Rivers in the Desert

Over the past two decades, the history of Los Angeles has attracted a growing number of scholars drawn to the City of Angels because its story is at once intriguing in and of itself and illustrative of larger American issues. In Los Angeles, after all, was first achieved a paradigm - an aqueduct city in an arid to semi-arid environment, created through engineering and sheer force of will - that has since come to characterize other Southwestern cities as well, most notably Phoenix and Las Vegas. The creation of Los Angeles - or, more correctly, its re-creation - in the early twentieth century as an aqueduct city dramatically asserted that urban civilization could flourish in environments once thought hostile and prohibitive, provided that there be vision, engineering, enlightened self-interest, political will, and (if the truth be told) a certain willfulness, ruthlessness even, capable of imposing a city on an environment resistant of urbanization in traditional terms. From this perspective, the re-creation of twentieth-century Los Angeles through water engineering is a case study (for better or for worse) of how Americans have reorganized their environment through technology and how cities have been created in the wilderness.