Diane Davis, Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism recently co-organized a two-day conference on water with Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Professor of the History of Science and Antonio Madero Professor for the Study of Mexico in Harvard's History of Science Department. The two—co-chairs of the Faculty Committee on Mexico at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies—brought together an unusual group of experts—from historians to hydrologists to border analysts and architects—to think about think about the challenges for water in Mexico and beyond in the context of climate change.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Diane Davis is Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism, Department of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. She recently co-organized a two-day conference on water with Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Professor of the History of Science and Antonio Madero Professor for the study of Mexico in Harvard's History of Science Department. They are both very valuable co-chairs of the faculty committee on Mexico at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. Welcome to Faculty Voices, Diane.
Diane Davis:
Thank you June. Thanks for having me.
June Carolyn Erlick:
My first question is why water?
Diane Davis:
Why water? Well, first of all, water is the most important resource at all global scales, not just in Mexico, every country. Because of climate change and other, both natural and manmade transformations, the problem of either too much water or not enough water is the defining feature, I would say of the anthropocene of the 21st century, not to be too jargonistic. So, it's a problem in general. We in the Mexico committee decided to focus on water. I would say, and I know I'm going on a little long, but there are two reasons and I can elaborate. Well, one reason is that both Gabriela and I, despite coming from very different perspectives and disciplines, have some knowledge of water and in the present or in the past have been involved in questions related to water. So it seemed like a natural conflation of determinants to have this conference.
June Carolyn Erlick:
It's a very unusual conference because usually we think about conferences focusing on social history or the science of water. This was so interdisciplinary, not only bringing together policy makers, scholars, activists, but also spanning many different fields of study from historians to hydrologists to border analysts to architects. Could you talk a bit about that approach and how it came about?
Diane Davis:
Yeah, I'm so glad that you characterized it that way because what I think all of us who were involved, not just Gabriela and myself, but every member of the panel. So every person that we invited for this, as you know, I think you've seen some of the emails, was raving about the opportunity to be in this transdisciplinary environment and how they learned from each other, and maybe that was our larger objective. But when we first started pulling the conference together, we started by thinking about themes that we wanted to look at.
So who owns water? Water and urbanization, which is something that I've been working on, and then water wars at the border. And once we started having these general themes, which we thought were both social, historical, scientific. You can't deal with any of those themes without having interdisciplinary conversations. So our capacity to identify what are critical problematics in thinking about the [inaudible 00:03:28], I say the theory and practice of how water operates, that required us to have different disciplines. When I say required that we thought, well, yeah, let's make sure we have a hydrologist there when we have a historian who's talking about different engineering approaches to water. So they were learning from each other in the process of talking about the themes that we used to structure the conference.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Was there something that really surprised you in the course of being at this two-day conference after you'd organized it?
Diane Davis:
Many things surprised me, but I will start by saying about the keynote panel, which I moderated. So that was the first in my mind. We had a landscape architect Iñaki Echeverría who had taught of the GST, but very important landscape architect in Mexico in the context of a very politically controversial project, which was to design this [foreign language 00:04:22] in the site where Lopez, Oprah door canceled the airport contract. So he is a very politically charged project, but he shared these amazing slides of the design, what he was doing. Then we had a political scientist who wanted to represent the different themes of the conference. Then we asked archeologists, anthropologists that were studying water practices 10,000 years earlier. Anyway, I'm sitting in the front row. We thought, this is great. These are different disciplines, different instances. We knew it was going to be interdisciplinary.
But as I'm sitting in the front row hearing their talks, I started to panic to think, oh my God, will I be able to say anything that unites these three because they seem so disparate. And then I knew we were humming this 10,000 years of kind of water conservation among native indigenous people in the [foreign language 00:05:12] Mexico. And ultimately after she spoke, it kind of all came together. And so I guess my surprise here is that I myself was surprised at the way we could loop back to water practices in the present that were related somehow to water in the past. And if you're interested, the comment that I made, I actually added a third more epistemological Latourian comment about the ways in which 10,000 years ago, there were different modalities for dealing with water. They were two very different ones in two very different seasons. And in modernization, we've tried to look for one solution and engineering a single solution for a single site. And so that started a debate throughout the conference about the idea of a fixed responses to water crisis versus flexible. So it linked to larger epistemological questions about what modernity is. Anyway, I'm going on and on because you can say I loved listening to all my colleagues, but that was a surprise that we even started from the night before to find new synergies across different disciplines.
