Abstracts Geography

Thirsty by Design Regulating Water Access in the Coachella Valley

by Jessica Bremner

In the Coachella Valley, issues of water access are spatial in nature. Residents of the Eastern Coachella Valley experience water insecurity, while residents and visitors of the Western Coachella Valley have access to water for both potable and non-potable purposes. My dissertation takes the spatial inequality of water access between the two regions as a foundation for inquiry. I ask: How did the Coachella Valley’s spatial inequality in water access develop, deepen, and become exacerbated? I answer this question using the extended case method with water access in the Coachella Valley as my case. I use spatial analysis to examine the geographic patterns of water access over time, situating them within the institutional and water source context of the Coachella Valley. I analyze policy and archival documents to understand three conjunctural eras of spatial inequality in water access. I start with early United States settler colonialism in the late 1800s in the Coachella Valley. I then examine regional government formation for water management from the early 1900s to mid-century. Finally, I analyze contemporary land and water use policies that currently exacerbate spatial inequality in water access. I find that United States settler colonial policies were used by early settlers to dispossess Coachella Valley Indigenous communities of land and water, developing spatial inequality in water access. This spatial inequality, first presented as a racialized checkerboard spatial pattern between Indian/public and non-Indian/private land, deepened with the 1918 formation of a regional government to manage water provision and distribution, the Coachella Valley Water District. The water district, designed to grow the agriculture industry, established a center/periphery pattern of water access based on use where access to agricultural water was found in the periphery and access to domestic water was built in the region’s urban core. Today, regional county land use and water district regulations exacerbate both spatial patterns. Their growth for growth policies (that require new private development to expand public infrastructure provision) pursue peri-urbanization through luxury tourist developments. In doing so, they increase socio-economic disparities and decrease geographic proximity between those who have access and those who lack access to water.