New Trees for Tijuana

A rapidly expanding city often grows chaotically, forsaking ideal urban planning in order to meet basic infrastructure needs.

Tijuana is no exception. Rapid urbanization has left little place for nature, and now many of the larger earthworks there are threatened by erosive forces. Particularly vulnerable are the city’s highway embankments and dykes, which often suffer significant soil erosion during the rainy season. Previous solutions to this issue have been to pour concrete over the affected areas, though this is not always effective and always an eyesore. That is why we have teamed up with local NGO Tijuana Innovadora to plant trees on these embankments to secure the soil and put the city back in bloom. The Cocoon is ideally suited to the task as the embankments are often not close to a water source, making irrigation particularly difficult. The first trees are in the ground and we hope to expand the project over the course of the coming year.