Project

Mexico City's Deepening Water Crisis

The largest city in Latin America is running out of water, with groundwater depleted at a rate that means buildings are sinking by a metre a year. What do you do when a city is sinking? How do you carry on as if things are all right when they clearly are not? This last question cannot only be asked of Mexico City, of course—it’s one we are all trying to answer regarding the global water crisis, but it’s more pressing, perhaps, in a city of 23 million people.

In this project, Rosa Lyster speaks to ordinary people and to the officials whose job it is to manage this crisis, asking what a normal day looks like for them and how they imagine their city’s future and the futures of other cities facing the same frightening problem in a world that is running out of water.