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Governing beyond capacity: Engineering, banality, and the calibration of disaster in Mexico City

Material type: TextSeries: ; American Ethnologist, 49(1), p.20-34, 2022Contained works:
  • Chahim, D
Subject(s): Online resources: Abstract: How are disasters made into routine, even banal parts of everyday life? In Mexico City the spatiality and temporality of disasters have become an object of dynamic governmental manipulation. The city's water engineers use a vast drainage tunnel system to strategically transform what would otherwise be catastrophic flooding of the city center into a slow-moving, spatially diffuse, and ultimately routine environmental problem for the poor on the urban periphery. Furthermore, to prevent unrest, the engineers deliberately modulate flooding within the thresholds of what populations can perceive and bear. This technopolitical work, which I call calibration, has emerged as a crucial means of governing beyond capacity, of maintaining social control even amid the unfolding of a disaster that has exceeded a government's capacity to prepare for or prevent.
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How are disasters made into routine, even banal parts of everyday life? In Mexico City the spatiality and temporality of disasters have become an object of dynamic governmental manipulation. The city's water engineers use a vast drainage tunnel system to strategically transform what would otherwise be catastrophic flooding of the city center into a slow-moving, spatially diffuse, and ultimately routine environmental problem for the poor on the urban periphery. Furthermore, to prevent unrest, the engineers deliberately modulate flooding within the thresholds of what populations can perceive and bear. This technopolitical work, which I call calibration, has emerged as a crucial means of governing beyond capacity, of maintaining social control even amid the unfolding of a disaster that has exceeded a government's capacity to prepare for or prevent.

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