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Autumn

2019

A Killer Air: Delineating Disaster in Mexico City

Published
2019-12-12

Abstract

Mexico City is prone to extreme environmental risks. Such hazards shape the lives of the valley's inhabitants. Yet, since the 1960s, its residents have grappled with changing conceptions of urban-environmental risk, particularly related to the air they breathed. Three decades of dedicated urban-industrial growth, combined with a geography hostile to the free flow of air into and out of the valley, resulted in a new disaster: a killer air. Defining this air as a danger to the city’s prosperity and the lives of its inhabitants was a deeply political and power-laden process, marked by economic, rather than health, concerns.