The Parque Ecológico Lago de Texcoco is being created outside Mexico City on a site where it was once planned to build a large airport. The park relates to the historic lake landscape where the Aztec city Tenochtitlan once stood. Under the direction of Iñaki Echeverria the area is being ecologically regenerated with a ‘soft infrastructure’, by means of minimal low carbon interventions such as artificial lakes, renaturalization zones, sports areas, and biotopes that combine climate resilience, biodiversity and public functions. The park serves as a carbon sink, ecological buffer and education centre. It measures 14 000 hectares, making it more than forty times as big as Central Park and providing a habitat for more than 250 000 migratory birds. Several challenges remain, especially as regards social and transport connections with the surroundings. But the ecological park is seen as an open, instructional syste — a new spatial direction and an attempt to take a new look at historical mismanagement in ecological and social terms.