Since the early 20th century, Mexico City has sunk more than 30 feet due to unrelenting groundwater extraction. It will continue to sink another 90 feet by the end of this century. This anthropogenic – human-induced – land subsidence causes water lines to crack, subway lines to warp, and buildings to slowly implode. It has also long been the principal cause of the city’s flooding woes and the efforts to document and resolve it dominated the newspaper headlines in the 1950s. And yet land subsidence today has become a mundane fact of life in the city – simultaneously widely acknowledged and widely ignored. This talk excavates the history of how a series of massive engineering adaptations, particularly to the city’s drainage system, transformed the ostensible disaster of land subsidence into a chronic and unremarkable condition of everyday life in North America’s largest metropolis. It suggests that Mexico City might offer a window into our collective future in the Anthropocene, as engineers are called on to design ever more radical adaptations to ensure the survival of capitalism on a burning planet.
This is the third in a four-part series on Engineering and Social Justice produced by the Forum on Technology & the Liberal Arts with support from the Class of 1974 Technology and Liberal Arts Endowment.