecological thinking too has its counterfeit and debased forms, and many “sustainability” discourses remain moreoppressive than liberatory, more stifling than inventive, and it would be at great peril if we were to continue to assume thatthis two areas of approach, and especially their methods and presuppositions, are necessarily complementary.”

17 Perec, George, 1974. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. London: Penguin

18 De Landa, Manuel, 1997. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. NY: Zone Books

19 Burns, Elena (Coord), 2011. “Plan Hídrico para las Subcuencas Amecameca, La Compañia y Tlahuac Xico”. México D.F.:Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana

20 Nabor Carrillo built, in the former lake of Texcoco a series of pumps that extracted water from the subsoil, fast and intensively, producing a subsidence which allowed to recover a 10´000 hectares lake which now has his name.

21De la Lanza Espino, Guadalupe & García Calderon, José Luis, 1995. Lagos y Presas de México. México D.F.:Centro de Ecología y Desarrollo100´000 years ago the lake had approximately a depth of 30 to 35 meters, with alternating periods in which it became ashallow swamp.

22 Ibarrarán, María Eugenia “Climate’s Long-term Impacts on Mexico’s City Urban Infrastructure”Case study prepared for Cities and Climate Change: Global Report on Human Settlements 2011http://www.unhabitat.org/grhs/2011

23 Ver: Glez de Leon, Teodoro & Kalach, Alberto, et. Alt. 1998. La Ciudad y sus Lagos. México D.F.: Editorial Clio“Vuelta a la Ciudad Lacustre”, Memorias del Congreso, Instituto De Cultura de la Ciudad de México, 1998We will analyse different proposals, from the project by Alberto T Arai in 1952, the 1960´s proposals of Dr Nabor Carrillo,the proposal by Alberto Kalach for the Chalco Lake in the Solidaridad contest of the 1990, the “Retorno a la CiudadLacustre” in which I participated with Alberto Kalach in 1998 and 2002. See also Burns, Elena (Coord) “Repenter la Cuenca, La gestión de Ciclos del Agua en el Valle de México”, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2009

24 Dennett, Daniel, 1995. Darwin´s Dangerous Idea, Evolution and the Meanings of Life, London: Penguin

25 Crossley, Philip L, 2004. “Just Beyond the Eye: Floating Gardens in Aztec Mexico” Historical Geography Vol. 32: 111-35.Crossley describes how the idea of a floating garden has been utilised and from his point of view unfounded. The idea of floating gardens has constructed a romantic perception about the innovations of the pre-hispanic groups that continue through a nationalistic discourse that perpetuates in some sense a degree of discrimination by deviating the central themewhich should be the agricultural efficiency of the chinampa and from our point of view its persistence in time.

26 Rojas Rabiela, Teresa, “Las Chinampas”, 1998. en “Vuelta a la Ciudad Lacustre”, Memorias del Congreso, México D.F.: Instituto De Cultura de la Ciudad De México, Ciudad de México 1998

27 Stebbins1 G. Ledyard “Coevolution Of Grasses And Herbivores” Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden, Vol. 68, No. 1 (1981), pp. 75-86

28 Weaver, Warren, 1948. "Science and Complexity". NY: Rockefeller Foundation, American Scientist, 36: 536http://people.physics.anu.edu.au/~tas110/Teaching/Lectures/L1/Material/WEAVER1947.pdf

29 See Slavoj Žižek interesting arguments in “Ecology against Mother Nature: Slavoj Žižek on Molecular Red”http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2007-ecology-against-mother-nature-slavoj-zizek-on-molecular-red

30 Yu, Kongjian, 2010. “Five Traditions for Landscape Urbanism Thinking”, Topos,2010(71):58-63http://www.turenscape.com/english/news/view.php?id=219

31 Metcalfe, John, 2012. “Mapping Tokyo's Train System in Slime Mold” Web article in citylab.com, july 23 2012http://www.citylab.com/commute/2012/07/mapping-tokyos-train-system-slime-mold/2679/

32 Dennett, Daniel 1995 “Darwin´s Dangerous Idea, op.cit.

33 Parker, Joe, Rossiter Stephen et alt., 2013. "Genome-wide signatures of convergent evolution in echolocating mammals” Nature 502, 228–231 (10 October 2013)http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v502/n7470/full/nature12511.html

34 Holland, John H1995. Hidden Order, How Adaptation Builds Complexity. NY: Basic Books / Perseus Books GroupSpanish translation: El Orden Oculto, De Como la Adaptación crea la Complejidad, México City: FCE

35 Holland, John H, 1998. Emergence, From Chaos to Order. Ny: Basic Books / Perseus Books Group

36 Holland, John H 1998. Op. Cit.

37 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capillary_actionCapillarity is a physical phenomena where liquids ascend in narrow tubes due to cohesion within the liquid and adhesionto the surfaces of a tube allowing for liquids to rise further in narrower tubes even against gravity.

38 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylem

39 Levin, Simon, 2005. “Self-organization and the Emergence of Complexity in Ecological Systems”BioScience • December 2005 / Vol. 55 No. 12