자료유형  

 학위논문

Control Number  

0016934414

International Standard Book Number  

9798380268073

Dewey Decimal Classification Number  

305

Main Entry-Personal Name  

Chahim, Dean Mohammed.

Publication, Distribution, etc. (Imprint  

[S.l.] : Stanford University., 2021

Publication, Distribution, etc. (Imprint  

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2021

Physical Description  

1 online resource(367 p.)

General Note  

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 85-03, Section: A.

General Note  

Advisor: Ferguson, James;Ebron, Paulla;Hecht, Gabrielle;Inoue, Miyako;Wolfe, Mikael.

Dissertation Note  

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2021.

Restrictions on Access Note  

This item must not be sold to any third party vendors.

Summary, Etc.  

요약My dissertation challenges the simple yet pervasive notion that engineers "mitigate" or "solve" disasters. It reveals instead how engineering transformsdisasters as a mode of governing amid increasingly strained infrastructures and environments. I focus on the particular case of Mexico City, which floods constantly despite having one of the world's largest urban drainage systems - a vast sewer tunnel network that operates like a subway for rain, industrial pollutants, and human waste. Planned in the 1950s in response to devastating floods in downtown Mexico City and initially completed in 1975, the Deep Drainage system is now buckling under the effects of climate change, explosive urban growth, and decades of neglected maintenance. Nevertheless, engineers managing the system face intense pressure from politicians and property developers to prevent flooding from becoming an obstacle to the city's growth.To understand how engineers designed, built, and now operate the radically inadequate drainage system under these constraints, I spent nearly two years in Mexico City conducting ethnographic, archival, and spatial research. I drew on my engineering training to participate in and observe the actual everyday practices of municipal engineers and workers in the city water utility as I followed them between command centers, design offices, remote infrastructures, and flooded homes. I discovered that by dynamically manipulating floodgates during downpours, engineers routinely determined which neighborhoods flooded and which stayed dry. These improvised operations were inextricable from political considerations: I found engineers avoided, to the extent possible, flooding those wealthy areas whose complaints had far more political weight than those of the poor. To trace the social impacts of these operational decisions, I conducted additional ethnographic fieldwork and oral histories with nineteen frequently flooded communities. Drawing on fragments of spatial data and engineering diagrams, I traced the ways that these seemingly isolated stories and flood events - and my own observations with municipal engineers and workers - were connected through the subterranean workings of the city's drainage system. Concurrently, I conducted research in both public and restricted internal historical archives that engineers gave me unprecedented access to.The core finding of this dissertation is that engineers use their control to ration access to the drainage system across the city in ways that reproduce urban inequality while minimizing social unrest. They strategically avoid politically catastrophic floods in wealthy central neighborhoods by creating a slow-moving and spatially diffuse patchwork of flooding on the impoverished periphery. These floods of sewage and rainwater cause bacterial infections, triple commute times, and ruin homes. Yet they are so routinized - by design - that they have become a banal problem of everyday life for the poor that gathers little news and inspires few protests. I argue that by materially, spatially, and temporally reconfiguring flooding in this way, engineers have made the city's unsustainable growth both imaginable and politically tenable.More broadly, this dissertation shows how engineering becomes an increasingly crucial modality of state power that preempts social unrest over growing environmental crises. Through designs and operations that shift how, when, and where disasters are experienced, engineers make the temporality and spatiality of disaster into objects of governmental manipulation. In so doing, engineers have become essential mediatorswho negotiate between increasingly strained environments, abandoned public infrastructures, and developmentalist imaginaries of endless growth. This mediation is an essential yet understudied element not only in the work of government, but also the intertwined processes of urbanization and capital accumulation, which depend on engineers to "fix" capital into the built environment. This dissertation furthermore demonstrates that focusing on the mediation of engineers allows us to take seriously the political effects of material things while still foregrounding considerations of political power and responsibility for mounting environmental injustices in cities.

Subject Added Entry-Topical Term  

Ethnography.

Subject Added Entry-Topical Term  

Political activism.

Subject Added Entry-Topical Term  

Floods.

Subject Added Entry-Topical Term  

Cultural anthropology.

Subject Added Entry-Topical Term  

Latin American studies.

Subject Added Entry-Topical Term  

Political science.

Subject Added Entry-Topical Term  

Sociology.

Added Entry-Corporate Name  

Stanford University.

Host Item Entry  

Dissertations Abstracts International. 85-03A.

Host Item Entry  

Dissertation Abstract International

Electronic Location and Access  

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Control Number  

joongbu:643153