Overview

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.

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9780822370406

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Reviews

Based on exhaustive archival research and engaging theoretically with new scholarship in political ecology and urban environmentalism, A City on a Lake adds critical new dimensions to the history of modern Mexico. Matthew Vitz transcends arid dichotomies between urban and agrarian history, and deftly interrogates the once-sacrosanct watershed of the Mexican Revolution. Like few other studies, A City on the Lake demonstrates how ecological transformation and the struggle for environmental rights factored importantly into outcomes of the Mexican Revolution's modernizing project of capitalist development. This exciting monograph should establish Vitz in the vanguard of Mexico's and Latin America's new environmental and urban historians. -- Gilbert M. Joseph, Farnam Professor of History and International Studies, Yale University Matthew Vitz's focus how the relationship among Mexico City's inhabitants, ecology, the state, and the city's political figures played out in policies of land reform and modernization is absolutely novel. And to my knowledge, this is the first book in English to address in detail what happened in the city itself, in effect bringing the rurally centered analysis of land reform into the city, which is itself is a major contribution. Conceptually and analytically complex, yet crisp and clear, Vitz gives us a new way to understand a familiar period in Mexican history. -- Vera S. Candiani, author of * Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City * Tracing the relationship of social and ecological change during Mexico City's crucial stage of development in the early twentieth century, A City on a Lake is the most compelling environmental history of modern Mexico City available. -- Christopher R. Boyer, author of * Political Landscapes: Forests, Conservation, and Community in Mexico *

Matthew Vitz's focus how the relationship among Mexico City's inhabitants, ecology, the state, and the city's political figures played out in policies of land reform and modernization is absolutely novel. And to my knowledge, this is the first book in English to address in detail what happened in the city itself, in effect bringing the rurally centered analysis of land reform into the city, which is itself is a major contribution. Conceptually and analytically complex, yet crisp and clear, Vitz gives us a new way to understand a familiar period in Mexican history. -- Vera S. Candiani, author of * Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City * Tracing the relationship of social and ecological change during Mexico City's crucial stage of development in the early twentieth century, A City on a Lake is the most compelling environmental history of modern Mexico City available. -- Christopher R. Boyer, author of * Political Landscapes: Forests, Conservation, and Community in Mexico *

Author Information

Matthew Vitz is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego.

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