In the 16th century, Lake Texcoco was an uninterrupted body of water that stretched all the way to the edge of the Chapultepec Forest in the west and over to the limit of the Texcoco Kingdom in the east. In the maps from that era, it is depicted as a wide-reaching circle that contains a large blue surface dotted only by the small island of Tenochtitlan. As the desiccation initiated, the lake was displaced to the Texcoco region, in an attempt to drive it out of the city. In spite of this, it largely remained one body, one single patch, although parted by straight and diagonal lines that progressively adapted to the political divisions of the neighboring grounds. At the beginning of the 20th century, the borders of the lake where reduced to edges and lines drawn with the neatness and sovereignty of the fast-growing urban territories. These territories were spilling onto each other and set up barriers to contain each other’s encroachment. Rather than an edge that follows the curves of the water touching the land, the lake became a combination of polygons, isosceles triangles, and perfect circles, measurable by the devices of Euclidean geometry. Towards the 70s, once it was depleted, the lake became a great desert of white, uninterrupted soil, framed by the growing neighborhoods of the outskirts, tucked between the city and the ring formed by the state of Mexico around it: the fusion of a polygon, a circle and a rectangle. [...]
Highway
in ENCYCLOPEDIA