As any of you who’ve played SimCity know, it is easy to treat a city’s symptoms than its problems. Need more water, build pumps and aqueducts. Need more land? Fill in lakes. Have problems with flooding? Well, that isn’t a SimCity thing, but in real life, you build dikes and drainage.

Mexico City, formerly the great metropolis of Tenochtitlán was one of the first megacities in the world, and 700 years ago, it was already dealing with these issues. This Aztec city was originally built in the center of a great briny lake, and to support its large population, the salty water had to be kept out while fresh water was transported in.

In 1521, the city fell to the Spanish, who drained the lake and just kept building. As the city has grown to become one of the largest in the world, it has begun to sink as fresh water is pumped away, and it has continued to struggle with flooding and other water-related issues.

Today, geographers led by Beth Tellman are using this ancient city as a case study to understand how we need to look at cities as a whole and consider how water tables, surface water, and flooding are all interrelated.  We can’t treat each as a separate symptom. This problem is affecting Boston, where the big dig drained land that is now sinking; Jakarta and Venice, which are just sinking while waters rise, and many other places around the world. 

This research makes it clear that city planners need to treat water as a system, just like we have to treat blood circulation as a system and do more than just treat symptoms. Our world is, in many ways, alive, and the same errors doctors make – treat symptoms only – can be just as catastrophic with a planet as with a person.

More Information

AGU press release