In a warming world, dominated by excessive rain in some areas and drought in others, arcology designers propose a Nevada city that would rely on landscapes right out of Frank Herbert’s classic novel, Dune (which was made an equally classic film of the same name).
The Sietch, Nevada urban prototype, a cellular system of subterranean enclaves, provides a defense against arid climates and an urban landscape atop a network of canals connecting the city with vast aquifers deep underground which deliver both transportation and agricultural irrigation.
The Sietch project envisions a densely packed honeycomb of underground canals flanked by residential and commercial structures, while the inverse surfaces act as domed greenhouses for agriculture, aquaculture and energy production. Water in this model is the most important commodity available, almost sacred, as among the Fremen of Dune, whose entire civilization was constructed around the cultivation and banking of water on a planet that has undergone complete desertification.
Sietch is part of the “Out of Water: innovative technologies in arid climates” exhibit at the University of Toronto via Matsys. The Sietch is conceptually grounded in a future where water is scarce and humans in arid climates survive on their mastery of hydrology. But the seemingly outlandish sci-fi roots of this concepts’ design are starkly real, as the Colorado River and aquifers are tasked to their limits, and water becomes increasingly commoditized the world over.
When this happens in the continental U.S., over the Colorado River – predicted to run dry by 2057 – the ensuing violence will be unimaginable, as crops from the Western Slope (of Colorado) to California’s fertile southern valleys are allowed to dry up. This, in turn, will lead to a shortage of fresh fruit and vegetables such as this nation hasn’t seen since the Great Depression.
But it won’t just be crops. The Colorado River watershed provides water to treatment plants for drinking and washing to about 24 million people in the states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California.
As Sietch project creators Aziza Chaouni and Liat Margolis note, water scarcity is a problem global in scope, with 28 percent of the earth’s surface classified as either arid or semi-arid according to the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP). These zones are likely to expand as climate change takes it toll, creating significant population displacement, political turmoil and death – a toll exacerbated by rising populations and increases in both agricultural and industrial use of water.
Already, water banking is a standard practice and growing industry in the U.S. Southwest. In places like Detroit, water – something historically ubiquitous and taken for granted – has become something many struggle to obtain, as the recession cuts into the basic affordability of essential services. In the winter of 2008, the city cut supply to some 40,000 inner-city households – almost all of them African American – for delinquent bills. Many of those affected were elderly and children.
If you can conceive of how difficult something like peak oil is, try to imagine peak water and you will be in the correct frame of mind to understand the Sietch Nevada vision.
The Sietch is depicted in Dune as being not only the communal living space of an embattled people maintaining their own secluded water cache, but a “place of assembly in time of danger”. An apt scene, then, for the future of the American Southwest, as dwindling resources invalidate an entire way of life, forcing a dystopian management of the most precious resource on earth.
Water is life. We are constantly using water in so many ways, and even if we were to limit these ways, its lack would put our very existence in jeopardy. Until we start building cities like Sietch Nevada, where hydrology and the successful integration of humans with the biome can occur (or something every similar), we must accept the fact that somewhere out there on the horizon of the future looms a desperate situation where life becomes so perilous that even the simplest joys – a cup of coffee, a shower – are surrendered just to survive.
It is not just the growing scarcity of water in regions like the target site in Nevada, though. Globally, the fundamental problem is that water, as life, means that access to it literally is the difference between life and death. “Differences in availability across and within regions” according to a UNDP Human Development Report, constitute the major challenge in a world where water is abundant and yet 1.2 billion people do not have access to safe water.
The report also highlights the crushing statistics about access to fresh water: in Yemen, each person is allotted 198 cubic meters, while Canadians have 90,000 liters.
Similar inequities repeat themselves within the continental U.S., where some states have abundant water while others, like California never satisfy their demand.
The reality of having to take the Sietch model of hydrological architecture seriously is no longer science fiction and future. It is here, and it is now. And, in its way, the Sietch model is both a damning indictment of our former resource profligacy, and a testament to the haphazard sloppiness we still use in designing and implementing civilization’s systems.
As the earth grows ever more imbalanced ecologically, these crude human systems we have designed, and failed to perfect out of laziness, lack of will or sheer indifference, will become increasingly less relevant, and subject to catastrophe.
In fact, it is our failure to design systems like Sietch, for arid climates like the U.S. Southwest, which will inevitably result in the very water-hoarding society the project envisions.
Andrew Kudless of Matsys signified the impending doom of the American Southwest, with its sprawling, wasteful landscapes, by offering up this design which recognizes that water conservation and efficient usage will be, as Kudless puts it, the “fundamental factor” in the design of future cities for arid biomes.
The future of the human species itself hinges on our adept mastery of water use and conservation; a future which the people of America’s southwest are going to have to deal with it a little sooner than the rest of us.
As alien, and perhaps even “tin-foil hat” paranoid as the Sietch concept may seem, it is likely better to begin dealing with such eventualities – which require massive engineering initiatives and capital outlays to accomplish – than to wait until we no longer have the resources or money to tackle the problem.
The Sietch Nevada project was created by Matsys innovators Andrew Kudless (Design), Nenad Katic (Visualization), Tan Nguyen, Pia-Jacqlyn Malinis, Jafe Meltesen-Lee, Ben (Model). Matsys is an architectural design studio that explores the emergent relationships between architecture, engineering, biology, and computation.
Read more great articles on Celsias:
