Global Strategies and Perspectives

Mario Schjetnan, FASLA

Managing Director, Grupo de Diseño Urbano

Valuable Case Studies in Water Management: Flood Control, Infiltration and Water Quality:

1. Mexicali Fluye, Mexicali / Calexico

2. Mexico City, Tecnoparque

The presentation highlights two important projects completed by our office, GDU/Mario Schjetnan. The first case study is the “Mexicali Fluye” Master Plan. Sponsored by the Tucson-based nonprofit Sonoran Institute with funding from the State of California. This project focuses on a 2.98-mile stretch of the Northern Collector Drain (DCN), a river south of Mexicali, Baja California, created largely by irrigation-canal water. The DCN flows northward, joining the Rio Nuevo before crossing into Calexico, California, creating a unique binational  ecosystem and social corridor, presently with low water quality.

The “Mexicali Fluye” project aims to enhance water quality using natural, sustainable treatment methods while simultaneously creating a linear park that provides accessible open areas for local communities, offering ecological restoration alongside recreational and sports facilities.

By providing public spaces, encouraging safe use, and fostering environmental recovery through passive water purification techniques, such as constructed wetlands, the project sets criteria for future integration between residents and the revitalized natural spaces of the DCN-Río Nuevo.

The interest and validity of the project lies in the similar complexities, constraints, and opportunities at the natural, geographic, social, hydraulic, and political interrelationships between México and the U.S. along our roughly 1952–mile, shared border.

The second project is the Tecnoparque development in Mexico City’s Azcapotzalco borough, a 13-hectare post-industrial site envisioned as an office hub for data and call centers. GDU/MS has served on this project since 2004, contributing master planning, water infrastructure design, landscape architecture, and the design of recreational and communal areas.

Mexico City authorities mandated that no new municipal water flow could be added beyond the pre-existing supply, and no stormwater or drainage flows could enter the overburdened municipal system.

This constraint led to a pioneering zero-discharge campus design. Our team developed a dual rainwater system: collection into cisterns and infiltration wells extending 55 meters down to geological absorption strata. Treated sewage water stored in cisterns is channeled to open-air reflecting pools, which irrigate green spaces and promote evapotranspiration, thus supporting local microclimate regulation. This system

recharges Mexico City’s depleted aquifer and conserves water through effective reuse. Building on Tecnoparque’s success, we recently founded the “Alliance for Water Abundance in Mexico City” a nonprofit partnership with Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana and private sector collaborators aimed at scaling this model to other urban districts facing similar water challenges. The objective is to restore hydraulic balance, reduce underground water overextraction, and mitigate flash flooding across Mexico City.

Kongjian Yu, FASLA

Professor, Peking University; President, Turenscape

Designing the Sponge Planet: Monsoon-Inspired Modular Solutions for Climate Resilience 

Climate change mitigation is often framed around carbon emissions, yet the degradation of the Earth’s hydrological and surface systems plays an equally critical role. The author’s Sponge City theory reframes climate action as a landscape and territorial design challenge, emphasizing the restoration of soil moisture, evapotranspiration, and low-cloud cover to stabilize hydrological cycles and mitigate heat extremes. Extending this vision to the “Sponge Planet,” the author calls for rehydrating terrestrial surfaces through decentralized, nature-based solutions. This framework draws on the agricultural ingenuity of monsoon cultures—such as terraced paddies, pond-dike systems, and seasonal flood-adapted planting—which historically integrated human productivity with ecological resilience. 

To translate these traditions into contemporary practice, the author advances a research-to-application pathway: *ancient ecological wisdom→model extraction→enhanced ecological design→post-occupancy evaluation→modular technology→modern ecological restoration.* Modularization enables low-cost, replicable interventions that optimize ecosystem services—including flood regulation, water purification, biodiversity enhancement, and cultural value—while remaining adaptable to diverse climates. 

