Desert arcologies and path dependencies

• Main Author: RANDLE, Sayd
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2022
• Subjects: Environmental Policy
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cis_research/104; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/cis_research/article/1103/viewcontent/desert_arcologies.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

In Phoenix, Arizona last year, the local high temperature topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit on 145 days, a new record. Of those 145, 53 days saw top temperatures above 110 and 14 days exceeded 115 – also new peaks. Taken together, these numbers strongly suggest that to live out 2020 in Phoenix was to inhabit an environment sliding towards a painful, and perhaps even hellish, new baseline. Of course, numbers are known to occlude at least as much as they reveal. But in the case of Arizona’s largest metropolitan area, they’re useful for framing a certain conventional wisdom about the place: greater Phoenix, that monstrosity of a suburban city, land of putting greens and cul-de-sacs and backyard swimming pools in the desert, is well on its way to being uninhabitably hot and dry. Though climate change is appropriately fingered as a driver, the very shape and extent of the built environment – they built enough generic strip malls for four and half million people here? – is also widely cited as its own kind of evidence and argument for the city’s inevitable downward trajectory. Developed with so much piped-in water and so many subprime mortgages, this is a place with decline baked into its low-density subdivisions long ago, plodding along its path towards dystopia. They built it like this, the thinking goes, so eventually it must decay into that.