355- Depave Paradise

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It's easy to forget that you're in a particular place on the Earth's surface, a coast or a bay or a desert or a plane. Mexico City is one of the biggest, busiest, trafficiest cities in the world. But it's also a highland valley over 7000 feet in the air, surrounded on all sides by volcanoes. Sometimes these volcanoes spit up a little fire and smoke to remind people of the volatile geology all around them. But about a millennium and a half ago, a volcano called Xitlé fully erupted. The molten lava poured into the valley, destroying an indigenous city and covering 30 square miles in a bed of volcanic stone. SPEAKER_04: Today, most of this lava field has been paved over with roads and buildings and parking lots devoured by the largest city in North America, Mexico City. SPEAKER_06: That's producer Emmett Fitzgerald. SPEAKER_04: But in the midst of all this urban sprawl, there's one spot where you can still get a good look at that old volcanic rock. SPEAKER_03: So you can see now, in 2019, rocks that are exactly the same as 1600 years ago. SPEAKER_04: This is Pedro Camarena. He's a landscape architect, and we're in the Pedro Gal de San Ángel Ecological Reserve. It's a small park in South Mexico City that contains the last remnants of the old lava field. Looking down at the ground, you can see swirls and folds in the rock, how the lava was moving as it cooled all those centuries ago. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you can see that, that ripples. Yeah, oh yeah, look at that. In Spanish, el cordones. SPEAKER_04: In English, el Pedro Gal means the rocky place, and it's a fitting name. The ground pier is made of purplish-black stone and covered in bright green lichen. Dry-brown grasses are growing up through the cracks, but Pedro says that when the seasonal rains come, this whole landscape will transform. In rainy season, it turns green and a lot of corals, from orange, red, yellow, purple, blue, a lot of wildflowers. SPEAKER_03: So this is beautiful. Pedro Camarena is probably the Pedro Gal's number one fan. SPEAKER_04: Here in the Pedro Gal, there are 300 of different species of plants. SPEAKER_03: There are two or three endemic species. Only here in this place, you can find that. One is an orchid, and the other one is a cactus. There's also a tiny little frog. SPEAKER_04: That only appears in the rainy season, but by night. SPEAKER_03: But some nights, you can stay here in this place and listen to the frog, the little frog. It's magical. SPEAKER_03: And many people, even me, are very crazy about this landscape. Pedro is not the first architect to fall in love with the Pedro Gal. SPEAKER_06: Back in the 1940s, this lava field became the muse of the great Mexican modernist Luis Baragon. Baragon is a giant of Mexican architecture. SPEAKER_04: He's famous for designing simple cubic houses painted with bold, bright colors, yellows and reds and fuchsias. His vivid single-color walls are like the perfect Instagram background. And Baragon designed some of his most interesting houses among the rocks of the Pedro Gal. SPEAKER_06: But in attempting to build harmoniously with this volcanic landscape, he may have accidentally led to its demise and contributed to an ecological crisis that threatens the future of the entire city. SPEAKER_04: Luis Baragon moved to Mexico City from Guadalajara in the late 1930s. The city was in the middle of a building boom, and amidst all that construction and growth, the Pedro Gal, about 10 miles south of the city center, was one of the few places that remained completely undeveloped. Baragon used to explore the lava field on weekend hikes with his artist friends. Baragon, like a lot of other artistically-minded people, including Diego Rivera, became enamored of this place. SPEAKER_04: This is Keith Eggner. He is an architectural historian at the University of Oregon who wrote a book about Luis Baragon. He says that Baragon fell in love with the Pedro Gal for its physical beauty, but also because the landscape felt distinctly Mexican. SPEAKER_08: It was a place that the Spanish had never tamed, had never colonized. It was a place with views of the volcanoes that were so central to a lot of Mexican mythology and Mexican history. And Baragon decided to build there. He came up with the plan of building houses, modern houses, and gardens on this, again, very distinct volcanic site. SPEAKER_04: He called the project Los Hardines del Pedro Gal. For years, this uneven, rocky landscape deterred would-be developers. But Baragon saw the lava as an asset. SPEAKER_08: And rather than breaking up the lava and carting it away and trying to level off the ground as other people might have done, Baragon developed this idea to keep much of the lava and the native vegetation in place. This idea was inspired by architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, who believed that the design of a building should reflect