SPAA Urban Planning Student Raquel Ordoñez Recognized as Winner of Donald Schön Award

Urban Planning student Raquel Ordoñez has been recognized as the recipient of the Donald Schön Award for Excellence in Learning from Practice. Raquel was nominated for the award by Associate Professor of Urban Planning Dr. Ward Lyles based on her digital story, “Sweeping up the Pieces: The Story of the Lost City of Tenochtitlan,” noting it as an exemplification of Schön’s legacy of fostering reflective professional practice.

Raquel completed the digital story in the course History and Theory of Planning, a core course of the Urban Planning Program. This was during her first semester of the accelerated Master of  Urban Planning. Dr. Bonnie Johnson, FAICP, created the assignment for students to meet the following goals:

• Demonstrating understanding of historical and theoretical contexts,
• Conducting research that is well supported by evidence and is accurate,
• Telling a compelling story which would appeal to a general audience,
• Practicing critical consciousness and reflection to create & expand the planning story beyond canon,
• Ability to communicate in a new media format, and
• Ability to “plan” and implement a complex project.

Dr. Lyles explained the connection of the goals of the assignment to Schön’s vision of “professionals who embed reflection to learn from the daily practice of planning.” Going on to say that “In our opinion, Raquel’s piece meets the highest standards of intellectual rigor, critically reflects on the profession, demonstrates tremendous acumen in interpersonal communication, and exemplifies authentic storytelling.”

Raquel grew up in Goodland, Kansas, near the Colorado border. She entered into the Master of Urban Planning program after completing her undergraduate education in environmental studies at KU.

In his nomination, Dr. Lyles goes on to provide a description and insight into Raquel’s work:

“Raquel begins with the theme of relationships, embodied through family stories. The digital story deftly weaves her family’s personal history into the story of Tenochtitlan, particularly the wisdom she has gained from her grandmother, wisdom passed down through generations dating to era before European conquest in North America. This setting, when juxtaposed to Raquel’s current status as a descendent of immigrants attracted to the United States in hopes of greater prosperity for future generations, helps viewers reflect on their own nuanced stories and their relationship to place.

Raquel also engages a theme of questioning assumptions, particularly those embedded in colonial narratives, by highlighting the amazing city that Tenochtitlan was at the time of ‘discovery.’ In doing so, Raquel skillfully touches on challenges of urban planning we still grapple with today, such as managing water, fostering commerce, and navigating the tensions between governance and religion. Moreover, Raquel does so in a way that invites openness to learning. That is, her story is told with humility, curiosity, and a desire to go deeper, as illustrated by Raquel having gone well beyond any assignment expectations to engage a leading scholar, Dr. Olivares, to check, reinforce, and extend what her own research revealed.

Along with the depth of insight and compelling personal narrative, Raquel’s digital story presents the viewer with an engaging array of visuals. The production quality is highly professional. And, the audio seamlessly pulls the viewer along so that time passes smoothly and quickly. We believe Raquel’s work meets her twin goals of representing “the strength of Indigenous teachings that have lasted through destruction and fragmentation” and produced a “love letter to the lost city.”

You can view Raquel’s digital story “Sweeping up the Pieces: The Story of the Lost City of Tenochtitlan” here: https://mediahub.ku.edu/media/t/1_808mhg1p

You can also view the final script below:

Raquel Ordoñez

Digital Story: Final Script

Title: Sweeping up the Pieces: The Story of the Lost City of Tenochtitlan

My Grandma told me a story about when she was young growing up in Mexico City where her family had to hike a quarter mile to a stream and haul water back home in metal 5- gallon buckets. When one of the buckets would get a hole, they wouldn’t just throw the bucket away. Instead, her dad would pound the metal flat and bend up the sides, then her mom would use it as a comal for cooking tortillas and nopales on. Since my grandma grew up poor, I think she believes they did this out of necessity. When you have so little it is important to not waste anything. But I think her story goes deeper than that. It is an evolution of an ancient indigenous planning story.

Before Mexico City was called Mexico City, it was called Tenochtitlan. Also known as the capital city of the Mexica people. Its location was prophesied to them by the sun god Huitzilopochtli in the form of an eagle eating a snake on top of a cactus (Cartwright 2013). In 1325 the Mexica people came across this exact sight on a small island in the middle of Lake Texcoco and began to construct their great city. Since the island was small, they had to plan out how they were going to expand the city. So, they created artificial islands called chinampas with canals in between to form a grid (Medina 2014). Just like early European cities the Mexica were practicing grid planning before planning was a thing.

But they took their plans a step further and included food systems and waste management in their plans. The chinampas contained fertile soil perfect for agriculture. Tenochtitlan was able to grow about two thirds of the food consumed within the city. By the year 1519 Tenochtitlan had a population of over 200,000. So that’s a lot of food. To keep the chinampas at the necessary high production rates, the Mexica people would dispose all kinds of organic waste them. This included food scraps, agriculture waste, and the most valuable fertilizer human excrement. It was so valued that the city had a public latrine system to collect waste to sell at the market for other various uses like tanning leather and dyeing fabrics (Medina 2014).

Throughout the entire city wastefulness was not tolerated and even penalized by death. Cleanliness was prioritized and there were city officials in charge of sweeping the streets. There was also scavengers called pepenadores who were in charge of recovering recycled materials There is no know record of any garbage dumps in the city, so everything was either reused into something else or recycled (Medina 2014). The Mexica people built a sustainable zero waste city before planning was even a thing. Before climate change made sustainable cities a priority. So why don’t we as planners learn about the pristine capital city of Tenochtitlan?

Well, the short answer is Spanish colonization. But the true answer is much more complicated. To find out more, I interviewed professor and historian Dr. Irene Olivares who specializes in the intellectual history of the Spanish empire. In 1521 Tenochtitlan died and Mexico City was born and lives on today. Hernando Cortes led the siege of the pristine city and wrote back to King Charles V (the fifth) of Spain that the city was “destroyed and razed to the ground” (Mundy 2015, 1). It is important to understand that religious differences were the driving force behind this destruction. The Spanish viewed the Mexica religion, rituals, and practices as horrific sins. So, they tried to erase their existence by destroying their city. Eventually the Spanish created a caste system where whiteness was privileged and sought after, and indigenous and black people were othered. For all the centuries since Spanish colonization Indigenous people all over Mexico have been fighting to keep their land, culture, and cities alive (Hernandez 2022, 54).

My grandma, and countless other Mexicans lie in the middle of this caste system in a category called mestizo which means a mixed race between Spanish and indigenous decent. Because of this inevitable mixing of races, there are traces of indigenous knowledge embedded into every part of Mexico City. They have persisted until this day even though colonization and the imposition of assimilationist policies like rational planning which were intended to erase indigenousness (Hibbard 2021, 17). The Mexican flag still shows the prophesized eagle with a snake in its hand. Many people in Mexico will wake up early in the morning and sweep the street near their homes like the officials of Tenochtitlan would. Xochimilco which is south of the center of Mexico City still has canals and chinampas used for farming. And remember my grandma’s story about the upcycled comal? Well, the word comal is rooted in the native Nahua language and it is a valuable cooking tool used by generations of my family even to this day.