Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua.— Mrs. Laura has seen how the park in front of her street has deteriorated for a decade. She points out that some neighbors have shown little co-responsibility with her care, so the area looks vandalized, the playgrounds destroyed, the flora deteriorated. Skeptical, she attends one of the meetings organized by the Juarez Neighborhood Network to discuss the needs of this public space located in the Parajes de Oriente subdivision.
Laura's park has a rainwater catchment vessel, so that in the rainy season it prevents the streets surrounding the park from flooding, however, some people found another use for it: as a clandestine garbage dump.
Thus, the collection vessel is surrounded by a half-fallen cyclonic mesh and inside it you can find tires, old shoes, drums, laundry baskets, bottles, bags, branches, food scraps and other waste that is not even achieved identify.
Laura says worried and disappointed. Although the Municipal Government has not taken care of her park to date, she is aware that the deterioration is also due to the misuse that some neighbors have made. Despite this, she says, she is not willing to give up the fight for a decent public space for her grandchildren.
That is why she decided to attend the meetings of the Juarez Neighborhood Network, where she is learning how to make arrangements with the authorities so that they rehabilitate her park and she is also acquiring the tools to report acts of vandalism that occur within this park. public space.
Laura is one of the people in the southeast who are organizing to recover her green areas and public parks.
The municipal Directorate of Parks and Gardens, headed by Daniel Zamarrón Saldaña, tries to implement programs so that citizens join in the maintenance of the parks, given that the directorate alone cannot attend to the nearly 2,492 parks that are at your expense.
For the year 2022, a budget item for the rehabilitation of parks was authorized for an amount of 3 million pesos, which would represent an investment of just over a thousand pesos per park.
According to the Municipal Institute of Evaluation and Planning (IMIP), the southeast of Ciudad Juárez is endowed with hundreds of green areas, including neighborhood parks, mudflats, urban parks, ridges, gardens and roundabouts, but many of these green areas are located in deteriorating conditions similar to those of Laura's park.
The hundreds of green areas in the southeast contrasts with the satisfaction that the citizens of that polygon have with the quantity and quality of green areas and parks, with a rating of 6.37 out of 10, according to a perception survey carried out by Así Somos Juarez.
Regarding the topic of 'environmental management', the citizens of the southeast rated the number of trees in their neighborhood with a 6.42, the lowest rating assigned after street cleaning. On 'environmental problems', AEJ has identified that dirty and neglected parks are the third problem most mentioned by the inhabitants of the sector.
The survey also reveals that vacant land is the second most mentioned problem, while clandestine garbage dumps occupy fourth place.
According to Zamarrón Saldaña, many of the supposed green areas identified as parks, lacking infrastructure, are actually vacant lots that end up becoming clandestine dumps.
The director of Parks and Gardens said that they are still in a data systematization stage, so it is not known exactly how many parks have the condition of vacant land.
At the city level, Juarenses have given a rating of 6.15 to the availability of green areas and public spaces, according to the AEJ perception survey. This is the third lowest citizen rating for public services, followed by public transportation and street quality.
The southeast of Juárez has 1,556 green areas, of which 694 are public gardens, 24 neighborhood parks, 78 neighborhood parks, two urban parks and 758 are areas such as ridges and roundabouts.
For the director of Parks and Gardens, Daniel Zamarrón, one of the great challenges of the unit is to give attention to these areas with the limited resources they have.
The official mentioned that there is a deficit even in the operational personnel, because while in 2005 there was a payroll of 340 people, today there are 240 people active within the dependency, despite the exponential growth that the city has had in the last decade.
Daniel Zamarrón affirmed that many of the lands that are classified as green areas are donated lands that are not equipped as parks. Many of these vacant lots are used as clandestine dumps for waste such as rubble and car tires.
For its part, the Juárez Limpio environmental civil association has identified that green areas and parks are misused in the southeast, as they are full of gravel and garbage, vandalized and with flora not suitable for the city's ecosystem.
