A City on a Lake: Urban Political Ecology and the Growth of Mexico City by Matthew Vitz (review)

As it stretches for miles and up the sides of mountains, the megalopolis of Mexico City has long held one of the highest population densities in the world. The population explosion has not come without consequence as residents in spontaneous developments rely on daily shipments of water rather than a steady infrastructure. The expansion began after World War II when the country began a shift to more capitalist economic models and industries surrounding the city demanded workers as well as lax environmental oversight. How did the city's current struggles with water develop over time? What perspectives and approaches to water management shape the problems today? And how did a city that rests on a lakebed become a site of desiccation and drought? Matthew Vitz answers these questions in a well-researched book that outlines how water has informed the goals and limitations of growth in Mexico City.

A City on a Lakeexplores how urban development transformed the Basin of Mexico while examining the social and environmental consequences of rapid growth. Specifically, it focuses on how social and political perceptions regarding water led the city to implement large-scale environmental projects and public health campaigns while unwittingly spurring dust storms as well as the collapse of lake-based economies. The book frames these perceptions through an urban political ecology lens, which emphasizes the dynamics of power between "planners, environmental change, and popular politics" (8). Nonhuman nature plays a critical role in this discussion as it eludes those that seek to make it conform to plans regarding sanitation, cleanliness, and hygiene. The book traces the discussion surrounding water through the Porfiriato (1876–1910), a period when technocrats were imbued with positivistic ideas of water and hygiene, to the Mexican Revolution, when conservation and populism clashed, to the 1940s, when technocrats and state bureaucrats joined forces to restrict environmental rights.

With this book, the author has three principal arguments. First, the author seeks to underscore the struggle for balance between the political sphere and the environment. Vitz cites the examples of the fuelwood industry on the city's edge, an economic benefit to some and a threat to the surrounding forest. Likewise, the fisherman and lake-based industries disappeared because they drew from the ancient lake that politicians eventually drained to stop seasonal flooding. In effect, the book paints the picture of a monster constrained by its own size. Second, the book also reiterates that urban growth did not necessarily quash nature but rather saw it grow in tandem with development, albeit in different ways. Nonhuman nature remained part of the urban scene, whether with the microbes stirring worries over sanitation or in the dust storms rising from the desiccated lakebed. Lastly, the book expertly situates the current challenges facing the city as part of a trajectory closely tied with the "urban environmental imaginary" (20, 29–35).

That is, the imagined vision of what the city could do with its resources in the context of its relationship with the hinterlands. As the author suggests, the supposed solutions that drove the city forward through the Porfiriato, dredging and draining the remains of the lake, added to problems later. Now, urban planners proffer solutions through sustainable measures, reverse engineering past projects, and new sources of water — once again, employing the urban imaginary.

While all seven chapters offer valuable insights, four chapters in particular stood out. Chapter three discusses the organized tenant strike of 1922, which saw population growth stretch housing resources. Namely, tenants in urban housing pushed for the sanitary living spaces with running water and sewage, an infrastructure too slow to arrive to new developments. Likewise, chapter four also delves into the urban spatial question with an examination of how planners came too close to surrounding forests while an informal charcoal industry sprung up. This growth to the forest's...