Heritage water parks between peri-urban nodes: remains and productive interstitials toward a framework for agricultural protection and development

Abstract

The territory of Lima, structured around three heritage valleys within a naturally desert region, reveals an ancestral worldview that enabled the expansion of fertile land from the inter-Andean valleys by an understanding of nature, sacredness, and agricultural production as closely interrelated factors. This ancestral system materialized in a network of huacas—monumental architecture that functioned as macro and micro-scale spatial organizers. Today, unregulated urban growth has fragmented this system, compromising not only the city’s remaining food sources, but also the memory and cultural identity embedded in the territory. In response to this scenario, the heritage park as a planning figure positions heritage as a resource, grounded in the revaluation of culture and the tangible and intangible traces of a territory as active assets for development.
Accordingly, this research aims to highlight the strategic role of huacas as nodes between urban and agricultural systems. Drawing from international experiences such as the Llobregat Agrarian Park and the Huerta Plan of Valencia, as well as the territorial analysis of the U-shaped temples of Cardal and Manchay in the lower Lurín River Valley, this study seeks to extrapolate planning criteria capable of integrating Lima’s remaining productive matrices, heritage, and memory into a public-use agricultural development model.