the landscape on which it was built. SPEAKER_06: Just as Wright designed his famous falling water house around a spectacular waterfall in Pennsylvania, Baragon wanted to design homes inspired by this majestic lava field. SPEAKER_04: And so he decided that all houses in the Pedro Gal should be simple and modern and made from basic local materials. Streets should follow the natural contours of the rock, and lots should be kept really large, as much as 30,000 square feet. SPEAKER_08: And that houses only take up a relatively small percentage of those lots. The rest to be left to gardens. SPEAKER_04: Baragon was obsessed with gardens. This could be apocryphal, but supposedly he used to say, I don't build houses with gardens, I build gardens with houses. And he wanted the gardens of the Pedro Gal to be odes to this unique volcanic landscape. A substantial portion of the original lava should be left on site, and only small patches of lawn might be used. SPEAKER_08: Distinct native trees and shrubs were to be left in place and cultivated. SPEAKER_06: Baragon began working in the Pedro Gal in the late 1940s. His first houses were carefully nestled among the rocks and integrated seamlessly with the volcanic landscape. The gardens featured little stairways cut into the stone that allowed you to move through the space. There's even a spot in one of the houses where a huge piece of lava comes through the wall. And if all this sounds pretty expensive, well, it was. SPEAKER_04: Baragon's goal was to convince wealthy professionals to escape the crowded, noisy city center in favor of the fresh air and beautiful scenery of the lava field. And he hired a photographer named Armando Salas Portugal to really capture the vibe. Salas Portugal's beautiful photos of well-to-do Mexican families wandering through the rock gardens helped sell Baragon's lava lifestyle to the Mexico City elite. You can live in the paradise, very exotic place with a lot of lava. SPEAKER_04: Here's Pedro Camarena again. Nobody surrounds you. You came with your Cadillac 57 or your Buick 59, and you look like Cary Grant or something like that. SPEAKER_03: So many people in Mexico say, yes, we want to live like that way. I mean, it sounds pretty cool to me. SPEAKER_06: Right? You're living in this rugged wilderness, just a short drive from your downtown office job like a sophisticated cowboy. SPEAKER_04: Yeah, but new cowboys with a Cadillac instead of a horse. SPEAKER_03: If I had money at that time, I for sure bought a house in the Pedregal, of course. SPEAKER_06: If you aren't able to visit Mexico City, Armando Salas Portugal's photographs are probably the best way to experience Baragon's architecture and his vision of harmony between building and landscape. But the truth is that vision never really came to pass in the real world. In the early 1950s, Baragon got bought out of the project. SPEAKER_04: And soon all his utopian ideas about how the landscape should be developed went out the window. The city was growing at a breakneck pace, and here was this source of cheap land. SPEAKER_08: And so you can see in these aerial photographs El Pedregal in 1950, there's a few houses and roads there. By 1959, the place is densely packed with houses and very much built up. The houses got bigger and the gardens got smaller, and newcomers to the area didn't seem to share Baragon's reverence for the lava. SPEAKER_06: They covered up the rocks with driveways and lawns and gardens full of non-native plants. And it's easy to think about this story as a kind of eco-architectural paradise lost, in part because of the way people talk about Luis Baragon. SPEAKER_04: He's kind of come down to us in the, you know, the architectural hagiography and in the literature as this, you know, this mystic monk. SPEAKER_08: Sort of remote from modern life in many ways. And there's certainly truth in that. But at the same time, he was also a very successful businessman, even a rather rapacious real estate developer. Eigner says that Baragon knew what he was doing. SPEAKER_04: That paradise was always very ephemeral. It was never really meant to last. SPEAKER_08: And again, I don't think Baragon really expected it to last. SPEAKER_06: Between the 50s and the 80s, nearly the entire lava field was developed. Today, about a half million people live on top of the Pedregal. There are fancy neighborhoods and poor ones. But aside from the little preserve where our story began, the lava rock is basically gone. And it wouldn't be fair to put that all on Luis Baragon. But the irony is, as much as he genuinely loved that lava landscape, in a way he facilitated its demise. That project of beautiful houses in Jardines del Pedregal, they trigger the urbanization in South Mexico City. SPEAKER_03: And then starts to develop, urban develop this area. And that's the fatal error. SPEAKER_04: Pedro Camarena thinks that developing El Pedregal was a fatal error, not just because the rocks look pretty, or were home to