Tenth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

Sea-water desalination - turning the ocean into drinking water - is being promoted to supply urban areas with a “drought-proof” technological fix, marking an important transition in the social construction of the environment through infrastructure. Why, after the “mega-project” era was declared to have ended by the 1980’s, is there now a return to industrial water supply efforts? Desalination has emerged as a surprising supply-side solution to water scarcity, because of high carbon emissions, high costs, and negative impacts to coastal ecology. Thus, this paper interrogates Ulrich Beck’s risk society thesis, which argues that contemporary risks will be invisible, and non-insurable. Yet, water scarcity is a visible manifestation of climate related problems, where the solutions are heavily calculated by governments, and private equity investors seeking to financialize the problems of the Anthropocene. Thus, financial relations are remaking the California riskscape geographically and socially, meaning the politics of the return of mega-infrastructure are trans-scalar - crossing multiple levels of social action - and forming the foundation for contestation. The paper shows how state actors partner with transnational private finance to fundamentally reshape the California riskscape, while local activists operate under a model of ecological modernization - that society would transition to a situation wherein nature’s position in capitalist society would be strengthened, although the economic order would remain largely intact. As such, the return to infrastructure, at the nexus of environmental, social, and financial riskscapes, represents an effort to deal with modernity’s problems, rather than allowing society to transcend them.