Mexico city is an unbelievable backdrop to become dedicated to design-based problem solving because the city planners have taken unbelievable risks in order to overcome unthinkable barriers.
One famous example is how the city was founded itself - in a lake; a man-built temple for the center of the Aztec universe surrounded by floating farms and amazing aquatic trade and warfare canal systems. Now occupying some of those canals are double or triple-decker overpass highways, wild feats of engineering hosting almost 3 million vehicles on the road daily. When Mexico found itself in dystopic, polluted, violent decay and "brain drain" to suburbs and the U.S. in the 90s and onwards, planners audaciously installed gigantic live plant towers to suck up highway pollution, hundreds of accessible bike share stations, an electro-responsive skyscraper with programmable wall panels to project images across the city and host futuristic art happenings underground. These are only a few of the amazing solutions to restore vitality to America's most intimidating megatropolis. Not to mention poverty solution at immense scale - flying toilets for slums, sustainable gardens in poor housing projects, platforms to allow informal street tent vendors to form minifranchises. The possibilities are endless and the confrontation of design with ancient civilization and futuristic urbanity makes the potential impact of successful programs scalable to previously unreachable or "impossible" parts of the world where tradition, corruption, and lack of access frustrate others.
But design thrives in Mexico City.
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