A City on a Lake

Reviewed by: A City on a Lake: Urban Political Ecology and the Growth of Mexico City by Matthew Vitz Edward Beatty (bio) A City on a Lake: Urban Political Ecology and the Growth of Mexico City. By Matthew Vitz. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Pp. 338. Paperback $27.95. Matthew Vitz begins his superb new history of Mexico City by contrasting apocalyptic visions of an urban leviathan overwhelmed by impending environmental collapse, ca. 1950s, with nineteenth-century portrayals of its sublime natural and architectural beauty. One needs not to have spent much time in Mexico's largest and grandest city to sense that it is indeed living on borrowed time. At the center of an expansive and densely-packed metropolitan area bursting with over 21 million people, any city would struggle to provide basic services to all. Few of today's global mega-cities, however, face the range of location-based, "environmental" challenges that characterize Mexico City. Situated in a broad, semi-arid and terminal (or endorheic) basin at over seven thousand feet above sea level, Mexico City has for five centuries pressed against the fragility of this particular environment. Flooding, desiccation, ground water depletion, subsidence, and dust storms have long plagued a city already vulnerable to earthquakes and atmospheric inversion layers that trap contaminants over the city. The magnitude of the challenge of pursuing growth while providing basic services and minimizing environmental threats is almost unimaginably large. Vitz's fine book gives us the story of the city's remarkable growth from the 1880s to the 1950s. The chapters proceed chronologically through this transformative century: the Porfirian modernizing project of the late nineteenth century; the revolutionary years under Madero and Huerta; the construction of basic urban infrastructures to provide water and sanitation; the city's relationship with its hinterland, especially surrounding communities and the lands, waters, and forests they controlled; the engineering of landscapes focused especially on efforts to develop drained [End Page 904] lakebeds; the pressures of massive postwar population growth in the form of informal settlements; and the negotiation of new industrial interests in the second half of the twentieth century. Throughout, the story Vitz tells is more political ecology than environmental history. It is not a history of Mexico City's environment, or of the contested relationship of the "natural" and the human-made. It is an account of an intensely engineered ecology, of the inextricably entwined and co-created ecology of terrain, habitation, sanitation, forests and fuels, households and industries, air and water. This history is shaped by political power in both formal and informal manifestations. Although Vitz's compelling history of urban growth is set firmly within the particular environmental conditions of the basin, each chapter centers on a series of political moments that highlight the challenges faced by urban planners and the typically technocratic approaches taken by policy makers as they pursued growth and navigated competing social and political interests. Here, political ecology is centered on political authority, starting with the direction set by successive national presidents. Vitz's primary interest, however, lies with a technocratic elite, ranging from government ministers and planners to engineers and entrepreneurs, all interested in promoting growth, and all more or less cognizant of environmental constraints. The story never falls into the dichotomous trap of growth-oriented planning versus environmental constraints and consequences. The political ecology of the basin is instead the story of an engineered environment. What sets that presence apart from other "natural" elements of the environment is the imperative of intentional transformation and growth, and the ways in which human societies from the fifteenth to the twenty-first centuries wielded technologies to accomplish those ends. Any scholar interested in the history of urban growth and political efforts to craft technocratic solutions to the challenges posed by urban growth in fragile environments should read this book. It fits well within an impressive group of recent books that also highlight the construction of technological or technocratic practice in Mexican history, including works by Vera Candiani, Gabriela Soto Laveaga, and Mikael Wolfe, among others. Readers of Technology and Culture will be largely sympathetic with Vitz's conclusion that the dominant political project of the last century and

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