In recent months, there has been a record of an increase in clandestine garbage dumps in vacant lots, due to failures in the garbage collection service granted to the PASA company, which has called into question the Municipal Government during the last year. This was announced last month by the director of Limpia, Gibrán Solís Kanahan, during his appearance before the councilors to present the budget projected by the agency this year.
Solís Kanahan explained that one of the areas most affected by the lack of waste collection service that the concessionaire Promotora Ambiental (PASA) ceased to provide is the southeast, causing household garbage to be deposited on vacant lots: “It seems that the time that PASA stopped passing, the custom of throwing garbage in vacant lots was generated, ”he said.
For this reason, the Cleaning Directorate requested a budget of more than 25 million pesos for the lease of 10 trucks that will provide the urban cleaning service in the city during 2022.
One of the largest urban parks in Ciudad Juárez is the Parque Recreativo Oriente Jesús “Chuy” Mota, located in the southeast and managed by the Municipal Government. In its infrastructure it emulates the characteristics of the Central Park, since it has a lake, fauna such as ducks and geese, diverse flora, an area to practice sports such as soccer, skateboarding and a running track, as well as a soccer field.
During a visit to the place, it was found that said urban park is abandoned by the authorities. Built during the administration of Héctor Murguía Lardizabal (2010-2013), the park today is vandalized, full of garbage and with damaged infrastructure.
Inside the Jesús “Chuy” Mota park, it can be seen that the toilets do not work, damaged cyclonic mesh, collection vessels full of garbage, graffiti and areas consumed by fire.
The conditions of this green area, located in the Portal del Roble subdivision, are just a reflection of the environment. The park is surrounded by vacant lots that have been turned into dumps and where dozens of tires have been piled up.
Even so, the citizens take advantage of other areas that are in better condition, such as the soccer field, the running track and the skate area.
For the director of Juárez Limpio AC, Karla Ramírez, in the southeast there is little co-responsibility of citizens in terms of caring for their public parks and green areas. Despite the fact that the authorities do not provide punctual maintenance of the parks, citizens should not forget that garbage, remains of run over animals, tires, pet feces are residues that do not reach the park alone.
"We have also found a significant number of thrown masks (...) all these problems, we consider from Juárez Limpio, have to do with a co-responsibility of citizenship, where we have not finished adopting our role as conscious active citizens, "he emphasizes. .
Part of the diagnosis that Juárez Limpio has carried out in the southeast area indicates that there are different problems in the parks. Karla details that among these is reforestation with trees that do not correspond to the characteristics of the Juarez ecosystem; "These are trees that sometimes require a lot of water and that are sometimes exposed to pests," she says. And it is that the parks of the southeast do not have adequate irrigation systems either.
Daniel Zamarrón explains that one of the investment projects for the year 2022 is the rehabilitation of drip irrigation systems with a budget of 2,328,152 pesos.
During his appearance before the councilors, Zamarrón said that it is necessary to remove access to drinking water for watering trees in the parks, given that one of the main problems in the city is the lack of water: "we need to put the system in place to that they have the amount of water they need and that it is not wasted, this is essential for the water sustainability of Ciudad Juárez,” he argued.
In addition to not having adequate irrigation systems, the flora of the neighborhood parks and neighborhoods of the southeast are subjected to inappropriate uses, says Karla. Some of them are tied with cables from electrical installations and threads that weaken the structure of the tree.
For the director of Parks and Gardens, the misuse of public spaces by citizens has to do with the type of training that is imparted from educational establishments. In the opinion of Daniel Zamarrón, the educational system has stopped training people in ethics and civic culture, essential for community coexistence.
For Karla Ramírez, the lack of citizen co-responsibility is due to the normalization of neglected spaces. “If I clean and make an effort once, and if I see that with everything and my effort again it is already dirty or vandalized, then we normalize things and we get used to living in those conditions,” she says.
A second ingredient that contributes to the apathy of citizens towards their public spaces is the lack of a sense of belonging, says Karla.
“I think it is very important that we work much harder on the issue of public spaces to build community ties that lead us to want to improve in an intergenerational and intragenerational commitment,” she explains.