Multiple cases illustrate this approach: Benjakitti Forest Park in Bangkok—a 52.7-hectare transformation of a former tobacco factory into a porous wetland–forest mosaic; Nanchang Fish Tail Park—converting a flood-prone urban wasteland into a multifunctional floating forest; and Sanya Dong’an Wetland—turning a flood-prone urban backyard into the ecological front yard of the city’s new CBD. These projects capture and store stormwater, restore degraded waters, expand habitat networks, and foster community engagement, often under severe budget and time constraints. 

The author’s modular, monsoon-informed Sponge City methodology offers a transferable blueprint for Sponge Planet restoration—bridging hydrological resilience, cultural heritage, and ecological engineering. It positions landscape architecture not only as climate infrastructure, but also as a catalyst for cultural continuity and planetary rehydration. 

Adriaan Geuze, FASLA, IR, RLA, OALA

Founding Partner, Principal, West 8

Hidden Rivers

Landscape infrastructure, engineering and water management are deeply embedded in the practice of shaping land. West 8 departs from this culture of constructed land and nature-born solutions and, when approaching the field of landscape architecture, views the discipline as place-making and land-shaping intertwined as engineering ecosystems.

In international contexts, we equip this unique perspective and toolbox when we reimagine the possibilities for envisioned landscapes and public space. Our multidisciplinary studio work with a systemic approach and, as we widen the lens, the larger context becomes the foundation for the design process. We learn from the site and give these layers—both anthropological and environmental—gravity and agency. Within the studio, we use the metaphor—the hidden rivers. Only by diving into the history and heritage, the formal and informal economies, and the users and uses, are we able to redefine the possibilities. We create spaces that invite, express identity and further the discussion.

Within the presentation, West 8 founder, Adriaan Geuze FASLA, will speak to examples of unique conditions, strategies and perspectives. These include national objectives for water management (e.g., The Room for the River Project) and how these initiatives apply within an individual context (Noordwaard Polder, Biesbosch National Park). In addition, recently completed projects (e.g., Grand Egyptian Museum, Cairo) will be showcased as precedents of international studio work. Lastly, discussing how these principles translate to a Californian context, where designing spaces for encounter and exchange and enhancing natural ecology coalesce to create a 21st-century workplace environment for innovation: Google Campus, California.

Maura Rockcastle, ASLA, PLA

Principal and Co-founder, TEN x TEN

Mississippi Stories

Stewardship in the context of the Mississippi River is a layered and complicated idea. Human, non-human, cultural, geologic, floodplain, wetland, backwater habitats, and riverine systems depend on relationships and reciprocity to thrive. In the Twin Cities, there is a groundswell of awareness and advocacy work fostering/nurturing those critical relationships between these human and environmental systems across policy, design, and community forums. How can future work in the public realm of the Mississippi River honor Indigenous legacy, build resilience, and better understand future vulnerabilities?

This question will be explored through the lens of two projects along the Mississippi River in the Twin Cities. The first, the Mississippi River Learning Center (MRLC), is a visionary, mixed-use river-focused space with year-round environmental, cultural, and historical learning along Saint Paul’s stretch of the Mississippi River. The project builds on the city’s long-standing effort to integrate the river into community life, reinforcing its role as the River Capital of the world. Environmental sustainability and climate change realities, alongside education opportunities, are embedded in the site restoration and design approach.

The second, Indian Mounds or Wic̣aḣapi, is a cemetery built by ancestors of living people. The place has deep significance to the Upper Sioux Community, Lower Sioux Community, Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, Prairie Island Indian Community, Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin, Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska, Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, and other descendants of those who are buried here. It is home to the only known remaining burial mounds within the Minneapolis-Saint Paul urban core. The Cultural Landscape Study, Messaging Plan, and site interpretation present an inspirational and holistic guide to gradually replace recreational features and activities with preservation of the burial ground, expansion of native plants, messaging acknowledging the sacred site, and removal of impacting elements. The sacredness of this place is communicated through a variety of changes to the landscape and sharing of messages that aim to build respect and restore dignity.

Situated within the traditional and ancestral homeland of the Dakota People, these sites are of significant cultural importance and considered sacred. The cultural, spiritual, and economic practices of the Dakota and other Indigenous peoples are woven into these landscapes in unique ways. These project sites, design, and management approaches embody the complex historic and contemporary context in which we work.