June Carolyn Erlick:
So how did this flexible versus fixed argument play out?
Diane Davis:
Well, the issue is that, for example, in the original speaker, Lisa Lucero, she talked about different seasonalities, but then we started talking about the way that you build water infrastructure. There was a commentator, Enrique Lomnitz happens to be the son of Claudio Lomnitz and a designer who was doing this water harvesting. But he showed the ways in which in everyday life people are already using both fixed and flexible strategies. So as a concept, we talked about it on the civilizational skill or modern skill, and then it came down to what cities do, how they have water sometime and not another time, how families deal with that fixed and flexibility. So it just resonated in interesting ways, and nobody could have predicted that we didn't think that would necessarily be a theme. It just all fell together in an amazing way.
June Carolyn Erlick:
What sort of role did climate change play?
Diane Davis:
Well, of course the larger elephant in the room of the conversation was the issue of the fact that so many parts of Mexico, I'm not going to talk about Mexico, but we can talk about parts of the world are in a drought, and that in fact, there were a couple slides that showed in countries around the world, not every country is going to face the same problem of water scarcity. Obviously, no matter what country, if you're a city or you're a settlement on the coast with sea level rise, that will impact you. I guess I'm coming back to the thinking about what climate change means for water and the distribution of problems of too much and not enough water. And in Mexico itself, it's already experienced 20 to 30 years of a crisis. The work that I've been doing, as I think I've spoken to you about in the past, is in this struggle over a depleted aquifer outside of Mexico City.
That's a struggle between an internationally owned brewery and local farmers who have been suffering through drought. But what the conference showed is these kinds of problems that create new conflicts that require new legal. We had a whole panel on the who owns the water? We had a lawyer talking about the kind of legal regulations, let's say that even the constitutional, the political jurisdictions in Mexico and elsewhere around the world that were used to resolve issues and have democratic resolutions to service, shall we say, research problems in the past, climate change produces water problems or let's say problems specifically with respect to water that transcend those jurisdictions. So climate change also impacts what can be done about the problem. It not only produces the problem, it produces a mismatch between institutions of governance and laws from the Mexican constitution that was discussed, how they're not really able to deal with the redistribution of water rights.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Wow, that's really interesting. One of the panels that really drew my attention and which I wasn't so aware of before, was the water wars at the border. That's something many of our listeners may not even have imagined. Could you please explain?
Diane Davis:
Right, I will. I'll say a little bit more about that because again, Gabriela has done a lot of work up in Sonora. So a lot of her original work was in Sonora. And I remember when I taught a class up the GSD several years ago on [inaudible 00:09:58] , which is major industrial city in Mexico that is right in the Sonora Desert. So water and climate change was a part of that. Anyway, I'm getting back to why we got to the border. So that work on the border and Gabriela's own knowledge of border area, it's the Sonora, the state of Sonora is also where the Yaquis are, and we had a Yaquis water activist. We decided why don't we think about water on the border too, and not just in the major cities. We were talking about one of the panels was water urbanization.
But once we started thinking about the border, and you might ask a question about who's border, I mean, is there a border between the sovereign nation of the Yaquis and the Mexican national state, that's happening at the border, but then there's also the Colorado River basin and treaties, which govern water that goes across the border from the United States and Mexico. So we thought, let's try to look at the transnational nature, or shall we say the cross sovereignty, cross political jurisdictional nature of water [inaudible 00:10:56] and we thought, let's look at that at the border. I remember a saying as the moderator of that panel that when I was writing the participants to speak with about, can we have a title for your talk, et cetera, almost all of them uniformly said, I don't want to call it a water war. I want to call it like it's a possibility for cooperation.
So that was very interesting to me that we called it water wars of the border because there's a struggle over water. It's not equally distributed. And when we think about sovereigns trying to help their nations, they want resources to help their nations. So often that leads to wars. But in this case, because of the social, cultural, historical fluidity of communities on the north side of the border and the south side of the border, that in a way our panelists weren't saying it's a shared problem. It's not a war, but it's a problem that we have to struggle through.
June Carolyn Erlick:
But how does that problem play out? Do the people in the north have more access to water? What is the issue there?
