Urban agriculture in Mexico City | Returning to the cultural roots of the city
Urban garden in the Álvaro Obregón Delegation. Credit: Excelsior. More than a fashionable ‘foodie’ trend URBAN GARDENING SEEN AS HEALTHY AND NECESSARY Devon G. Peña | Tijuana, B.C. | March 9, 2014 Note: The source for this article is an article that appeared in the March 1 issue of the Mexico City daily, Excelsior . I have translated the original from Spanish and inserted additional observations and comments . The Colhua Mexica (Aztec) twin island cities of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco were filled with urban farms, home kitchen gardens, fish-stocked ponds, and aviaries. Two large lakes south of the cities were filled with highly productive floating gardens known as chinampas . These ancient Mesoamerican city-states were basically food self-sufficient. The conquest destroyed most of these cultural ecological landscapes and built Mexico City with the rubble of demolished temples, schools, colleges, homes, and other buildings. Mexico City has never been able to reproduce this ideal condit...