some cool plants and animals. He says that covering up this unique geology contributed to a deeper problem, an ecological crisis that's playing out in Mexico City today. A crisis rooted in the city's extremely complicated relationship with water. SPEAKER_07: Yeah, for Mexico City, the trouble with water is quite complex. And it all starts in the moment that someone decided to build a city upon a lake. This is Loretta Castro-Reguera. SPEAKER_04: I'm Loretta Castro-Reguera. SPEAKER_07: I'm an architect and an urban designer. And I do design, design for the city and design with water. Castro-Reguera says that the Valley of Mexico is actually more of a basin. SPEAKER_04: It's a closed basin. It's like a bowl, which has no natural water exits. SPEAKER_07: So when it rains, all the runoff concentrates in the lower areas of the basin. And this bowl starts filling up. For centuries, the basin was filled with a series of rainwater lakes. SPEAKER_06: The Aztecs built their capital, Tenochtitlan, on an island in the middle of one of those lakes. They built causeways and canals and floating gardens. It was like the Venice of Mesoamerica. SPEAKER_04: But when Spanish conquistadors sacked Tenochtitlan, they rebuilt the city as if it was just any old city in Spain with a centralized grid. So that's when real trouble starts happening. SPEAKER_04: Nearly every year when the seasonal rains came, the colonial city would flood. And we're talking serious flooding. After the flood of 1629, Mexico City was underwater for four years. SPEAKER_07: And in that moment, the government, the viceroy, decided to open the first canal that would start draining the lake system. Over the course of the next several centuries, SPEAKER_04: Mexico City built an elaborate system of tunnels designed to evacuate rainwater out of the basin and prevent flooding. Little by little, the city drained the lakes and expanded out over the dry lake bed. But Mexico City also suffers from a second water problem, one that seems almost paradoxical. SPEAKER_06: Even as it gets inundated every year with rains and floods, the city is running out of water. SPEAKER_04: In the middle of the 20th century, Mexico City's population exploded. And all of those people needed to drink. The seasonal rain could have provided a reliable source of freshwater, but Mexico City had just built a massive system of infrastructure designed specifically to get rid of it. And now with the 23 million inhabitants in the city, SPEAKER_07: there's not enough drinking water to satisfy the necessities of all this enormous population. Today, many neighborhoods in Mexico City don't have reliable running water. SPEAKER_04: And then when the rainy season comes, those same neighborhoods get far too much water all at once. So we live in this paradox of urban floods and water scarcity. SPEAKER_07: To solve the scarcity issue, the city took two approaches. SPEAKER_06: They piped water in from far away, and they pumped it up from the aquifer below ground. Which in turn created a third problem. SPEAKER_11: In the early 20s of last century, some engineers saw that the city was sinking. This is Manuel Perlo Cohen. He's director of the Institute for Social Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. SPEAKER_04: Some buildings sank five centimeters per year, and some of them ten. SPEAKER_11: The reason was pretty straightforward. SPEAKER_06: As more and more people took more and more water out of the aquifer every year, the muddy lake bed soil began to crack and crumble like a stale cookie. And that's why the city began to sink. SPEAKER_11: Today, Mexico City is pumping water out of the aquifer twice as fast as it can replenish. SPEAKER_04: And the city has sunk about 30 feet over the past century. If you walk around Mexico City today, you can see this in the landscape. Crooked skylines, sinkholes, and places where the ground is completely uneven. Mexico City is flooded, thirsty, and sinking. SPEAKER_06: And climate change is only going to make all of it more extreme. It's an impossibly complicated problem with no easy solution. SPEAKER_04: But with impossibly complicated problems, you have to start somewhere. And Pedro Camarena thinks that one place worth considering is the lava fields of El Pedro Gal. So let's take a look. What is the Pedro Gal I'm going to show you. SPEAKER_03: I'm going to show you why this water runs very, very easy in this lava field. Pedro is one of several architects who have started thinking about ways the city could recharge its groundwater aquifer. SPEAKER_04: In most places, recharge just isn't possible. SPEAKER_06: The ground beneath the old lake is made of clay that retains water on the surface and prevents it from flowing underground. But in a few places around the edges of the old lake, the landscape is rocky and permeable. And you think El Pedro Gal is probably the best place? SPEAKER_04: It's the best place, of course. Because lava fields are the most permeable geology