Avocado Urbanisms

Gerardo Corona is pursuing a Master of Architecture in Urban Design at Harvard GSD. He is an architect trained in Mexico with experience in projects across a variety of scales. Gerardo’s current interests range from the political economy of space to the dichotomy of natural and built environments.

The economic, social, and environmental vulnerabilities of avocado cultivation in the Meseta Purépecha region of Michoacán embody the inequities and unsustainability of global food production chains which have emerged in the last half-century. This landscape of production, once dominated by the Hass avocado tree, is a visible expression of the issues associated with rapid changes in land use and ownership, which privileges consolidating capital profits over the long-term needs of local communities and regional environments.