Daniel Zamarrón has a similar opinion, because for the official it is necessary for people to take ownership of the spaces: "we need to start raising awareness to make people understand that public and community matters are very important for the health of society."
One of the most important benefits of having green areas is that they work as a catalyst for community ties, explains the director of the environmental organization.
In the southeast of Juárez it is common for neighbors not to know each other; however, the young people and children who use the park do know each other since they share the public space. Coexistence in these spaces helps build community ties that can eventually lead to a reduction in risks, Karla considers.
There is a close relationship between the existence of green areas and the quality of life of citizens, reveals the director of Juárez Limpio AC, Karla Ramírez. This link lies in the fact that when there are natural areas, people enjoy spaces for enjoyment and coexistence.
“Many times, in communities and societies that tend to violence, when green areas for public enjoyment are filtered or created, the risk of violence is greatly reduced; there are many cases in many cities where this is observed. In Medellin, Colombia, for example, when they built an urban park per state, they managed to make it go from being the most dangerous city in Colombia to one of the calmest,” says Karla Ramírez, who has been trained as an internationalist.
Both the Municipal Government and civil organizations agree that the participation of citizens in the care of their green areas and parks is key.
That is why civil society organizations have undertaken a community intervention project to rescue public spaces called 'Comunidades Juárez'. It is a comprehensive project, supported by the Fundación del Empresariado Chihuahuaense AC (Dechac), where the components of citizen participation, care for the environment and creation of cultural and artistic spaces intersect.
The activities of civil society organizations framed in this project are carried out in the southeastern area bounded by Independencia Boulevard, Manuel Talamás Camandari Avenue, Santiago Troncoso Avenue and Paseo de San de San Isidro Street.
Claudia Arreola, from Red de Vecinos de Juárez, one of the organizations promoting the project, announced that she has the goal of intervening in the improvement of five parks or public spaces in the southeast of Juárez.
For its part, the Juárez Limpio association, since December of this year, has begun to implement different activities to rescue public spaces, specifically green areas and parks in the Parajes de Oriente subdivision.
Since then, Red de Vecinos and Juárez Limpio have worked as a team. For its part, the network is responsible for socializing the project and training citizens on issues of citizen participation and management. Juárez Limpio organizes workshops and conferences on urban improvement, which include a process of collective reflection on the environment.
The first intervention activity was carried out on December 4 in the Libyan Desert Park, in the Parajes de Oriente subdivision. Dozens of families came out to clean and paint their park in a day of urban improvement.
For Karla Ramírez, it is important that these activities are not isolated, but that they are complemented by a process of reflection on the urban environment. That is why on December 18 the residents of the Libia park met again to discuss the needs of this public space.
In addition, the Juarez Neighborhood Network will advise the neighbors so that they can carry out a project to rehabilitate the park, which lacks playgrounds, cyclone mesh, irrigation and lighting systems. This project could be considered to obtain resources from the 2022 Participatory Budget, a citizen participation mechanism covered by the Citizen Participation Law, where five percent of the freely available municipal budget is allocated to projects proposed by citizens.
On the other hand, Daniel Zamarrón indicates that, given the lack of resources in the agency, it is necessary for citizens to join in the maintenance activities of the parks. For this, it is contemplated that during 2022 100 'park clubs' will be formed, made up of citizens who wish to improve the conditions of their parks.
According to Zamarrón, the Municipal Government is seeking to focus investment resources on those areas where residents are organizing. He indicated that among the benefits of forming a 'park club', are the recognition by the dependency of the neighborhood committee that will have the power of the park, hold assemblies and build projects for the improvement of those spaces.
For Karla Ramírez, citizen participation is the most important thing to start rescuing these spaces. She considers that activities such as the urban improvement day, she encourages other neighbors to participate: “it is a contagious topic; if you see that your neighbors are beginning to live well, that their park is beautiful, you see that it is possible, you want to do the same with yours (...) we hope that these committed neighbors manage to infect others and a chain of good practices is created ”.
