‘Another Venice in the World’ with a Different Outcome. From Tenochtitlán to the Creation of the Urban Valley of Mexico

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Abstract

This lesson aims to contrast the geohydrological trajectory of Venice in the early modern period with that of another water city in the New World: the city of Mexico-Tenochtitlán. If Venice has been proposed as an Anthropocene city, the same could be said of Tenochtitlán, since both were built on artificial islands. But in the long term, the different policies of relationship between the city and its aquatic environments have produced opposite environments in both cases, for while the lagoon of Venice has been preserved, the lake of the Valley of Mexico has practically been transformed into a mega-city. This reminds us of the importance in the Anthropocene of our imaginaries of the relationship between society and the environment, and of the competing interests that can drive very different projects with contrasting outcomes for both society and the environment.


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Published June 10, 2025 | Language: en

Copyright © 2025 Omar Rodriguez. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-933-7/010


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