The Logistics of Waste: Engineering, Capital Accumulation, and the Growth of Mexico City

Abstract

AbstractHow is capital accumulation sustained in the Anthropocene, even as it threatens to overwhelm everyone—capitalists included—in ever‐growing quantities of waste? This paper examines this question at the metropolitan scale, focusing on the growth of Greater Mexico City. In a bid to spur capital accumulation, governments across the megacity increasingly push for new urban developments that encroach on the already‐strained drainage system, limiting its capacity to prevent floods. To protect these developments, state engineers now regularly divert wastewater through the homes and streets of marginalised areas of the metropolis. Even as these diversions turn marginal neighbourhoods into ephemeral waste conduits, the transience of wastewaters and the complexity of engineers’ operations limit the possibilities for collective resistance. This calculative management of the flows of waste—here termed the logistics of waste—is a critical yet understudied way engineering sustains the accumulation of capital and limits popular resistance to elite‐led projects of endless growth.