[the hydrological network of Mendoza, Argentina at the edge of the Andean Cordillera includes a massive hydroelectric dam, a municipal park, and the fascinating Campo Espejo de Agua sewage treatment facility which feeds irrigation systems for 2,200 hectares of agricultural production in the region]
In 1933 historian Herbert Eugene Bolton noted that 1776
was a big year in the Americas. In
addition to the US Declaration of Independence it was also the year that the
Viceroyalty of La Plata was established in South America, with Buenos Aires as
its capital. This was done to prevent
further expansion south by the post-treaty Portuguese Empire and to fend off
the imperial efforts of the British, who had already established themselves on
the Falkland Islands and were gunning for Buenos Aires.
This event authored in a fundamental
restructuring of the Spanish American Empire.
Up until this point the colonial expanse was Pacific-oriented. The entire political-economic structure of
the expansive Spanish portion of the continent was funneled through Lima in the
Viceroyalty of Peru. The great distances
and dispersed populations and economic activiites from the Darien Gap to Tierra
del Fuego were largely supported and protected by the the silver mining
operations of Potosi whose fortunes were in decline by the late 18th century.
Since 1561 the city of Mendoza existed as an
outpost for travellers going from the important cattle town of Buenos Aires to
Santiago. The situation is brutal-
subject to sand storms, floods, and earthquakes all in within site of the
highest mountain in the Americas, it is an area with some water but requiring
great effort to harness the rivers flowing down from the Andes. The pre-Colombian Huarpes established a
series of settlements based on canals and fields for agricultural
production. This structure was utilized
and eventually added to by the Spanish settlers. Mendoza was a stopping point, a place to rest
and gather supplies as one got ready to head through the Libertadores Pass on
the ways to Santiago. It was an outpost to
an empire located in a severe landscape.
With the formation of the La Plata Viceroyalty
in 1776, all of that changed. Mendoza
was now a border town, the western anchor of the soon-to-be-independent
Viceroyalty of La Plata. Within a
century it would be the end of the line for the major east-west railroads and
highways of the 19th century. Its
geo-political situation had changed from an outpost to a population center.
[Liberator Pass, also known as the Caracoles, is the main terrestrial connection between Chile and Argentina; because of this it has been the most important economic and geo-political connection between the two countries since the formation of the Viceroyalty in 1776]
[Mendoza was the western terminus for the east-west rail line General San Martin, nationalized in 1946 under Juan Peron, which served to tie the country and its agricultural products to the capital city of Buenos Aires and its port]
The earthquake of 1861 leveled the town and
brought to the forefront a host of public health issues including the need for
clean potable water, sewage effluent disposal, and protection from the floods
and sandstorms of the Andean cordillera.
The response in 1896 was a park.
A massive muniicpal park located on the western edge to protect the town
from the sand, modulate the town water supply, and improve the air and water
quality. Of course, just like at New
York’s Central Park, the project was open to the valid criticism of being
simply a real estate venture intended to boost the property values of the
ruling class.
The park is impressive and unites an
astonishing array of historical and contemporary uses that have enabled the
town to thrive in this extreme environment.
The park consists of forests, fields, a stadium, a zoo, a regatta club,
rose garden, playgrounds, national monuments, carriage drives, lakes, a native
plant nursery, and playgrounds. I’ll
stop but the list goes on and would be astonishing were it not so common to
this landscape typology. The most
important aspect of the park asserted at the time was that it was to be a
massive forestation effort- by covering the hills on the western side of town
with an intensely managed landscape of native trees the designers hoped to
drastically reduce the sand storms coming off the mountains into town. The forest and lakes were also imagined as a
massive stormwater infrastructure, limiting the discharge from the hills into
town during rain events, easing the burden on local sewers and reducing
flooding.
What interests us today is the types of
questions that come up when considering this park in the context of frontiers
in borders in the American landscape.
When understood as the result of turning a town that was an imperial
outpost in the Andean foothills into a population center meant as a western
pole to the federal capital in the east, then the park must immediately be
considering as one piece in the construction of a hydrological landscape that
enables this population to grow. It is
something like the public-domestic interface of a much larger and more powerful
entity at work enabling the habitation of 1 million people here.
As a population center in a semi-desert
climate, the procurement and use of water is the most primary objective. The water for the metropolitan area comes
from the recently completely Potrerillos Reservoir. The hydroelectric dam had to be designed to
resist the high levels of seismic activity in the area. The city uses 10,000 liters of potable waterper second, 85% of which is processed through the municipal sewer system. Then things get interesting.
[the Campo Espejo de Agua sewage treatment complex in the northern section of the Mendoza Metropolitan Area; the complex sends treated sewage through a system of lagoons which renders the water progressively cleaner; as a whole the Mendoza hydrological system serves to transfer a massive amount of water from the Mendoza River to the Rio Diamante system and converts much of it to an entirely new product beneficial for agricultural uses]
Much of the treated effluent is then reused for
agricultural irrigation through a system of agreements between the provincial
water and sewer board and local farmers and agribusiness corporations. Most of this is funneled through the Campo
Espejo de Agua (Field of Water Mirrors), a spectacular installation of
treatment lagoons that not only treats the sewage to a level acceptable for
agricultural irrigation, it also seems to switch transport much of the water in
the region to an entirely different basin- from the Rio Mendoza to the Rio
Diamante.
The result of this constructed landscape is a
center of population and agricultural production in an environment that
receives only 7.87 inches per year (for comparison, Los Angeles receives over
15 inches per year). It also brings up
many questions such as what kind of
social-ecological landscape results when an entire river basin is diverted to
another at the base of the Andes Mountains? Nonetheless it is a compelling opportunity to understand these
situations not as systems or urban patterns but as landscapes. The use of treated effluent in this severe landscape has began in 1945. As an example of the synergistic coupling of wastes and industrial production in the American landscape it offers a chance for what Pierre Belanger calls the "latent reciprocity between industry, waste, and urbanism". And it affords another example why
instead of always looking east/west we should look north/south, too.
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