Flood control politics : engineering, urban growth, and disaster in Mexico City
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation challenges the simple yet pervasive notion that engineers "mitigate" disasters. It reveals instead how engineers transform disasters as a form of governing amid increasingly strained infrastructures and environments. The project focuses on engineers' management of the persistent floods of sewage and rainwater that occur every rainy season in Mexico City, which cause infections, triple commute times, and ruin homes for the urban poor. I conducted 24 months of ethnographic and archival research in Mexico City focused on the work and lives of drainage engineers, drainage operations and maintenance workers, and flood victims. The dissertation spans the 1940s to the present, tracing how engineers planned one of the world's largest urban drainage systems in response to devastating floods in the city center and how they operate the decaying system today amid the city's explosive growth, ongoing land subsidence, and the pressures of climate change. Under these constraints, I demonstrate that engineers use a vast system of pumps and floodgates to strategically avoid politically catastrophic floods in wealthy central areas by creating instead a slow-moving and spatially diffuse patchwork of flooding in largely impoverished areas of the urban periphery. These floods are so carefully spread through space and time by engineers that they have become a banal problem of everyday life for the poor that gathers little news coverage and inspires few protests. This spatiotemporal distancing furthermore makes it extraordinarily difficult to understand flooding as a systematic, political problem. I argue that by reconfiguring flooding in these ways, engineers have made the city's endless growth pushed by capitalists and political elites both imaginable and politically tenable. More broadly, this dissertation shows how engineers make the temporality and spatiality of urban disasters into objects of governmental manipulation. Through designs and operations that shift how, when, and where disasters are experienced, engineers have become essential mediators who negotiate between an increasingly strained environment and political demands for endless urban growth. I contend that this mediation is an essential yet understudied element not only in the work of government, but also the intertwined processes of urbanization and capital accumulation more broadly.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2021; ©2021 |
| Publication date | 2021; 2021 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Chahim, Dean Mohammed |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Ferguson, James, 1959- |
| Thesis advisor | Ferguson, James, 1959- |
| Thesis advisor | Ebron, Paulla A, 1953- |
| Thesis advisor | Hecht, Gabrielle |
| Thesis advisor | Inoue, Miyako, 1962- |
| Thesis advisor | Wolfe, Mikael |
| Degree committee member | Ebron, Paulla A, 1953- |
| Degree committee member | Hecht, Gabrielle |
| Degree committee member | Inoue, Miyako, 1962- |
| Degree committee member | Wolfe, Mikael |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Anthropology |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Dean Mohammed Chahim. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Anthropology. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2021. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/bd083vq0744 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2021 by Dean Mohammed Chahim
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...