DATELINE–Stockholm

Scientific conference in Stockholm concludes with dire predictions for cities around the world. Mexico City cited as leading indicator of current trends.

Cities without clean water or edible food. Impassable roads. Infectious airborne diseases that can decimate an urban population in a matter of days. These are some of the stark predictions issued by a conference of scientists, urban planners, and government officials that convened last week in the capital of Sweden to discuss the current state of the modern metropolis.

The conference, titled “Urban Growth and Sustainable Cities for the Coming Millennium,” featured more than 200 workshops and panel discussions led by some of the world’s top academic and political figures on topics like industrial pollution, water management, transportation policy, global warming, and population control.

Although there were some notes of optimism, the overwhelming sentiment at week’s end was one of sober pessimism. While delivering the closing address, Emile-Henri Adams, a physicist at the Institute for Civic Engineering in Toronto, Canada, spoke of an imminent implosion in the modern city system.

Although there were some notes of optimism, the overwhelming sentiment at week’s end was one of sober pessimism. While delivering the closing address, Emile-Henri Adams, a physicist at the Institute for Civic Engineering in Toronto, Canada, spoke of an imminent implosion in the modern city system.

“A city is a complicated network of energy flows,” Mr. Adams asserted. “The growth of most cities alive today is characterized by disproportion. We are looking at bodies too massive to sustain their own existence – imagine an adult human body with certain organs 20 times the size of the average person. Now imagine that gargantuan creature trying to survive with the kidneys of a child. This is the fate of our metropolises: death by toxicity.”

While the conference concluded with predictions for the future, the majority of the week’s discussions focused on crises already facing cities around the world. One such metropolis on the verge of catastrophe is the largest urban center in the western hemisphere: Mexico City.

The capital of Mexico may also be the first city in modern times to collapse under its own weight. More than 18 million people are cordoned off in an 875-square-mile valley ringed by mountains. Every day, 4 million vehicles take to the streets of central Mexico City. The World Health Organization has declared the city’s atmosphere the most polluted in the world, with only “4 to 20 days a year with ’satisfactory’ air.” In addition to serious contamination problems, the city itself is sinking three to four centimeters a year due to overpumping of the underground water supply.

At the best-attended panel of the conference, representatives from the Latin American Society of Civil Engineers (SICLA), the World Bank, the Mexican government, and researchers from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México held forth on Mexico City’s terminal condition. The picture that emerged from the marathon session was one of desperation and alarm.

“What is happening to us today will happen in Calcutta, Beijing, and Los Angeles in the next 50 years,” stated Simon Bollivar, chair of UNAM’s urban planning department. “The environmental disaster is a function of both the city’s historic role in the colonization of the Americas and its position in the borderless global economy dominated by the transnational corporation.”

Many of the delegates present stressed that the particularities of the Mexico City scenario are common to any of the megalopolises that have risen in the 20th century. According to Bollivar, Mexico City is only the first urban center to succumb to a process taking place around the world as urban sprawl is filled in. The scholar went on to urge attendees to reevaluate urbanization in their own countries in light of Mexico’s breakdown.

Luis Tenicanflas, an advisor to Mexico City’s newly elected mayor Cuauhtémoc Càrdenas, offered a holistic view of the challenges facing the administration. “The growth of crime and the endemic corruption in Mexico are simply another component of the pollution produced by cars, factories, and past government policy. In this, we are the modern city developed to its logical end. And we are dying.”

Days later, as the Stockholm conference on urban growth drew to a close, all eyes were still on Mexico City and its reform-minded mayor, Càrdenas. The engineer and career politician whose father nationalized the oil industry as president of Mexico during the 1930s is just beginning his three-year term as mayor of the dying city. Some of his chief proposals include routing out the criminal culture that has paralyzed the city, expanding light train and electric tram lines to alleviate deadly pollution levels, and replenishing the ancient city’s aquifer with stored rain or treated water.

“Cuauhtémoc,” Càrdenas’s first name, is a tribute to the Aztec emperor who witnessed firsthand the apocalypse of that civilization when the Spanish sacked Tenochtitlan in 1521. It was over the ruins and remnants of Tenochtitlan that Mexico City was first built. It is widely speculated that Càrdenas will run for president of Mexico under the PRD party banner in the year 2000.