on earth. SPEAKER_04: Back in the Pedro Gal ecological reserve, Camarena bends down and points to a piece of lava rock. Take a look. There's a lot of holes. There's a lot of porous, very porous stone. Thank you. SPEAKER_03: It looks like one of those pumice stones that people use in the shower to scrape dead skin off their feet. SPEAKER_04: Yeah, more or less. Pedro says that for years when rain fell on the Pedro Gal, the water would easily trickle down through this porous stone into the aquifer below ground. Can you think if came a big, big storm, do you think you can find a lagoon here? Of course not. SPEAKER_03: But the same cannot be said for most places on the old lava field. SPEAKER_04: Because apart from this ecological reserve, nearly all of the porous volcanic rock is gone, covered up by layers of impermeable concrete. And so when the rains come, the water just runs off the pavement into the sewer system. But Pedro Camarena wants to change that. SPEAKER_03: The only thing we have to do is to depave the rocky fields in the south. We have 80 square kilometers of big lava field. Obviously it's very, very urbanized now. But we can depave, do you understand what I mean? SPEAKER_04: What he means is get rid of all the unnecessary pavement that's plugging up all those volcanic pores. Camarena wants to depave parking lots and medians and create volcanic infiltration zones where rainwater could flow back to the aquifer. You have to be cautious. You can't create an infiltration zone next to a toxic waste dump or you could contaminate the whole water supply. But Pedro wants to carefully peel back the city's concrete skin. To expose the lava and try to restore the lava field. SPEAKER_06: Because the old lava field is still there, beneath all the asphalt. SPEAKER_04: If you go to Los Jardines del Pedregal today, the upscale neighborhood that Luis Baragon started back in the 40s, you can catch a glimpse of this buried landscape. Little pieces of lava poking through the grass and the concrete. For the most part though, it looks like other affluent neighborhoods in Mexico City. A lot of lawns with sprinklers. So they prefer to put a lot of grass. And let me tell you, they spend, nowadays, they spend a lot of money in irrigation. SPEAKER_03: But Pedro wants to shift how people in Mexico City think about gardening. SPEAKER_04: A while back, he was asked to design a garden to go with a public art sculpture that was built in the Pedregal 40 years earlier. And instead of planting a bunch of flowers and shrubs, he just started digging. So I create that garden only by excavating, digging. SPEAKER_03: Gardening by subtraction. Pedro calls this landscape archaeology. SPEAKER_06: We start with three guys, old guys, digging, like archaeological sites. SPEAKER_03: They start to remove plants, then soil. And then it starts to appear, the lava field, beautiful. SPEAKER_04: It's a lot more work than planting tulips. But Pedro says that people in the Pedregal can do landscape archaeology on their own property. Uncover the lava and build Beragon-style dry rock gardens that don't require any irrigation. But it's a tough sell. People want gardens that look like Versailles. Yes, we are very dependent, emotionally dependent in Europe. SPEAKER_03: We still design gardens like in France. I mean, it's ridiculous. Because we don't have the landscape of France. We don't have the weather. We don't have the soil. It's very different. SPEAKER_04: But Pedro told me that there is one house in Los Hardinis del Pedregal where you can still see a true Mexican lava rock garden. It's actually one of the first houses built in the area, designed by Beragon himself back in the 40s. SPEAKER_06: The property underwent a lot of changes in the decades since. But a few years ago, a new owner, a man named Cesar Cervantes, decided to restore the house to the way it had looked in Beragon's day. And Pedro convinced him to uncover the original lava rock. And he did it. And now, everybody told me, Pedro, you have to see, you have to go to Cesar's house to see what's happened there. SPEAKER_03: Have you seen it? No! I asked him and he said, come whenever you want, but I don't have time. I, on the other hand, have plenty of time. SPEAKER_10: I am Cesar Cervantes and we are at Casa Pedregal. Cesar grew up in this neighborhood and he says that back then no one really wanted to see visible lava in their garden. SPEAKER_04: And I remember even my father covering or getting rid of visible lava, favoring grass or a swimming pool or things like that. SPEAKER_04: When Cesar bought this house, the previous owners had covered up the original Beragon rock garden with an astroturf putting green. But Cesar and his team started doing a little landscape archaeology. We started removing and removing layers. SPEAKER_10: Layers of grass, baked grass, and cement. And slowly, the original lava field began to reemerge. SPEAKER_06: As it was coming back to its original condition, it was