Humberto S. Castro

The Calgary Green is a 30-mile, $7 billion light rail project scheduled to open in 2026. As part of the economics team in the project, I developed a model that calculated the benefits of different alignment options (tunneled vs elevated rail and different rail corridors). The model helped the city council understand different trade-offs and communicate with residents.

The model ultimately tallied up the benefits of final alignment and was used to secure funding from the provincial governments. Finally, the property value uplift portion of the model was used for the station and land use planning.

The owners of a 400-hectare site in Leon, Guanajuato, Mexico held a design completion to develop a new vision for the site. As part of the winning team (alongside Sasaki design office) I provided guidance on land use, phasing, and the development program. The development program included an innovation campus, office, retail and mixed-income housing.

I led a team of three architectural designers in the design of a ten-room, five-star eco-resort. We developed the master plan, prototypes of the rooms, design of common areas (restaurant, reception, and pool) and landscape. We also developed construction documents for all of the buildings. All the rooms and their amenities are designed in order to the guests’ connection with the natural landscape while the construction process and building systems are designed to reduce the hotel’s impact on the natural landscape.

Hotel is fully operational.

As part of the exhibition Our Cities Ourselves sponsored by the Institute of Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) I worked on a new long term master plan for the Tacubaya neighborhood of Mexico City. The new masterplan included public spaces, a market, civic buildings and a new Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) corridor. The master plan depicted a vision that fused an intermodal station with a public library and educational building.

The project achieves three goals:

1. It establishes a hierarchy over the existing modes of transportation and the future BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) lines that would converge in the Tacubaya Multimodal Transport Center.

2. It recovers and rehabilitates the public realm.

3. Increases the value of the private property through the improvement of public infrastructure, and infill development projects.

In 2017 San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) issued a request for proposals for designing a new maintenance facility with residential or commercial uses on top. Over the following two years, we developed six different prototypes and conducted several community outreach workshops to understand the neighboring communities’ needs and build support for the project. The final project is a three-level bus maintenance facility with 500 residential units on to, half of which are affordable. The massing models, development program, and funding strategy were incorporated into the environmental impact report (EIR) as the project goes into CEQA approval.

The government of Panama commissioned a new master plan for the informal settlements of Chicheme and Petaquilla in the province of Colon. Give that the communities lived in the previously uninhabited rain forest, the master plan required minimizing the footprint of the community while still providing adequate land reserves for subsistence agriculture and the growth of coffee for commerce. The master planning team conducted on-site workshops to understand land requirements, and family structures and natural boundaries to tailor the master plan and community buildings to the needs of the residents.

The International Code Council (ICC) commissioned an online tool to analyze and communicate how small savings in construction materials translate to fewer carbon emissions and more vibrant local economies. The policy analysis dashboard disaggregates findings on national, state, and county levels.

Maribus, a proposal for a new ferry system, is a response to the deep transportation issues in the metropolitan region of Acapulco. Maribus tackles the mobility problems the area is experiencing in an integrated way by contributing to the tourism industry, creating new economic activities, and linking zones and geographies of Acapulco that remained isolated. All this is achieved by creating a maritime transportation system without equal in Mexico. The proposal contemplates the intermodal integration of this project with the rest of the existing infrastructure.

Skybridge is an industrial development connected to the Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport. The 435-acre multi-use gateway development houses the first-of-its-kind expedited, joint U.S.-Mexico Customs inspections facility. The master plan is also an extension to the Arizona State University Campus and includes:

• 1.3M SF of aeronautical development

• 2.19M SF of nonaeronautical development

• 270,000 SF of commercial development

The Azcania master plan, with an area of 6,135,429 sq ft, is a proposal intended to rehabilitate the post-industrial area Atzcapotzalco to revive the economy and strengthen the connections between southern Mexico City metropolitan area and this one. This innovative urban concept represents an example of the regeneration of Mexico and Latin America through developments with low carbon emissions both in buildings and in transportation, and renewable energy implementation. The design breaks large batches in small blocks under the principles of European cities. Blocks, streets, and parks together with a diagonal avenue are the main elements for the syntax elements of the plan.

In 2015, Mexico City did not have a recycling program. Most separation of recyclable materials was left to the informal sector. In an effort to better regulate its recycling, Mexico City planning department held a competition for a cheap that could be replicated in neighborhoods throughout the city where residents can separate their recyclable garbage for money. The proposal creates a mesh container with its walls filled with different recyclable materials and open up to the street. The cube is sized to represent the amount of garbage produce by a Mexican household every year.

The program for the new production building at Churubusco Movie Studios fell into two general categories: spaces that needed to sealed from all light and spaces that did not. Thus the design of the building is divided into two pieces: a stoned podium with no windows and an airy glass box housing all offices. A void in between the two volumes houses an atrium with access to all the public programs.