How do you live with water when there simply isn't enough of it? Why did an island that had spent centuries learning to do exactly that suddenly stop? And why does the answer to both of those questions matter far beyond one small island in the Atlantic?
In this episode, architect Pablo Castillo Luna reads his text "Arid Infrastructures: Water beyond techno-optimism in the island of Lanzarote."
Lanzarote is, in many ways, a preview of where a lot of the world is heading: a hot, dry territory with no natural freshwater, that for generations built entire cultures of care, maintenance, and shared responsibility around scarcity — and that then, almost overnight, handed that relationship over to a desalination plant and a control panel. That shift, from water as something you live with to water as a resource managed by technical experts, is happening quietly almost everywhere, and it rarely gets questioned. Pablo's text asks what gets lost when it does, and what we might still learn from the infrastructures it replaced.
The text builds on Pablo's project "A Permeable Atlas," shown in our exhibition "Slow Down" at the Copenhagen Architecture Biennial.
Post Notes
