HILO – Upcycling climatic infrastructure for resilient communing.
Team
Name: Erick Vernon-Galindo
Nationality: Mexican
Institution / Company: The University of Texas at Austin / Wer.o
-HONOURABLE MENTION of Waste Pavilion Competition
Los Laureles canyon in Tijuana, Mexico is prone to severe flooding and erosion due to its geography and the arid soil surrounding its informal settlements. The absence of accessible infrastructure leads to difficult living conditions for the residents. To tackle these issues, a proposed intervention involves a digital platform that collects, transforms, and delivers upcycled materials from nearby demolition and construction sites. This alternative supply chain aims to create a new climatic infrastructure for the canyon’s inhabitants.
The intervention serves two main purposes: mitigating flood risk and erosion while also connecting different parts of the canyon through new circulation paths and terraces. These pathways and terraces facilitate the storage of upcycled materials for the community’s use in their own upgrades.
The circular material strategy involves upcycling concrete debris and reusable wood scraps through techniques like ramming and stacking. These methods integrate the materials with the landscape, promoting water filtration and revegetation. The stacked materials serve various purposes such as structure, façade, roof, openings, seating areas, and water drainage. This approach reduces the requirement for extra materials and resources. The construction process is designed to be adaptable, enabling residents to actively participate and improvise within basic guidelines.
This approach envisions a synthetic debris landscape supporting an informal, circular material economy, forming a distinctive ecosystem and green infrastructure in environmentally compromised areas.
#CircularEconomy #Upcycling #MitigatingClimateChange #CommunityEngagement #UrbanAgriculture
