Dean Chahim | Discard Studies 2022 Conference
“The Logistics of Waste: Engineering, Capital Accumulation, and the Growth of Mexico City”
Based on Antipode paper published this year.
Hello everyone. Thanks again for having me today. It's really such a pleasure to be here with you all. I'm Dean Chahim. I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso. I’m an anthropologist and recovering environmental engineer. The paper I’ll give today was just published a couple of months ago in Antipode, but I’ll be revising it for a book – so all comments welcome!
The big question my paper is motivated by is this: How is capital accumulation sustained even though it threatens to overwhelm the planet with waste?
This is obviously a huge question – central to discard studies. I think we all can provide part of the answer: from the ways that waste is laboriously collected at its source to the ways that it is laboriously and unjustly dumped in the backyards of other, more marginalized groups. But my argument is really to ask that we pay more attention to the work that happens in between, to the management of the flows of waste – of waste-in-motion.
How is wasting constructed as a – seemingly – seamless flow, in order to sustain capital accumulation? As you’ll see, in framing the question this way, I’m indebted to critical logistics scholars like Deb Cowen and Charmaine Chua.
I look at this question at the urban scale, specifically in Mexico City, focusing on urban growth as a component part of capital accumulation more broadly, and a specific form of waste: wastewater, which includes both sewage, industrial effluent, and rainwater. As we will see, the specific materiality of wastewater matters a great deal – if solid waste is hard to trace and understand the origins of – “indexically murky” as Sophia Stamatopolou-Robbins writes – fluid wastes are more so. And they are also often much less labor-intensive, more mediated by complex, technical infrastructures operated at a distance – or simply prone to flowing on their own.
Let’s begin with a very quick geography lesson, pre-colonization, Tenochtitlan – now downtown Mexico City - was at the center of Lake Texcoco. After colonization, via vast drainage engineering works, most of the basin has been desiccated – and turned into concrete.
Now, how do you maintain it as concrete? A huge drainage network, these green lines are tunnels and canals that criss-cross the city and allow it to – mostly – stay dry.
Now, give you a sense that we're now zooming in for the map going underground. There are these humongous tunnels these are seven meters and 21 feet or so in diameter in certain places. In the distance of this picture, there is a man for size.
There are also canals, and - particularly important to my paper today - reservoirs, which are meant to temporarily hold water.
But here’s the paradox: many of these reservoirs and canals – like this one here, where you can see columns of a new train line being built (more on that in a moment) – are being destroyed or constricted to make way for new urban developments, especially logistics and transportation infrastructures.
Now, as you can imagine, by constricting these spaces that are supposed to hold water back, these developments radically increase flooding risks for people up and downstream. But what’s crucial is that this is not the classic story of a kind of spatially-delimited “sacrifice zone”: the problem does not stay put. There are ripple effects across the drainage system, endangering both rich and poor people alike. Even more bizarrely, these developments quite self-evidently put themselves in harm’s way. They are building not just in flood prone areas, they are building inside drainage infrastructure! It’s one thing – as Dawn Biehler pointed out – to build stormwater infrastructure in a poor part of the city to protect the booming parts. But here, we see capitalists destroying the very base foundation of their investments – the ability to stay above water.
So the paradox is, well, why and how could it be imaginable to build and destroy the very infrastructures that the city depends on in order to stay dry? And how is capital accumulation sustained in such a context?
Now, the answer is pretty simple: waste flows. But there’s nothing natural about this: this flow is almost totally controlled by engineers. They of course, there's excesses, there's things they can't control. Nevertheless, they have a tremendous and surprising amount of control over where, where they direct water in the system, how it moves, which goes beyond the design of the system. It's about operations.
They do this through the operations of these floodgates that you can see here, these pump stations. So the real story here is that wastewater is made to flow. It's made to flow through the technical operations of engineers. And it's made to flow to sustain urbanization to make it such that this continues to be a place for capital investment.
This engineering work of redirecting water around is part of what I call the logistics of waste: this calculative management of flows of waste in order to facilitate the accumulation of capital. While we focus a lot on the often lasting, durable forms of disposability produced at the sources and sinks for waste, by focusing on the logistics of waste, I’m trying to draw our attention to the far more ephemeral – but no less impactful – forms of disposability of the people and places that waste moves through.
