UC Berkeley

Traditional accounts of Mexico City’s environmental crisis focus on the city’s rapid population explosion in the 20th century. Population based theories of the environmental crisis misdiagnose as 'bios' conditions that are inextricable from the city’s 'geos,' obfuscating the central geological relationships that structure life in the city. In Five Soils, urban and anthropogenic soils are taken up as a lens through which to examine the vertical geopolitics of the larger Mexico City-Mezquital Valley system. Each these five soils reveals something crucial about the politics and epistemologies that shape our understanding of urban ground.