Modernist ontologies of water physically materialise in Phoenix’s landscape: over 100 miles of canals convey water to the suburban grid, where thousands of gallons are piped into backyard swimming pools. The canal and pool are thus joined in architectural folly to move, hold, and control water in the service of sustaining the belief that dry ecologies are but supply chain problems in need of engineering solutions. These typologies reveal longstanding entanglements between the promises of modernity and aridland urbanism; and they further amplify the immense challenge of transitioning away from modern water infrastructure in the face of climate change. By using the canal and the pool as signifiers of the insidious entanglements between modernity, growth, and aridland urbanism, this article advances an historical examination of Phoenix that destabilises tropes of water scarcity as a problem to be solved but which has also created cultural perceptions of abundant water.

Modern ideology strips water of its sociocultural and political contexts, reducing it to the scientific abstraction of H2O. This reductivist approach to water has erased longstanding ontologies and physically transformed America's aridlands to advance modern political and economic agendas. By studying the 1947 proposal for the Orme Dam and the Yavapai Nation's forty-year resistance to it, this paper reveals the interconnected relationship between modern ideology and the design, development, and management of the environment. I also suggest that the inclusion of alternative ontologies can inspire the design of more just and resilient environments.