Here I'm drawing explicitly on this new in a relatively new logistics literature and trying to bring it into conversation with discard studies. And what I think is so interesting here about thinking across these disciplines, these fields, critical interdisciplinary fields is how there is a similar interest, I think, theoretically and politically, in drawing attention to the kinds of systemic webs – and violences – that go way beyond the thing that we see at the end of the supply chain (for logistics) or at the beginning of the disposal chain (for discards).
What I’m going to show you is that there’s a kind of parallel project – in both domains – to organizing the flow of substances and objects as a kind of seemingly seamless flow, moving faster and faster, in order to maintain capital accumulation. The engineers I describe in the paper are dealing with wastewater, but their approach is eerily reminiscent of a kind of ‘just in time logistics’ – the constant drive to reduce storage of goods and increase the precision of their flow.
To do this research, I spent a lot of time doing an ethnography of the engineers and workers who build, operate, and maintain the city’s drainage system, going out from their command centers to the flooded strets of the urban periphery.
I now want to take you to a particular case study that I think is really relevant: the Ruiz Cortines reservoir, just about three miles west of downtown Mexico City. While I go into more ethnographic detail in the paper, for our purposes now I just want to give you the outline:
While the reservoir is crucial for the city’s flood control system, to prevent water from inundating downtown. The entire reservoir is slated for demolition to build a train station in order to connect the city better to the wealthy, corporate exclave of Santa Fe. this project is really key to keep up the growth of this part of the city which has suffered from tremendous congestion.
But now, because the reservoir is now being demolished and turned into this train station, drainage engineers have to divert water elsewhere. The primary diversion is towards the San Joaquin reservoir, a few miles north.
I visit the reservoir the day after that major rainstorm and find models, an engineer, Marcos, who spent decades at the water utility. He tells me about the storm the night before: water levels in the dam kept rising as water rushed in from the Ruiz Cortines and he kept radioing back to the command center to redirect the water elsewhere but they told him they had no choice – if they did so, the city center would flood. So he had to deal with the water on his own.
The problem is, he had no good options. If he opened the dam’s normal outlet, it would flood a convention center and horseracing track build in the ravine below his dam. This was not an option: as he explained to me, these “generate income at an international level – so you can’t give yourself the luxury of letting them flood.”
And so in order to not flood them, he diverts the water from his dam through a different diversion tunnel, sending it out to another jurisdiction entirely, which is in the state of Mexico, which surrounds Mexico City. This sends wastewater hurtling towards neighborhoods like Echegaray, which have frequently faced devastating flooding in the past. This only increases their risk of floods like this one, from a few years back.
But it’s not just there, it’s also Valle Dorado, Altavilla, and a half a dozen other communities who are connected – by way of those drainage tunnels and canals I showed you earlier. All are affected by these small decisions way downstream miles away through a mostly invisible tunnel network. The floods are rapid and ephemeral, draining in a matter of hours and leaving behind only material devastation and trauma – but little in the way of lasting evidence.
Most, however, have no idea about the technopolitical discretion engineers exercise in, very often literally, deciding which areas of the city to risk flooding and which to protect. This severely limits the possibility of collective, political resistance to flooding – and helps explain the notable lack of any kind of organized pushback against the state. This absence of resistance, in turn, opens the door to continued urban growth – even growth that comes at the very cost of the drainage system the city depends on.
[could end here, if need be]
So, to conclude: To keep capital flowing, engineers keep wastewater moving through the kinds of complex logistical operations described here, shifting water from one reservoir to another and back and forth between tunnels and canals to avoid accumulations that might cause floods.
The more capacity urban encroachments take from their system, the more engineers have to speed up the flow, to avoid accumulations—backups—that cause flooding.
In this precarious (and at times, deadly) game of musical chairs, no one wants to be left standing with more water than their (sub)system can handle—and held liable for a flood by superiors. With declining storage, their drainage operations have increasingly come to resemble a distorted version of “just in time” logistics described by Bernes (2013): the engineers’ goal is to maximise the circulation of wastewater through conduits and minimise its stagnation and accumulation at nodes in the network, like these reservoirs.
In the process, the render a diffuse array of neighborhoods disposable – but in fleeting ways that make it very difficult to organize any kind of resistance.
And so, the question is of course what is to be done? I take inspiration here from what some critical logistics scholars like Jasper Bernes have called “counter-logistics” or a “logistics against logistics,” in his terms, a use of the very techniques of logistics to undermine and block those same flows. What would, then, a counter-logistics of waste look like? How could engineering, cartography, and other techniques be used in order to trace and connect these disparate struggles, and hold the state accountable for this systematic, engineered violence? These are the questions I am now wrestling with.
Thank you.