Matthew Vitz

The thesis of A City on a Lake (2018) is that the Mexican capital cannot be understood without the lake beneath it. Draining the Texcoco basin, a four-century undertaking, solved growth and created three permanent problems: the city sinks because the aquifer is pumped, it floods because it lost its natural drainage, and it must bring water from far away at great energy cost.

Vitz adds the element usually missing from environmental histories: distribution. The hydraulic works did not affect everyone equally. The well-off western districts ended up high and with running water, while the working-class colonias of the east occupied precisely the bed of the drained lake, where the ground is worse, the subsidence greater and the flooding annual. That geography still holds today and is no accident of terrain: it is the accumulated result of engineering decisions.

An American historian and professor at the University of California, San Diego, Vitz works on Latin American environmental history and Mexican urban history. His book combines engineering archives, expropriation files and neighbourhood disputes, and so reads public works as what they were: political decisions with winners and losers.

The account runs from the Porfiriato to the 1970s and includes the actors official history tends to forget: the ejido farmers who lost land, the labourers on the deep drainage works, the residents who organised against the dust of the dry lakebed. It is one of the best examples of urban political ecology applied to a specific city, and it explains why Mexico City still spends fortunes solving a problem it created itself.