La imagen del agua en la ciudad. Review by Ximena Gómez González Cosío

In the complex urban fabric of Mexico City, water exceeds its condition as a mere resource: it operates as a geographic agent, a historical substrate, a cultural symbol, and, above all, a structural challenge for the metropolis’ future. In La imagen del agua en la ciudad (The Image of Water in the City), Loreta Castro Reguera addresses this multidimensional condition from a perspective that moves beyond technical specialization, positioning her work at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and culture.

The author builds a critical cartography of water representations, revealing how they have shaped both planning decisions and everyday experience. The city has shifted from a society articulated with its lacustrine environment—still legible in the remnants of the Valley of Mexico’s lake system—to an urban condition that renders the water cycle invisible, confining it within subterranean infrastructure that disconnects inhabitants from its origin, journey, and destination. This “dis-imagination” of water limits the comprehension of its value and obscures the inequalities embedded in access to it and its distribution.

One of the book’s contributions lies in linking long-term historical processes—the drainage of the valley following the Spanish conquest and the consolidation of an extractivist model that alternates between floods and scarcity—with the micro-scale of everyday life, where water materializes as memory, risk, or lack. In this dual reading, the hydraulic system emerges not as a neutral network, but as a political landscape in which visible and invisible infrastructures shape territories crossed by inequity and delineate geographies of both social inclusion and exclusion.

In response to this diagnosis, the work proposes a “sensitive urban hydrology” rearticulating the relationship between city and basin through nature-based solutions: rainwater harvesting systems, rain gardens, treatment wetlands, and restoration of water courses. Beyond a technical toolkit, this represents a paradigm shift that not only transforms infrastructure, but also the traditional and everyday uses and services of water, understanding them as elements of identity. In this sense, it seeks to reinstall a renewed image of water in contemporary urban life through replicable strategies that are easy to assemble, have low-costs, and are built from prefabricated materials.

Conceived in these terms, water infrastructure must emerge and integrate into public space, operate as a pedagogical element, and perform as both spatial and social infrastructure. In contrast to the prevailing model that renders water invisible, the proposal advocates for the contrary: visible water, everyday presence, and fully shared, in a harmonious and efficient manner, thus laying the groundwork for a sustainable future of water.

The book is also a visual essay, illustrated with historical plans, diagrams, photographs, and models, which turns reading into a deeper experience, expanding the registers from which one can think about the territory. La imagen del agua en la ciudad invites readers to recognize the hydrological strata beneath asphalt and to rethink architectural practice in relation to the environment. Its relevance concerns both specialists and citizens participating in the transformation of the city’s water footprint.

 Loreta Castro Reguera Mancera

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