In A City on a Lake Matthew Vitz tracks the environmental and political history of Mexico City and explains its transformation from a forested, water-rich environment into a smog-infested megacity plagued by environmental problems and social inequality. Vitz shows how Mexico City's unequal urbanization and environmental decline stemmed from numerous scientific and social disputes over water policy, housing, forestry, and sanitary engineering. From the prerevolutionary efforts to create a hygienic city supportive of capitalist growth, through revolutionary demands for a more democratic distribution of resources, to the mid-twentieth-century emergence of a technocratic bureaucracy that served the interests of urban elites, Mexico City's environmental history helps us better understand how urban power has been exercised, reproduced, and challenged throughout Latin America.
- Cover
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- I. The Making of a Metropolitan Environment
- One. The Porfirian Metropolitan Environment
- Two. Revolution and the Metropolitan Environment
- II. Spaces of a Metropolitan Environment
- Three. Water and Hygiene in the City
- Four. The City and Its Forests
- Five. Desiccation, Dust, and Engineered Waterscapes
- Six. The Political Ecology of Working-Class Settlements
- Seven. Industrialization and Environmental Technocracy
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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- C
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- F
- G
- H
- I
- J
- K
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- N
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- Q
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