Matthew Vitz's book, A City on a Lake, is a thoroughly researched and intricately woven history of environmental change in Mexico City from the last decades of the nineteenth century to the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution. By looking at both structural processes of environment-making and spaces of environmental contention, Vitz challenges linear accounts of the Mexican capital being a site of inexorable environmental decline; a monolithic city that grew beyond its limits, ravenously devouring urban and rural dwellers and nature. Instead, he shows how ‘nonhuman nature, rather than being torn asunder, was inextricably joined to the built environment in the process of urbanization’ (p. 6). At the same time, he illustrates how these processes of environment-making and urbanisation were not defined solely by top-down policies, but were instead forged through the tumultuous everyday politics of the period. In doing so, Vitz has written a book that might be of interest to not only historians or researchers working on Mexico City, but also broader audiences engaged with discussions on urban political ecology and urban environments.
Throughout the text, Vitz skilfully brings together discussions on changing land and water uses, finance, elite-led projects of conservation and sanitation, the everyday contentions around housing or agriculture, the many geographical particularities of the Mexico Basin, and the shifting policies and politics of the Mexican state. In accounting for these different flows, processes and practices, he is able to construct a complex history that highlights the open-ended character of environment-, state- and city-making. Moreover, through this articulation of natural, technological, political and social processes, Vitz shows how the worlds we inhabit and produce are always already hybrid. This hybridity is not simply given, but rather made through numerous (techno)-political contentions. In the case of Mexico City, these struggles orbit around the elite-led policies that sought to modernise Mexico City whilst deepening environmental inequalities, and those – often short-lived – proposals, practices and policies that heralded a more just, equitable and sustainable city that has not yet come to be.
As a starting point, Vitz identifies two urban ecology revolutions that mark the period he studies. The first, articulated in the latter years of the Porfirio Díaz regime (1876–80, 1884–1910), was a sanitary one. Elite-led and influenced by international imaginaries of urban modernity, it centred on drainage, sewage and water supply projects, as well as on the implementation of sanitary codes and forest conservation policies. On the back of the mounting inequalities of the Díaz regime, partially fuelled by the making of an exclusionary urban environment in the Mexico Basin, the Mexican Revolution emerged. This is the second revolution to which Vitz refers; one without an environmental dimension, but rather environmental in itself. From 1910 to 1940 competing imaginaries and practices of urban environment-making were played out in the higher circles of statecraft, and through the everyday politics of Mexico City and its hinterlands. During this period, the programme of capitalist urbanisation and industrialisation that became hegemonic after 1940 was not yet dominant and environmental futures were still in dispute. This exploration of the competing practices, processes, policies and imaginaries of the post-revolutionary years, and in particular of the Lázaro Cárdenas administration (1934–40), constitutes one of the main contributions of this book.
The text is organised in two sections. The first deals with the making of the metropolitan environment. Chapter 1 discusses the urban environmental imaginary of the Porfirian elite – centred on sanitation, progress and modernity – and the deepening urban inequalities of the period. Chapter 2 analyses the Mexican Revolution as an open-ended process in which elites, popular groups and lively natures came together in reshaping metropolitan space and urban politics. Chapters 3–7 zoom in on diverse urban environment spaces during the Revolution and its aftermath. Chapter 3 looks at the politics of urban living in the 1915–28 period and the popular search for sanitary living spaces. Chapter 4 focuses on the competing practices of hinterland forestry, highlighting how the Cárdenas period opened up spaces for potentially emancipatory politics. Chapter 5 looks at another site of alternative urban eco-political relations: the Texcoco and Xochimilco lake beds, where numerous experiments around water and land management and use were put forward through shifting political alliances and contentions between popular movements and the state. Chapter 6 discusses working-class urban politics, showing how it led to the definition of state policies and infrastructural development. Chapter 7 looks at how this grassroots politics of urban environment-making was eventually displaced by a new technocratic elite, and a decidedly capitalist agenda.
The conclusion highlights Vitz's comprehensive approach to urban environmental change. He shows how today's Mexico City, where modern promises of urban welfare never came to be, is the result of the unfolding tensions between egalitarian visions of urban living and the dynamics of capitalist urbanisation and industrialisation. In this respect, the state and the city were being made simultaneously, shaped by contentious politics involving heterogeneous elite and popular groups. Crucially, these contradictions are not imposed on the city or the state, but rather they unfold through them and the ways in which they shape and are shaped by the environment. As the twentieth century advanced, elite-led environmentalism and urban planning took hold. Old demands for social justice receded, but did not disappear. Dreams of lacustrine returns subsist, even if speculative urbanisation deepens. Vitz's urban political ecology approach lays bare the contradictions, still at play today, in the relations between urbanisation and the environment.
A City on a Lake is at its best when weaving together diverse processes and practices in and through the environment. Vitz's argument is articulated through richly described data, which vividly conveys the complexity of urban environment-making. Precisely as a result of this intricacy, more conceptual work might be of help. Vitz introduces a number of interesting concepts, such as the urban environmental imaginary or the metropolitan environment. However, they sometimes slide out of view, and their explanatory and analytical potential might not be fully developed as a result. These concepts, beyond being relevant to the work of understanding how urban environments come to be, might also be useful in building interdisciplinary conversations within academia – and certainly beyond. Vitz's emphasis on the open-endedness of environmental change, the importance of everyday popular politics and the possibility of building more just and sustainable futures is of the utmost importance today, as capital-induced climate change perilously unfolds. Such a view can potentially be applied in a politics of hope; one that challenges apocalyptic views of inexorable ends without exchanging them for the cruel optimism of nostalgia-driven futures, and that, crucially, is already visible in numerous environmental contentions in Latin America, and elsewhere in the world.