really, really breathtaking. SPEAKER_04: And it really is. Cesar kindly let me take a tour of his home with a guide named Mariana Esceda. Before we got to the garden, Mariana showed me the house. The walls are thick and heavy and painted this delightful shade of pink. As she opened the door, I was yammering on about something or other and the house kind of took my breath away. The project, the gardens of Pedregal, like what was he trying... wow. Oh, it just, it sounds so quiet. Yes, I know. It's one characteristic of Beragon. Now you can feel the silence, the tranquility. SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it feels almost like a church. SPEAKER_01: Yes. SPEAKER_04: After showing me around the house, Mariana led me out back to the garden. We scrambled down a rocky path and then suddenly were surrounded on all sides by porous black lava. It was unlike any garden I've ever been in. More like a nature preserve filled with Mexican plants and animals. Like succulents, like cactus. SPEAKER_01: I mean look, there's like lizards right there. SPEAKER_04: Yes, have many lizards everywhere. SPEAKER_04: It feels wild. Yes, completely wild. SPEAKER_04: It's really beautiful. Cesar says that when his neighbors first saw the rock, it was clear that they didn't even know they'd lived on top of a lava field. They say, what did you do here? Where did you bring this lava from? How did it appear here? SPEAKER_04: But Pedro Camarena hopes that if more people see these rocks, maybe they'll follow suit and dig up the lava in their own backyards. Rock gardens in rich neighborhoods are not going to solve the water crisis. Not even close. But every bit of lava that gets uncovered is a tiny step in the right direction. Towards rebalancing the city's relationship with its groundwater. SPEAKER_06: A huge thank you this week to the fantastic environmental reporter Zoe Schlanger. Her great piece in courts about Mexico City's water problems clued us into Pedro Camarena and his work. Zoe has written a lot of great stories about water and climate change and other environmental issues. You can find links to more of her work on our website at 99pi.org. After the break, we'll talk about the bigger picture and what architects and designers are trying to do to solve Mexico City's water crisis. When you're working on the go, how can you make sure the confidential information on your laptop screen is safe from wandering eyes? 3M has the answer with the new 3M BrightScreen Privacy Filter. Using Nanoluva technology, 3M BrightScreen Privacy Filters deter visual hackers while providing a 25% brighter experience over other privacy filters. In fact, it's 3M's brightest privacy filter yet. The perfect balance of screen clarity and visual privacy. It's a new type of privacy filter built for an era where our screens are wherever we go. Try the new 3M BrightScreen Privacy Filter and stop worrying about confidential or personal information escaping your computer screen. 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It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with Better Help. Visit betterhelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's Better Help. H-E-L-P dot com slash invisible. So I'm back with Emmet in the studio and we want to take a second to zoom out and talk a little bit about the bigger picture when it comes to the Mexico City water crisis. Yeah. And if you talk to Loretta Castro-Reguera, who is one of the architects that we heard from in the story, SPEAKER_04: she'll tell you that it's a question of design. Design is really a key element in this situation. For us, it's the language we speak with water. SPEAKER_07: Oh, I like speaking in the language of design. SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I know. She sounds like a 99 P.I. disciple. SPEAKER_04: Dream guest. You know, Loretta says that there's really no silver bullet design solution for Mexico City's problems. But what she kept coming back to with me was that fundamentally the city has to change its relationship to rain. So what do you mean by that? Well, you know, Mexico City is different than a lot of other cities that are facing water shortages around the world and that they do get rain. It rains there. You know, Cape Town, South Africa would love to have as much rain as Mexico City does. But because of this history with flooding, which we heard about in the piece, you know, they've learned that rainwater is bad. The problem for us is that we see water as our enemy. We have learned that water that floods is a problem. SPEAKER_07: And we've learned that for the last 700 years. So it's really hard to change the way in which we see rainwater. But they really have to because that rainwater is an asset that has been wasted for so long. SPEAKER_04: We've spent literally hundreds of years focusing on get the rainwater out of the valley as fast as you can so that we don't flood out. SPEAKER_09: And, you know, the consequence of doing that for so