In 2020, the government of Mexico announced that they would convert the 12,000-hectare (46 sq mi) space where the airport was being built into the Lake Texcoco Ecological Park, which will be a public space and an area of ecological restoration. Ĭonstruction continued for several weeks, but was suspended on Decemafter López Obrador took office. In October 2018, after construction had already begun, a non-binding referendum was organized by then President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in which 69 percent of the 1.067 million voters rejected the planned airport, choosing instead to build a new airport on the grounds of Santa Lucía Air Force Base. It was billed as Mexico's largest public infrastructure work in a century, and was set to replace Mexico City's current Benito Juárez International Airport. Texcoco Airport was first announced by President Enrique Peña Nieto in his State of the Union Address on September 2, 2014. Felipe Ángeles International Airport opened in March 2022. The project was announced in September 2014 but was canceled in late 2018 after a referendum was held stating that the new airport should be built at a different location. Those opposed argued that the project was being built and developed by contractors and other parties as a series of political favors to line each other’s pockets.Mexico City Texcoco Airport was a planned airport in Mexico City that was meant to become Mexico's New International Airport (Spanish: Nuevo Aeropuerto Internacional de México- NAICM or NAIM). The no vote won by a large margin, with 70 percent voting in opposition of completing the project, though, as others have noted, voter turnout for the referendum was underwhelming, with only around 1 in 90 registered voters turning out to the polls. The mega-project, which would’ve been the third largest airport in the world and the most expansive in all of the Americas, was noteworthy for its six million square-foot main terminal designed in a sci-fi X-shape with a sweeping canopy. USD$5 billion has already been put into the airport, which was designed to handle the ever-increasing traffic through North America’s most populous city, which also serves as a travel hub for much of the rest of Mexico and Latin America. As Fernando Córdova, a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico told Alto Nivel as later reported in translation in Citylab : “It’s just the worst terrain.” The Foster + Partners-designed new Mexico City airport has been cancelled by a public referendum. Furthering the environmental infeasibility is the impact it would have had on numerous bird species as well as its effect of exacerbating the decline of the city’s already dwindling water supplies. Not only does building the airport require thick supports, like much of Mexico City, which was built on former lakes dredged by the colonizing Spaniards five centuries ago, but it the area accommodates stormwater runoff for the city, requiring a complicated and expensive system of plumbing, tunnels, and canals to manage potential flooding. The wetland plain of Texcoco outside the city that it was to be built on is quite literally sinking-as much as 16 inches a year. Not only was the project, called NAICM (Nuevo Aeropuerto Internacional de la Ciudad de México), deemed inordinately expensive at an estimated USD$13 billion, its location was less than ideal. The referendum was originally proposed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the president-elect of Mexico, as popular opposition grew against the project that was approved by President Enrique Peña Nieto in 2014. In a referendum today voters rejected the partially completed project that’s been beleaguered by accusations of corruption, ecological irresponsibility, and lack of community involvement. Mexico City’s new Foster + Partners–designed airport has been canceled while already under construction.
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