Honor Award

DESERT FARMING MOISTURIZER — Transition from Dry Lands to Domingo Eco-Community

Jun Zhou, Student ASLA, Graduate,University of Pennsylvania
Faculty Advisors: Greg Burrell, ASLA and Laurie Olin, FASLA

Domingo Eco-Community is an residential project located in Santo Domingo in New Mexico. The design connects a strategic approach for the establishment of a community with the organic urban farming operation, cultivating agriculture and productive landscape value to serve as a community resource and economic development opportunities in a dry land. The goal is to provide an affordable housing development for a micro-moisture habitat for humanity with the harmony of relationships between cultural form and practice, historical and productive landscapes, conservation and sustainable development.

Domingo Eco-community is a new community design proposal which locate close to the Santo Domingo Pueblo that was established in 17 centuries in New Mexico. The Domingo Eco-Community involved the design of a new settlement with housing for 250 families in the planning phase, and apply 32 units as a typical block for the testing design. The Eco-community will be a combination of a family consumption farming, a recreational community productive foods for local grocery stores and markets. It investigated the productive and learning potential of work across disciplines, and interact over issues such as site design, site ecology, hydrology and their relationships. The design is to propose a strategy for the establishment of a community including the water mitigation catchment, cultivating agriculture and productive landscape value in a dry land based on the relationships, cultural form and practice, historic and cultural landscapes, conservation and sustainable development.

Project Goals

The community site currently includes an new developed rail station, a small town was left derelict. A few old buildings and ruin of the adobe structures remain from a long period.
The design goal is to build a productive community which more like a compound system with mitigating of arroyo water and recycling of grey water to amplify ecological services delivered by community planning. Moreover, the project is to bring together the community shared with farming productions and recreational events. It is also important that the community will generate a systematic ecological habitat that acts as a community activities center. It would be a space for recreational sports and playgrounds combined with the micro-moisture landscape establishment

Design Approaches

1. Organize the community from arroyo watershed
The site, a location in the middle of floodplain and will be in danger of back arroyo water threat during the flood season. The flowing of water across the site as a great opportunity to shape the whole 250 units community with the key considerations for how the settlement is to be developed with 9 blocks. Water runoff from the hills down to the lower point will drain the crops and establish three major green corridor as essential passages to support each clusters in the community. Several water checkdam will catch the heavy rain which installed between the edges of houses and hills. Besides, there would have 8 underground cisterns as the water storage destination which collect rain water through the pipes to each blocks. The arroyo water will be restored and mitigated through those cisterns to cater for irrigation of family farming field.

2. Create a neighborhood farming and recreational micro-moisture park from grey water system
In addition to site arroyo issues, the project has a complex process of grey water resources that is a key piece of organizing the eco-community. Each units possess a family water cistern which would collect the restored water from the daily use, including as the washing machine, dishwasher water, bath water, faucets water. Grey water washed and gradually purified from the storage cistern to living machine mitigation tanks, and then to the pipes supplied for farming field irrigation. Through a series of farming filed digesting water and overflow from the stone seep, which installed as steps and finally direct water down to the center weeds park. Based on such process, the block would eventually creates a neighborhood recreational space for events and landscape value combining the micro-moisture climate and habitat exchange in a dry land.

3. Foods production from agriculture
Each agriculture tank have the major water channel and then transfer from the control dam bypass to the branch pipe. The branch pipe would use the technology of drip irrigation to keep the crops in water demand. Besides, the community farm plots will be accepted by families will provide for family consumption and providing food for local restaurants and markets. The community will have a space for marketing selling and prepared food during market days in weekend as well.

4. Establishment the ecological community
From farming activities, and eventually gathering water to create micro-moisture center public space park, and finally establish a ecological community with food production, recreational value together. Moreover, the residential components are to be built in density and compactness with walkable streets. Each building has its systems, such as the solar power panel, roof green, wall green to keep the house cooling and energy saving. Houses has a front facade that faces with the solar orientation and easy accessible to the street, squares, plaza, and farming center weeds park. The street and network are in accordance with the farming activities and access to the public weeds park space.

Moreover, establish a organic farming practice that includes integrated product management, composting, and other organic practices. But it would become a model for low tech sustainable site development in Domingo area through the use of bio-filtration of water resources and recycling of grey water to create a micro-moisture space with alternative energy source, solar power to make the transition from desert to a sustainable community.

American Society of Landscape Architects