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

This book is a meticulously researched account of the production and reproduction of Mexico City's "metropolitan environment" during the long twentieth century, the bulk of which centers on the 1910s through the 1930s. It recasts the history of urbanization as a dynamic struggle among environmental engineers, urban planners, real estate developers, communal farmers, forest cooperatives, and squatters over the land, water, air, and vegetation of greater Mexico City. Working in the tradition of William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991) and incorporating insights from urban political ecology, Vitz skillfully bridges the fields of environmental and urban history.

This story begins at the end of the nineteenth century, when engineers working under the regime of Porfirio Díaz (1876–80, 1884–1911) attempted to sanitize the city by constructing an elaborate hydraulic infrastructure that included a massive drainage canal, a comprehensive sewer network, and a new potable water system. Like tentacles, this networked infrastructure extended into the outskirts of the city and beyond, linking the capital and its hinterland as never before. But these state-of-the-art sanitary services often failed to reach many of the city's denizens, particularly the poor and working classes.

Meanwhile, system builders placed new restrictions on the use of land in nearby farming and forest communities in an effort to end the cycle of floods and dust storms that had bedeviled the city for centuries. The Mexican Revolution (1910–20) challenged this top-down technocratic approach, as it unleashed and at times cultivated a new political culture in which popular classes clamored for modern sewer services, water for domestic use and irrigation, access to land for decent housing and crops, and control of mountainside woodlands.

The middle four chapters of the book delve into this revolutionary/postrevolutionary crucible and represent Vitz's principal historiographical contribution. He begins with case studies of a 1922 riot over clean water and a tenant strike that same year in which renters and urban residents demanded relief from unscrupulous slumlords. These two popular mobilizations ultimately failed to produce the more equitable distribution of sanitary services and housing that participants demanded; instead, they led to "a return to Porfirian technocracy, albeit under revolutionary auspices" (108).

In 1928, with many residents blaming incompetent municipal governments for their woes, the federal government created a unified Federal District that centralized urban administration. From here, Vitz turns to the woodlands surrounding the city, which environmental planners since the Porfirian era had been convinced needed protection from reckless forest communities. He traces the efforts of environmental planners to preserve mountainside forests, which they saw as vital to urban hygiene, even as local communities inspired by the Revolution fought to secure customary forest rights. Next, Vitz turns to the aquatic ecosystems of lakes Xochimilco and Texcoco, showing how the strategies planners used to supply the city with fresh water and eliminate wastewater tended to undermine agricultural production and worsen the dust storms that so often engulfed the city.

During a small window of time, from the mid 1930s to the mid 1940s, the state and lakeshore campesinos established a delicate working relationship whereby they turned the receding lands of Texcoco into arable land. Many of the same planners who developed environmental policies affecting Texcoco, Xochimilco, and nearby woodlands also pushed for hygienic housing for workers in the city proper. As informal, working-class settlements spread eastward, the residents found themselves subject to cycles of flooding and dust storms due to their proximity to Texcoco. Under the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas, "such settlements became hotbeds of political mobilization" (165) as they fought for improved housing and sanitation, at times alongside a new generation of radical architects. Yet, ironically, the program of rural expropriation and nationalization pursued by Cárdenas...