Sinking the Capital
engineering and the government of Disaster in Mexico
What if were to understand engineering as a mode of rule, as a means of governing a world of accelerating environmental catastrophes? Sinking the Capital takes readers inside the world’s largest drainage system, a massive complex of tunnels, pumps, and dams that keep the sinking metropolis of Mexico City above water – at least most of the time. Moving from the late 19th century to the present, the first part of the manuscript begins by tracing how Mexico City’s engineers, to their eventual horror, sunk the city in their attempts to supply its thirsty residents and growing industries with groundwater. As floods caused by this sinking – known as land subsidence – mounted, engineers in the mid-20th century began to question the very basic relationship between the city and its water, but their re-envisioning was ultimately cut short by the decision to build an extraordinarily deep sewer tunnel system that allowed the city center to be protected from flooding, no matter how far the city sank. The second half of the book traces the aftermath of this decision, following engineers and workers of the city’s water utility as they manage the crumbling drainage tunnels and sewer network amid continued subsidence, urbanization, and devastating austerity that have left them with far more floodwaters than their system can handle. Under tremendous political pressure and with no good choices, engineers and workers have learned to use their control over floodwaters to flood the poor urban periphery – often the very kinds of neighborhoods they grew up in – in order to protect the wealthy urban core. This control is not exercised at a distance, but through the intimate labor of hundreds of workers up all night staffing remote floodgates and wading with portable pumps through flooded streets, cajoling wastewater to move through the giant hydraulic pinball machine that snakes under every street of the city. Their work has transformed flooding in Mexico City into a quotidian disaster, one whose appearance is so routine, and causes so obtuse, that it provokes little popular unrest even as the city sinks ever further into the abyss.
I have published short pieces for the public about this project, which you can find here. I am also working on a linked digital humanities project, detailed here.