Loving it to death
Description
The idea of taming the Desert Southwest has captivated the American psyche for hundreds of years. The intoxicating beauty of the wide-open and wild landscape has lured people westward. The lure remains: the U.S. census figures are forecasting that by the year 2030, more than 67 million people will live in the West and that Nevada, Arizona, and Utah will be among the top 5 states in the nation in terms of percentage of population increase. The survival of the Desert Southwest's ecosystem depends greatly on the geographic distribution of this growing population. As the Desert Southwest's population continues to grow, a new urban paradigm is needed. Americans’ 20th century desire to live in nature in order to escape the squalor of the city has been fueled by the automobile and highway systems. These conditions have defined a sprawling and suburbanized pattern of settlement throughout the United States. Charles Waldheim says, “Across many disciplines, and for many centuries, the city and the country have been called upon to define each other through a binary opposition.” Resulting urban models sought to dissolve this opposition between city and nature. Such development had enormous horizontal spatial implications. But, as Edward Glaeser puts it, “it would be a lot better for the planet if their urbanized populations lived in dense cities built around the elevator, rather than in sprawling areas built around the car.” Our horizontal development has had devastating effects on the ecosystems they encroach upon and swallow up. One landscape that is particularly threatened by our outward sprawl is the Sonoran Desert located in the Southwestern United States. The beauty of the wild and unique desert landscape has drawn people and development to it for centuries. The dilemma is that the closer we get, and the more that we try to live within this natural world, the more we destroy it. The suburban development in the region has had a disregard for water usage and resources. Diverted waters from the West’s great rivers, rising temperatures, highways, and loss of habitat have made an arid climate even more unforgiving, put desert flora and fauna in danger of extinction, and endangered the landscape that has been our muse for hundreds of years. This thesis aims to define an intimate relationship between city and nature in the Desert Southwest, but unlike its historical counterparts, proposes that we build up instead of out in order to reduce water and energy use, contain expansion and growth, and begin to repair the land that we have loved to death.