Mexico: Community Urban Agriculture

Community Urban Orchards Program

César Manuel Lepe Medina
Technical Director of the Urban Laboratory
H. Town Hall of Tlajomulco de Zúñiga

It is a pleasure to greet you from the municipality of Tlajomulco de Zúñiga. My name is César Lepe Medina and I am currently Technical Director of the Urban Laboratory of the Government of Tlajomulco de Zúñiga. The urban laboratory is an area of ??government that focuses on the processes of citizen innovation and community participation, as well as public space and mobility.

Tlajomulco, is the second largest municipality in the Guadalajara metropolitan area, unfortunately, it was one of the municipalities most besieged by national housing policies that were created since the beginning of the housing bubble in 2008, the territorial condition of the municipality being mainly rural with small farmers and agricultural areas it was the ideal place for the real estate sector.

The developers acquired cheap land, far from the city with which they could speculate, make changes in land use of the land and build mega housing developments without infrastructure and without basic services that abusing the need for people to obtain a house. This condition has worsened over the years by mitigating conditions of poverty, remoteness, violence, marginalization, exclusion and other negative urban phenomena and that is why in this administration we assume the task of designing a Community Urban Orchards Program that is framed in a general policy of the government of Tlajomulco, called “Spaces of peace”, the program focuses on using the public spaces of the neighborhoods to transform them into COMMUNITY orchards through a formative process that goes from the horizontal community organization and the agroecological management of the garden, taking The organizational base and technical knowledge overflows with other initiatives in the neighborhood, such as: community management project for organic waste, natural pharmacies, vermicompost, production for commercialization of short circuits, waste separation and the creation of garden networks such as learning communities of ancestral knowledge, popular and technical.

In the Tlajomulco Community Urban Gardens Program, we design quantitative and qualitative indicators to measure the impact of the program, which gives us a real picture of the initial conditions of the neighborhood and how the garden can positively transform the context.