Connor, my understanding of chinampas suggests that they are a tool for a few specific situations, much like
hugelkultur, and not really of any use in many others.
As you have posted this in the "greening the desert" forum, I will give a desert-related
answer. If I were to regreen the desert, I think that once I had located a spot where the water table was sufficiently near the surface for deeply-taprooted tree species, I would dig a depression, like a giant zai pit, and plant said
trees around the perimeter. They would grow, and the pit would eventually fill with water, perhaps with a little help from clay and/or gley layer sealing.
At this point, I would construct a series of chinampas designed to shade the water's surface, and to grow more biomass, and perhaps fodder crops or human-edible food. I think that if we were dealing with a constructed oasis, I would encourage appropriate reed species to grow, and possibly a stand-in for a salix species, if they won't survive the heat. My chinampas would be woven baskets of willow stand-in and reeds.
In this scenario, the chinampas would be used to
boost the biomass-generation of the system to make more
mulch, and then more soil, faster, and at the same time would cut evaporative losses, allowing for that volume of water to remain and fostering a whole oasis ecosystems that, properly directed, would reinforce and spawn itself.
Honestly, chinampas without water are just hugelbeets that will likely dry up due to all the added surface area. So bearing that in mind, let's look at that.
I live within an hour's walk to the Lake Ontario shore in downtown Toronto, and my daily commute has me driving Humber Bay twice. I would take the idea of chinampas and industrialise them in a very specific way.
The first industrial chinampas I would build would use barges as floating bases. They would have wicking line nets forming a tent from the edge of the barges to buoys at the water's surface about three feet around the barge. Some clean fibre fill would form a base above that, then subsoil and topsoil from adjacent areas needing biological remediation, probably in Toronto's Portlands. These barges would be planted in hemp for it's heavy metal sequestration properties, and a reed bed system would be engineered to sit in silt sacks attached between the buoys.
The goal of this would be to remediate the soil on the barge, and to continue by being a slow-wicking biological filter on the lake water itself. As a next stage, the hemp could be processed into more of the wicking base that draws water into the system, and older barges might be retired from active sequestration and harvesting by parking them as part of a breakwater, but planted in willows, pollinator habitat, and surrounded by a reed bed system.
Another use of this idea could involve industry using these barges, covered in large hoop-houses, operating year-round as active biological sequestration that might include waste heat use and the pumping of
CO2 exhaust into the
greenhouse barges.
A less-industrial version of this could have much simpler, traditionally constructed chinampas placed to reinforce wetlands and reed bed infrastructure in areas at risk. If, for instance, every dock in Ontario had floating chinampas-inspired planting boxes with reed bed systems growing in them, we could amplify natural water cleaning and filtration exactly where we usually cause the damage.
There are interesting ideas to be had here, just, I think, not so many in arid environments.
-CK
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-Robert A. Heinlein
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