Abstract
The engineers who manage Mexico City’s vast combined sewer and drainage infrastructures are constantly improvising new ways to cajole water to flow through the crumbling system even as the city sinks due to anthropogenic land subsidence. Their labor to maintain the system amid decades of deferred maintenance and adapt to rapidly changing environmental conditions might be seen as positive acts of care for the present and future. And yet these engineers instead understand their work as a necessary but inadequate response to a condition of state abandonment, manifest in ever-insufficient budgets. Engineers find themselves today treading water in the shadow of fading modernist plans from a mid-20th century period when “solutions” to the city’s persistent flooding – however flawed we now understand them to be – were still imaginable. And their creative work to keep the city (if only every partially) above water makes the breakdown of the drainage system so ordinary that it ceases to galvanize political attention. Paradoxically, by keeping the system running just “well enough,” they make it possible for the government to continue to deny the budgets necessary for the restoration of the system, leading to ever more flooding for the poor. The talk suggests a critical rethinking of the political function of both maintenance and adaptation and asks what we might recover from the modernist dream amid the devastating conjuncture of austerity and anthropogenic environmental change.
Biography
Dean Chahim (PhD, Stanford University) is an anthropologist whose research and teaching broadly trace the interactions between political power, engineering, and the urban environment. Previously trained as an environmental engineer, his work asks both how unjust environmental conditions are produced and sustained through engineering and how engineering practice might be reconfigured to challenge injustice and design for radically different futures. His current book project takes up these concerns through the case of Mexico City’s vast and deeply unequal flood control system. Drawing on both ethnographic and archival research, the book shows how engineering becomes a mode not of mitigating, but governing disasters: of maintaining rule over populations living in increasingly hazardous environments. This project has been funded by the American Council for Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Prior to NYU, he taught at the University of Texas at El Paso and was a Fellow in the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities at Princeton University.
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