Lecture
The City on a Lake: Particular Environments and Global Paradigms in the Making of Mexico City
- Matthew Vitz (UC San Diego)
- Date
- Wednesday 21 May 2025
- Time
- Address
-
Wijnhaven
Turfmarkt 99
2511 DP The Hague - Room
- 3.48
Mexico City’s history is in many ways emblematic of major metropolises in the global south, if not everywhere. Long a dynamic economic center and political capital, Mexico City, one of the first megacities outside Europe and the United States, experienced explosive population growth and industrial development in the twentieth century that led to the formation of hundreds of informal peripheral settlements and a host of environmental problems such as dire air pollution.
Mexico City is also a rather peculiar place, with a unique political ecology and history. It sits on a vast and mostly dried lakebed in an enclosed basin (The Basin of Mexico) at over 2,000 meters above sea level, conditions that worsen air pollution, magnify the effects of earthquakes, and cause both water scarcity and perennial flooding. Moreover, Mexico’s three-decade history of social revolution and reform (1910-1940) provided peasant and urban popular classes a set of political structures to contest the unequal nature of urban-environmental change.
This talk traces this history of political contestation over water, land, and forests in Mexico City and the larger Basin of Mexico while placing these local and particular political-ecological processes within wider global patterns of urban-environmental governance. In doing so, I aim to explain how shared global urban paradigms—such as the quest for the “sanitary city,” urban regional planning, and environmentalism—during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were employed and reworked at the local level and how those local articulations sometimes reverberated outwards. Mexico City’s emblematic and peculiar characteristics, thus, can be explained by means of its environmental history
About the speaker
Matthew Vitz is associate professor of Latin American History at UC-San Diego where he also directs the Global South Studies Program. His areas of expertise include urban and environmental history and modern Mexico. His first book A City on a Lake: Urban Political Ecology and the Growth of Mexico City was published by Duke University Press in 2018. He has also published articles in Hispanic American Historical Review, Journal of Social History, and Historia Ambiental Latinoamericana y Caribeña, among others. Most recently he completed a Cambridge Element for the Global Urban History series titled Globalizing Urban Environmental History.
His current research seeks to explain the historical formation of a variety of environmentalisms in Mexico across a range of rural and urban spaces where big development schemes seeking to exploit natural resources became focal points of both a new politicized ecology and popular land claims during the 1970s and 80s. These histories reveal the limits and possibilities of popular environmentalism in Mexico and elsewhere.
Vitz has also contributed to several blogs and podcasts in urban, environmental, and Mexican history, and has written on the environmental history of Mexico City in the Mexican newspaper La Jornada.