Lyn wendon biography of barack

Making Desert Cities

Modern desert cities, such as Phoenix, Albuquerque, Tucson, Las Vegas, even Riyadh and Dubai, are

being made in ways that reflect the capacity of post-industrial technology to overwhelm the limitations

that constrained the forms of older, pre-industrial, desert cities. This work questions whether both the

technology and the living patterns that typify such modern desert cities are sustainable. It also looks at

some older desert cities to see if they have much to teach us about how to live well in desert cities without

an excessive dependence on non-renewable resources, and without placing so much stress on the

environment. At the same time, as Amos Rapoport and Besim Hakim have suggested, we must recognize

that the forms in which cities are made respond as much, or more, to cultural imperatives, as to issues of

climate and technology. We need to be cautious, therefore, as we derive these lessons and attempt to

apply them. Nonetheless, many of these older cities, such as Yazd in Iran, Shibam in Yemen, Jaisalmer

in India, and Marrakesh in Morocco, have evolved in response to their desert contexts over extended

periods of time. Some have even survived significant cultural shifts, such as in Sana’a in Yemen, with

the arrival of Islam after many centuries of growth. It is argued that they may provide valuable models,

regarding compact urban form, alternative house forms, climate control and its optimization, water usage

and its celebration, low-energy construction materials and methods, even the nature of windows, in the

making of modern desert cities.

Desert cities in the United States, such as Phoenix or El Paso, even Los Angeles and San Diego, face

a unique responsibility as they provide models for what it means to live a “modern” life in a desert

environment. Following these models can multiply by many times the stresses placed on other ecological

and political systems as they are emulated, p