In July, 1965, Lake Texcoco looked more like a desert than a lake. Thousands of hectares were taking the shape of an immense wasteland in the margins of a rapidly-sprawling city. The lakebed was being imagined as a clean slate of infinite possibilities. These possibilities were always thought as extensions, prosthetic limbs, or utopic projections of the city: even the idea of building a park, a stretch of green meadows, trees, and trails, constituted an exercise in taming, designing, demarcating a place which would otherwise spread and contract at will, disregarding the needs of humans. Back then, engineer Nabor Carrillo was able to carry out studies on ground sinking on a small portion of these still-unsegmented lands, south of what back then was the Peñón-Texcoco local road. Carrillo was the first to realize the city was sinking, and that this fact was directly bound to the way it (still) gets its water. [...]
Subsidence
in ENCYCLOPEDIA