A City on a Lake by Matthew Vitz: Mexico City and Its Lake

A City on a Lake: Urban Political Ecology and the Growth of Mexico City (Duke, 2018) is the book in which the American historian Matthew Vitz reconstructed how the Mexican capital grew between 1890 and 1940 on the drained bed of Lake Texcoco and how that environmental transformation was, at the same time, a political struggle over who had a right to the city. Its thesis is that the modernisation of the capital, drainage, dams, forests, new districts, was decided in conflicts among planning elites, peasants of the basin and poor settlers who claimed services as a right won in the Revolution.

The Gran Canal of 1900 and the draining of Lake Texcoco

The starting point is water. During the Porfiriato, engineers completed in 1900 the Gran Canal del Desagüe to empty the basin and end flooding, and that work, celebrated as a triumph of modernity, drained Lake Texcoco, ruined the lakeside communities that lived from fishing and chinampas, and produced dust storms of saline soil that plagued the city for decades. Vitz shows that the capital's political ecology was organised from then on around three resources, water, the forests that retained it and the lakebed soil, and that every intervention on them redistributed benefits and harms among classes and territories.

Revolution, ejidos and settlers: services as a right won

The Revolution of 1910 changed the terms. Post-revolutionary governments inherited the project of sanitising and beautifying the capital, but had to answer to new actors: the ejidos that claimed forests and lands of the basin, and the settlers who occupied the marshy grounds east of the city, in what would become Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl and the popular colonias. Vitz documents how those residents, organised in tenants' leagues and settlers' associations, demanded water, drainage, schools and streets by invoking the 1917 Constitution, and how the state alternated concessions and repression, with the head of the Federal District Department deciding which colonias were regularised.

Miguel Ángel de Quevedo and the forests: conservation against agrarian justice

Conservation was also a battlefield. The forester Miguel Ángel de Quevedo promoted parks, nurseries and the protection of the basin's forests to retain water and curb dust, and his project clashed with peasants who lived from firewood and charcoal and with developers who wanted those lands. Vitz reads that dispute as a conflict between a city that needed its surroundings to survive and a countryside that demanded agrarian justice, and shows that Mexican urban ecology was born from that tension rather than from an ideal of nature.

Urban political ecology and environmental citizenship in the capital

The book converses with the urban political ecology of authors such as Erik Swyngedouw and Maria Kaika, who study how the city produces and transforms nature, and with Latin American environmental history. Its contribution is to demonstrate that urban citizenship in Mexico was built around the environment: access to water and drainage, defence against floods and dust and the legalisation of colonias were the demands that defined who was a citizen of the capital. The city's identity, from the lost lake to the dust storms, was marked by that relationship with a transformed territory.

Vitz's lesson for planning today is that Mexico City's problems, ground subsidence, water scarcity, flooding, inequality between the wooded west and the lakebed east, have a political history that begins with the draining of the lake. The city on a lake is still paying for the decision to deny the water on which it stands, and the struggles of settlers in the 1930s for services and recognition are the same ones the metropolitan peripheries fight today. Understanding that continuity is the condition for a more just urban ecology.