Diane Davis:
Well, the issue there is the decisions that are being made. And this line also brought up too, we are having "water wars" in the United States between Arizona, Colorado, California. There was a treaty that was signed in the United States, and I think in the early 1930s about how to share water in those three regions that comes from the Colorado River Basin, the implications of who gets water at what degree and what amount has been central to the discussion of both urbanization in the Western United States, but also agricultural development. So there were treaties that were signed back then that now there's fights even among the three US states. And then when you factor that water though is also involved in a different treaty between the US and Mexico, and there is reliance on that water in the north of Mexico as well. But maybe some decisions, it's kind of like a horizontal and vertical treaties. The one that's made between the states and the United States has some bearing on the water that's going to flow back and forth between the US and Mexico and what it means for politics, for treaties, for governance, and for cooperation. And that was a big theme in that last panel.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Okay. So you've been talking about Mexico, the conference focused on Mexico. Both you and Gabriela have a specialty in Mexico, but looking at Latin America as a whole, is the Mexican situation emblematic or is it simply an outlier?
Diane Davis:
That's an excellent question. June, if we go back to some of those slides that we saw about where drought is going to be greatest, there are some countries, for example, Brazil looks like it's not going to have a problem. So there's a scientific answer to this, Chile a little bit. Mexico has much more. So as you move up north up through the continent, there is more of a problem. That doesn't mean that there aren't climate change problems in other places, but we could think for just a moment about the problem of deforestation in Brazil, which is part of the climate change problem that is bringing a water drought in Mexico. So even if right now they are not suffering the same water problem in all the countries, the fate of the region is linked to each other just as we a planet are linked to each other in new ways. That may be the second conference we do. Maybe we'll have to do one in another year about the transnational challenges that come when one country will deforest because it brings money to the economy and then who cares about Mexico. But it's a good question, and I'm not enough of a scientists to be able to say where exactly water crisis is greatest. It's a crisis all over the world, but unevenly spread, which makes it more interesting.
June Carolyn Erlick:
I understand there's a really interesting exhibit that accompanies the conference called Re-Imagining Water's Future. Could you first of all tell us a bit about the exhibit?
Diane Davis:
That exhibit grows out of a couple design studios that we've sponsored here at the GSD. One of which I was originally involved in, but I'm not as involved now, was one on the water conflicts in Apan that I mentioned to you between the Corona Brewery and the Collective Farmers and Lorena Bello Gómez, who's a design critic, professor in the landscape architecture program, has been offering a course for the last two years on the Apan water crisis and encouraging the students to come up with new imaginaries, both ecological but social, political, historical in terms of references to how to go deal with a water crisis with a reference to the history of the region. So that was one of the studio classes where the work was presented. And the second one was offered last fall also by another different professor, design critic and landscape whose Spanish originally Montserrat.
And she was doing her studio on [foreign language 00:16:10] and having students come up with different imaginaries for that. And that built on a studio that she offered two years ago on the Mezquital Valley Valley. So there have been several studios from the Landscape Architecture Department that have brought in urban designers and urban planners, and I was involved in several of them to imagine new ways to plan design and visualize water features. And that was the exhibition. And a lot of the scholars who came to the conference who are more social scientists and not like designers, just love to see the visualization of the problems that we've been talking about for a day and a half.
June Carolyn Erlick:
That's absolutely fascinating. Now you are talking about these problems for a day and a half, you brought together all these people. What's next?
Diane Davis:
Well, now I'm thinking your question. Should we do something about the inter-relationality between water crisis in one territory versus another? Maybe US, Mexico, Brazil? I don't know. Well, first of all, almost everybody that came to the conference [inaudible 00:17:13] say they want to get together again. So maybe there'll be some project or some new conceptualizations or some new opportunity to take these conversations to the next step down the road. But there is a lot of enthusiasm and energy, and I think that we could argue not just because we're focusing on water as an extremely important problem for humanity's future as we started out, but also the experimental interdisciplinarity that we pull together might be worth discussing in pedagogic terms, like how and why we are not doing more of this type of conferencing here at Harvard.
June Carolyn Erlick:
I think that's a really good point to end on. You've been listening to Diane Davis. She is the Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism, Department of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. She recently co-organized a two-day conference on water with Gabriela Soto Laveaga. They're both co-chairs of the faculty committee on Mexico at Dr Class. Thank you so much for being with us, Diane.
Diane Davis:
Thank you June, for giving me the opportunity to share some thoughts on this great event that we were able to host.