long has been like the desiccation of the watershed. So this is Enrique Lamnitz. And Enrique is the co-founder of an organization called Isla Urbana. SPEAKER_04: It means like urban island in Spanish. And the whole goal of Isla Urbana is to try and take advantage of all that rain, to try to flip the equation on its head and say let's turn this rainwater into an asset. And to do this, what they do is they design and install rainwater harvesting systems on people's homes. And Enrique says that this makes sense for a couple of different reasons. One, because it provides people with reliably clean water. And two, because it reduces the pressure on the groundwater aquifer. So rainwater harvesting systems like we use, they help you avoid pulling water out of the ground. SPEAKER_09: And they help you avoid kind of putting water into the sewage system. And they help a family in parts of the city that are having big water problems. Enrique helped launch the organization in 2009 in a neighborhood that had particularly bad water problems. SPEAKER_04: Like people are starting to open their taps and have like brown water come out of the tap, or just not have any water coming out of the tap, sometimes for weeks on end. SPEAKER_06: So are those birds I'm hearing on the tape there? Did you record that? Yeah, yeah. I spoke to Enrique from some rural town that apparently is filled with parakeets. SPEAKER_04: There's a lot of birds on the Skype tape. Oh, right. Okay, there we go. But anyway, his organization, Isla Urbana, they designed these systems for individual homes. And the system basically collects rainwater from the roof of the house, filters out all the kinds of impurities that you might have, and then stores it in a big tank for daily use. So in some ways, it's a pretty simple sort of design intervention. But the thing that makes the work really challenging is that you can't just mass produce this system and ship it out. SPEAKER_09: Every house is different. So every rainwater harvesting system is like a custom install, and every family has to be trained and taught how to use a rainwater harvesting system and what it's for and how to use it and how not to use it and what to be careful of. SPEAKER_04: And so the work ends up being really social. You know, you can't just drop the technology on people. You have to cultivate relationships and get them on board. Yeah. And so can you drink the water? Is it clean water? SPEAKER_06: So no, it's not clean enough to drink, but it is clean enough for just about every other household use you could have. SPEAKER_04: Okay. And that makes up the vast majority of the water that a home uses. And so what is the scale that they're working on? How many of these water systems are they trying to get installed around the city? SPEAKER_06: Yeah, so at this point, they've built about 11,000 rainwater harvesting systems. SPEAKER_04: So, you know, it's a lot, but it's not a lot in the grand scheme of things. And mostly they've been doing this on a fairly small scale and going kind of neighborhood to neighborhood, very grassroots approach. But things even in the last couple of years are really starting to scale up. And Mexico City just elected a new mayor. Her name is Claudia Scheinbaum, and she's a scientist who spent her whole, you know, a scientist being elected mayor of the city. It's not the normal background for a political candidate in any country, really. But she spent her whole career studying environmental issues, water issues specifically. She's got an engineering background. So this is all like really up her alley. And since her election, you know, just this past year, the city government has started to work much more closely with Isla Urbana, and they really want to push rainwater harvesting on a really large scale. The Mexico City government was like, dude, this is an important project and we need to do it huge, knowing all of the parts of the city that don't have water. SPEAKER_09: And we're installing, we're going to be installing 10,000 rainwater harvesting systems there this year. And if all goes well, financed the installation of like 100,000 or more rainwater harvesting systems over the next few years. So it's definitely a large scale experiment at this point. It's kind of one of its kind in the world. Wow. So they're like scaling up like 10 times, like 10,000 to 100,000. That's amazing. SPEAKER_06: Yeah, it's really cool to see. But, you know, even Enrique isn't trying to argue that rainwater harvesting is the solution. SPEAKER_04: It's really going to take a whole basket of different strategies to get Mexico City out of this mess. We're going to get out of this situation by doing a whole bunch of things together, but that fundamentally just create balance between how much water we actually put into the ground and how much water we pull out of the ground. SPEAKER_09: And it's kind of as fundamental as that in its most basic essence. SPEAKER_04: And with that in mind, Loretta