Envisioning Water: Sustainability and Future-Making in Dubai and Los Angeles

Abstract

The following dissertation explores how the future of water is being imagined, planned and prepared for in two dryland cities – hyper-arid Dubai and semi-arid Los Angeles – as the climate changes and as they face increasing pressures to become more ‘sustainable.’ Both Dubai and LA are cities that have long been deemed unsustainable, but are aiming to become sustainability leaders. Dubai, which relies on energy-intensive desalination and has high water consumption, including in ubiquitous urban greening, is investing heavily in achieving efficiencies and powering water through clean energy. Los Angeles, which sources the majority of its water through aqueduct systems from faraway places where water is becoming increasingly taxed, is looking to produce more of its water supply locally, and especially through wastewater recycling. Throughout the dissertation, I trace the plans, projects, and policies being introduced in this vein to consider how ‘sustainability’ initiatives play out and get negotiated through the socio-political and political economic structures in the two cities to unique effects. To get at sustainability’s variegated forms and effects, I first view sustainability as a “boundary object” (Star and Griesemer) and “technology of imagination” (Pederson et. al). Treating sustainability as a “boundary object” that is shared but viewed differently by actors enables me to hone in on the interests and forces - sometimes countervailing - that shape sustainability projects. Treating it as a technology of imagination allows me to get at the imaginative effects that sustainability projects constitute. Second, I consider how these interests, forces, and effects emerge from and get mediated through entrenched structures like bureaucratic systems, accumulation regimes, and sunken investments, which produce a stickiness to infrastructures and infrastructural visions that renders change challenging, slow, and incremental. As such, I show, for instance, how Dubai’s highly centralized governance structure and foreign-investment development model produce an emphasis on sustainability’s enhancement of the city-state’s competitiveness agenda that can belie larger eco-realities, while LA’s fragmented institutional, regulatory, and financing scapes complicate collaboration on recycling projects which span across and exceed individual institutional mandates.

Finally, alongside the municipal projects I focus on, I also look at visions of the future by artists, designers, and architects to get at how the arts might provide alternatives that in some cases could help get beyond the stickiness of sustainability as it is currently being imagined.