Vía Verde — Mexico City's Vertical Highway Gardens (A Governance Cautionary Tale)

Following a 2016 public petition with over 80,000 signatures, Mexico City authorised Vía Verde ('Green Way'), a private initiative by the company Verde Vertical to install vertical gardens on support columns of the Anillo Periférico ring road's upper deck. The first 10 pilot columns opened in July 2016, and the project has since covered more than 1,000 columns — roughly 50,000 square metres — with the operator recouping costs by selling advertising space on about 10% of the columns.

Independent investigative journalism by the Mexican policy magazine Nexos (2016) and by Arena Pública (2018) found that the contract was awarded without competitive public bidding to a company whose principal, architect Fernando Ortiz Monasterio, had prior government contracts — an undisclosed conflict of interest — and that funding terms were not made transparently public. As a vertical, rain-excluded planting system, Vía Verde depends entirely on an engineered irrigation network, a structural vulnerability not present in ground-level greening; the company's own claimed pollutant-capture figures (for example, roughly 89 tonnes of CO2 captured per year at full build-out) are self-reported and have not been independently measured or audited.

Despite years of public visibility, no quantified plant survival or mortality rate, nor a formal government audit, could be located for this programme — an information gap that critics have specifically flagged, contrasting it with more rigorously monitored urban-greening schemes elsewhere. Urban-planning critics have also argued that the same budget could have funded substantially more ground-level tree planting, and that the project does not address the car dependency that drives much of Mexico City's air pollution.

The company has since exported the same model internationally (reported work in Costa Rica, Guatemala and plans in Madrid and Manchester as of 2023), meaning the format has been replicated despite the underlying governance and evidence gaps — precisely why it is included here as a cautionary example rather than a model for straightforward replication.

Read the full analysis: https://labrujula.nexos.com.mx/via-verde-negocio-gris/