Castro-Veguera, the architect we heard from earlier, is focusing on designing parks and other sorts of public spaces that also function as water infrastructure. So, you know, like a public cistern that can collect rain for a lot of different people or a public park that has a groundwater infiltration component where you've actually got rainwater flowing back to the aquifer. And so her goal is to create a whole network of green infrastructure so that when those rains come, the city can take that water in and make use of it. In a sense, in which the city could really become a sponge. So when we have one of these rainstorms, all these public spaces somehow are able to hold rainwater and keep it there until the storm passes. SPEAKER_07: You know, in that way, theoretically, a big rainstorm could be something that people are looking forward to and hoping for rather than something that they fear. SPEAKER_04: Because it would both collect water that they need and also mitigate flooding because the water would be drained to the aquifer instead of being on the surface and trapped there destroying things. SPEAKER_06: It's true. It's true. Yeah. If you can hold that water, you're also preventing that water from turning into dangerous runoff that causes problems. SPEAKER_04: And, you know, I mean, you shouldn't go too far with that. Like flooding requires its own, you know, in order to solve the flooding problem, there's other things that are needed. There are architects that are actually thinking about, you know, bringing back remnants of the old lake systems as ways to allow water to flood into these spaces that can hold and retain water and keep people safe, you know. You know, there's all kinds of things that architects and designers are thinking about and engineers too, you know, the big problem is leaks. The whole water system is old and filled with leaks. Some people estimate they're losing as much as 40 percent of water in leaks. So, you know, in terms of low hanging fruit, that's a great place to start. Also, wastewater reuse, you know, there's so many different things that need to happen. And Loretta's point is basically like, we need all of it. There's not one, we're not waiting around for the best solution. We need it's an all of the above strategy. Because what I see at this moment is that we have the enough infrastructure to keep the city safe for 30 years. SPEAKER_05: SPEAKER_07: So we can think to a window of 30 years in which we have a very big opportunity of putting up all these alternate water management strategies. Right. Then we could really use this 30 years for our best benefit and in 2050 not have this problem of we have no more water and the city disappears. No, because we also know from history that many cities disappeared because of lack of water. Right. SPEAKER_06: Wow. I mean, it's kind of a terrifying thought, like a real existential crisis about the existence of an entire city because of water. Yeah, and an absolutely massive city, you know, 22, 23 million people. It's really scary. SPEAKER_04: But, you know, I mean, honestly, everyone that I talked to seemed a little more optimistic than I was expecting. And I think that that optimism comes from the sense that the city really feels like it's undergoing a real shift right now in how it thinks about water and how it deals with water. Towards, you know, really embracing all the rain that flows into the basin. And the question is just like, can that shift happen fast enough? SPEAKER_07: We can make another interview in 15 years and we'll see if it's working or not. Right. Yeah, let's book her right now. Yeah. Yeah, right. Thanks so much. SPEAKER_06: Thank you. SPEAKER_06: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Emmet Fitzgerald. Mix and tech production by Sharif Yousif. Music by Sean Real. Katie Mingle is our senior producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team includes senior editor Delaney Hall, Avery Truffleman, Taran Mazza, Vivian Lee, Sophia Klatsker, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars. This episode was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding and engagement with science and technology. More information on Sloan at Sloan.org. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% Invisible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radio topia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99 P.I. org or on Instagram, Tumblr and Reddit, too. But the beautiful lava field that we call home is 99 P.I.org. SPEAKER_06: Radio Topia from PRX. SPEAKER_06: Great sleep can be hard to come by these days, and finding the right mattress feels totally overwhelming. Serta's new and improved Perfect Sleeper is a simple solution designed to support all sleep positions. With zoned comfort, memory foam and a cool to the touch cover, the Serta Perfect Sleeper means more restful nights and more rested days. Find your comfort at Serta.com. 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