One garden doesn't make a summer: Fortuna Garden

As Yona Friedman stated, the future of cities will be centers of leisure, entertainment and public life. Fortuna Garden encompasses more than just a recreational public space project; it is a set of strategies that put public space at the center of urban renovations, as opposed to seeing it simply as a compliment or a residual necessity within an urban plan.

Fortuna Garden is an urban park that takes its main design gestures from its historic and urban context. Strong diagonals intersect the park extending Azcapotzalco’s east side urban trace into the west side, crossing over the railways and weaving both sides of the neighborhood. The silhouette of the artificial lake located in the park follows the ancient border of Mexico’s Valley lake that used to exist before Prehispanic times. In an effort to make visible an erased condition of Mexico City’s natural history, this organic silhouette overlaps in contrast to the diagonals that create the main interior circulation axis. \nThe project aims to integrate diverse programs in order to remain active throughout the day, ensuring its security and maintenance. The suburban train station is relocated to be inside the park along the edge of the railway and, on the opposite side, an abandoned building is transformed into Fortuna’s Cultural Center, activating the east side of the park. In addition to this, a series of industrial structures are recycled and transformed into activity detonators along the park’s main circulation lanes; abandoned containers become service stations, playgrounds, cafés and daytime pavilions; abandoned vertical structures are relocated every 50m as obelisks that serve as a location reference, lookout viewpoints, vertical circulations between the topography, and infrastructure for massive events. Nature is another fundamental project strategy as it composes the parks main spatial containment from the urban context. Vegetation is laid in longitudinal overlapping stripes throughout the park generating green esplanades between them.\nIt is through these strategies that this urban project aims to place recreational public space as the fundamental piece of an urban renovation. In a country where public space is often neglected or placed at the bottom of the priorities list, making it the essential element for the neighborhood’s existence ensures it’s medium and long term success, generating benefits from and to the society boosting urban improvement in developing countries.