At the Biennale in Venice, a Fantasy Island Imported from Mexico

Mexico City’s small urban farms — known locally as chinampas — practice a sort of agriculture in reverse: instead of bringing water to land as most farms do, chinampas bring land to water.

The chinampas in use today go back about a thousand years, to when Aztec farmers began building rectangular fields on top of vast lakes and growing food for what was then the city of Tenochtitlan. There were tens of thousands of chinampas at one point, arranged in strict grids with narrow canals between them, though many were destroyed or abandoned (along with the rest of the Mesoamerican metropolis) after Hernán Cortés and his invading Spanish soldiers rearranged the civic order in 1521.

But working chinampas continue to exist in the southern Mexico City neighborhood of Xochimilco — despite continuing encroachment by developers and competition from factory farms — operating mostly as family businesses that produce heirloom lettuce, radishes, dahlias and other crops. Lately, the farms’ irrigation-friendly ways are getting fresh attention in a world rocked by climate change and suffering from widespread droughts.

Could other places around the globe borrow the idea of creating “floating islands,” as the fields are sometimes called, which are engulfed by water? A team of Mexican designers, landscapers and farmers believes the ancient technology may be widely adaptable, enough that they will recreate a chinampa for their country’s pavilion at this year’s Architecture Biennale in Venice.

Lucio Usobiaga has spent the last 15 years defending the remaining chinampas through Arca Tierra, the nonprofit he founded.Credit…Uta Gleiser

“Chinampas have a simple and intelligent design, created in a collective way that benefits not only people but all of the surrounding living beings, too,” said Lucio Usobiaga, a team member who has spent the last 15 years defending the remaining chinampas through a nonprofit he founded called Arca Tierra.