Governing disaster:
engineering endless growth in Mexico City
Governing Disaster examines how engineering becomes a mode of governing disasters, of managing increasingly inevitable harm as environments degrade and infrastructures collapse. While building on scholarship on the ways people endure and cobble together modest forms of resistance in a seemingly broken world, the manuscript focuses instead on how that broken world is itself produced and governed through engineering in ways that maintain both state power and capital accumulation. It takes up the case of Mexico City, an improbable metropolis built on a lake whose rapid growth since the 1930s has severely compromised the drainage system it depends on to stay above water. The manuscript follows the work of the engineers tasked with managing this crumbling system and the lives of the residents who have suffered increasingly routine flooding because of its radical insufficiency. Governing Disaster shows how the increasingly chronic, diffuse, and ultimately inscrutable nature of flooding in the city has been produced – often deliberately – by engineers to limit popular discontent and pave the way for the city’s continued growth. Ultimately, the manuscript contends that this work of engineers to govern disasters makes it possible to imagine the endless growth not only of Mexico City, but of cities and economies globally.
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.