Sinking the City: Engineering and the Government of Disaster in the Mexican Metropolis
How do states maintain their power amid accelerating environmental crises and disasters, which have been exacerbated by their own policies and infrastructures?
“Sinking the City” takes up this question through the case of Mexico City, a metropolis that has been sinking faster than nearly anywhere else on the planet for more than a century—and has faced severe flooding as a result. It traces how engineers have used a vast flood control tunnel system to transform the intertwined problems of anthropogenic land subsidence and flooding from catastrophes of the wealthy urban core into chronic conditions of life on the poor urban periphery.
The manuscript argues that engineering has become a crucial mode of governing: by rendering environmental problems like flooding and subsidence routine and their causes largely inscrutable, engineers have allowed states to maintain rule even as their policies have degraded environmental conditions for the majority. “Sinking the City” turns attention from how people adapt to urban environmental crises to how those conditions are themselves produced and dynamically modulated by engineers to limit resistance. In centering engineering, the manuscript not only expands our understanding of who governs and how but also offers model for a critical anthropology of engineering.