In A City on a Lake Matthew Vitz tracks the environmental and political history of Mexico City and explains its transformation from a forested, water-rich environment into a smog-infested megacity plagued by environmental problems and social inequality. Vitz shows how Mexico City's unequal urbanization and environmental decline stemmed from numerous scientific and social disputes over water policy, housing, forestry, and sanitary engineering. From the prerevolutionary efforts to create a hygienic city supportive of capitalist growth, through revolutionary demands for a more democratic distribution of resources, to the mid-twentieth-century emergence of a technocratic bureaucracy that served the interests of urban elites, Mexico City's environmental history helps us better understand how urban power has been exercised, reproduced, and challenged throughout Latin America.

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Kenia, Mhyrre, and Tyrael discover something wonderful, something magical at the bottom of the lake. But they're not the first ones to find it, and now they may be the last.

“Lake City is a darkly funny and extremely relevant debut novel about American inequality and moral authority, featuring a sad–sack antihero who takes way too long to grow up. When he finally does, the results are beautiful, and the book ultimately becomes an elegy for a now–gone Seattle, and a lesson in how the place we’re from never fully lets us go.” —Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See Hunkered down in his childhood bedroom in Seattle's worn–out Lake City neighborhood, idealistic but self–serving striver Lane Bueche licks his wounds and hatches a plot to win back his estranged Manhattanite wife. He discovers a precarious path forward when he is contracted by a wealthy adoptive couple to seduce and sabotage a troubled birth mother from his neighborhood. Lane soon finds himself in a zero–sum game between the families as he straddles two cultures, classes, and worlds. Until finally, with the well–being of the toddler at stake, Lane must choose between wanting to do the right thing (if he could only figure out what that is) and reclaiming his idea of privilege. "Snarky social commentary on the world of Seattle have–nots." —Kirkus Reviews

The City Imperishable's secret master and heir to the long-vacant throne has vanished from a locked room, as politics have turned deadly in a bid to revive the city's long-vanished empire. The city's dwarfs, stunted from spending their childhoods in confining boxes, are restive. Bijaz the Dwarf, leader of the Sewn faction among the dwarfs, fights their persecution. Jason the Factor, friend and apprentice to the missing master, works to maintain stability in the absence of a guiding hand. Imago of Lockwood struggles to revive the office of Lord Mayor in a bid to turn the City Imperishable away from the path of destruction. These three must contend with one another as they race to resolve the threats to the city.

Fifteen-year-old Caroline Quiner, who will become the mother of Laura Ingalls Wilder, moves to Milwaukee in 1855 to experience city life and attend school.