The West After Water: Extractions, Frictions, and Power in the Desert Southwest

Poster Session
Samuel Owen  

The following study provides a critical inquiry into the infrastructures of extraction, circulation, and accumulation that enable American-style urbanism to develop in arid regions. Focusing on the exploitation of the Colorado River system for the benefit of Arizona and southern California, this paper highlights the scope of environmental destruction and cultural loss which has resulted from the development of these regions using settler-colonial principles of erasure and infinite growth. In the context of an ever-worsening regional megadrought that threatens the future of thirty-two million people and two percent of the world’s GDP, it is clear that new philosophical approaches to urban design will be necessary to mitigate urban collapse. As an alternative to the dominant settler-colonial perspective through which the Colorado’s network of dams and canals has been constructed, this article investigates the issue of mass water extraction through the lens of the water itself. Drawing from Macarena Gomez-Barris’s notion of “submerged perspectives,” the river can be divided into three eco-regions: the “spared” river, the conquered river, and the artificial river. In conclusion, this research hypothesizes regenerative urban design paradigms for these three eco-regions, respecting the fundamental right of the Colorado River to exist in its natural state.