Loreta Castro Reguera is a Mexican architect, co-founder of Mexico City practice Taller Capital and a professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Her work tackles flooding at the neighborhood scale, through what she calls "acupunctural" interventions where water management and public space are designed as one. We sat down with her late last year in Venice to discuss this important topic and to learn more about how her practice addresses urban resilience in the Latin American context.

You've described Mexico City as a city built inside a lake. What does that mean for water management today?

Mexico City sits on a 3,000-year-old settlement, but today it's really a city built in the center of a lake where the water no longer shows, because it’s drained by an enormous system that is always insufficient — and the flash storms and flooding are arriving more frequently each year.

To deal with this, why work on small, acupunctural interventions rather than large infrastructure?

Larger infrastructure projects require substantial budgets and political will. Smaller, acupunctural interventions don't — but they are powerful when they start working. We focus on public spaces that, by working with the soil and the topography of a place, can become more than just public space: they can become natural infrastructure, managing water without any other technologies.

For the next generation of architects and city-makers — where do you see the opportunity?

I can speak about Mexico City. I see it as a garden — it was conceived as one, and that potential is still there. Everybody in the city loves gardens; it's in our DNA. The idea of the water garden is so embedded in the city that, little by little, I believe it will become that again.

The Holcim Foundation’s second Future Tides film travels to Manchester, a city in northern England, where flood resilience begins with nature restoration on the surrounding hillsides and continues across town through inventive urban design.

Here, the ever-intensifying flood risk is forcing the city to reshape how it manages water.

Led by Kathy Oldham, Chief Resilience Officer for Greater Manchester, the short documentary features a sharp cast of citymakers reframing this relationship in a positive way, improving how the city plans, designs, and lives with water.

Together, they walk through Manchester's response from the restoration of degraded peatland above the city, to a community-designed ‘sponge’ park in the city.

Dr Kathy Oldham OBE has been Greater Manchester's first Chief Resilience Officer since 2017. Her work runs both ends of what she calls "the supply chain of risk": emergency response when floods arrive and prevention in the years between. Below, she outlines three strategies Manchester is using to stay ahead of intensifying flood risk.

"We cannot build our way out of climate change," Oldham says. Up in the Pennine moorlands above the city, a nature-based solution to plant trees and sphagnum moss alongside leaky dams is slowing the streams that feed Manchester's rivers. Sphagnum, she notes, holds over 20 times its own weight in water. The healthier the moorland, the slower the rainfall runs off — and the calmer these waterways stay when they reach the city.

The 3 million-tree Greater Manchester program — one for every resident — runs alongside swales, rain gardens, and permeable surfaces in the urban core. Manchester's first "sponge park," opened in 2020: designed to absorb runoff from surrounding roads and roofs.

Mayfield Park — a central Manchester park opened in 2022 — uncovered a river that had been buried in concrete for 50 years, and was engineered with floodable meadows to absorb the overflow when the river rises. The Manchester Ship Canal — once derelict — now hosts arts venues, museums, residential districts, and watersports. "Sometimes when we're thinking about flooding, the trouble is you think about water as a problem," Oldham says. "It's recognizing the other side of the coin — water is also the most amazing opportunity for people."