Around the world, water-related crises abound, whether from lack of rain or an excess of it. Just this summer, Hurricane Beryl wreaked havoc across the Caribbean and Gulf Coast. If the intensity and frequency of these events is aptly attributed to climate change, the conversation seldom extends into the realities of water management. And while all manner of sustainable design practices currently define architectural discourse, methods of designing around water infrastructure remain a challenge.
For Anthony Acciavatti, who has been studying water for nearly two decades, groundwater is the hidden front line of climate change. The difficulty of visualizing groundwater, and our inability to understand it through traditional sociopolitical boundaries, is the subject of a recent exhibition of his work, Groundwater Earth: The World Before and After the Tubewell. Sebastián López Cardozo and Harish Krishnamoorthy sat down with Acciavatti to talk about his research, the role of water in design practice, and what the future of groundwater looks like.
Sebastián López Cardozo and Harish Krishnamoorthy: Why water—why now?
Anthony Acciavatti: There is an urgency to studying water today, one that I think is best understood by two measurements: 80 centimeters and 959 cubic kilometers. The earth’s tilt shifted 80 centimeters between 1993 and 2010 due to the amount of groundwater we have extracted as a species. And in 2018, we extracted 959 cubic kilometers of groundwater, an amount equal to two Lake Eries. This is the hidden front line of climate change.
How is this water extracted and what is it used for?
The fulcrum, as it were, is the millions of hand pumps and tube wells in use today. Tube wells are bored into aquifers and driven by either an electric or oil-powered engine. These are fantastic technologies because they transform groundwater into infrastructure for agriculture and urban growth. As minor technologies with a global reach, they allow us to transcend surface water bodies like canals, rivers, or lakes. They can be sunk almost anywhere, they are portable, they provide water on demand, and they are managed independently. But they can give an owner the sense of being insulated from the caprices of water bureaucracies and rainfall patterns.
Tube well users have withdrawn copious amounts of water with little regard for their environmental impact. Today, nearly half the global population drinks groundwater on a daily basis, and over half of all agriculture is irrigated with it. With population growth, lack of municipal water supply, and widening socioeconomic differences, more and more people have come to rely on groundwater extraction.
You’re trained as an architect. Where does your work fit within architecture practice?
My work has largely focused on the ways surface water bodies like lakes and rivers overlap with subsurface water bodies like aquifers. Studying this can shed light on the ways in which rainfall and groundwater interface with urban growth and agricultural production.
While numerous earth scientists have studied the impacts of groundwater extraction, architects and designers are uniquely poised to visualize and measure the ways in which cities and farms draw from the subsurface to terraform the surface. And we are able to do so from the scale of the house and the neighborhood to the city and region, which is invaluable. Without this, how is anyone well poised to develop proposals that adapt to this changing landscape?
How would you describe your methods of researching groundwater?
Drawing on my training in design and the history of science, I engage in fieldwork and archival research across South Asia and North America. I approach the environment in the way that a sleuth might, looking for clues and assembling them to learn more about a place or set of processes. In my book Ganges Water Machine: Designing New India’s Ancient River, I spent nearly a decade crisscrossing the basin by foot and boat, as well as visiting archives on three continents. At a time when there were few hi-res satellite images and no contemporary maps of the Ganges, I made my own instruments to map the choreography of soils, cities, and agriculture across the basin.
For my most recent exhibition on groundwater at Yale, I cobbled together diverse datasets on groundwater extraction, urban boundaries, and conjectural models based on sample surveys to learn more about how cities and farms rely on groundwater. When an ecologist wants to study changes in an environment, they will often choose an indicator species to better understand what broader processes are leading to environmental change. By tracing the abundance and scarcity of water, I am similarly able to draw the political and social changes taking shape.
How does groundwater extraction manifest across scales and political boundaries?
Given that hydrologists estimate over half of all the world’s crops are irrigated with groundwater and nearly half the world’s population consumes it on a daily basis, it is undoubtedly a global issue. The Indo- Gangetic plains and the Sonoran Desert, for instance, both stretch across multiple countries and have long been laboratories for water management. As two of the world’s most intensively pumped landscapes, these regions can tell us a great deal about how people tap into the larger global commons of groundwater—a resource that is not only unevenly distributed but also unevenly accessed.
Is it a challenge to compare these two vastly different contexts?
Despite their differences in density, demographics, and sociopolitics, these regions actually share similar spatial patterns. Both places experience varying levels of subsidence, where the water table level drops and the soil compacts due to the reduction of water in an aquifer. The results may look different—large crevices around Arizona compared to sinkholes in New Delhi—but in both, subsidence cuts across private and public space indiscriminately, raising questions about insurance, responsibility, and who ultimately pays for repairs. The two regions largely rely on a system of decentralized groundwater extraction. When every house can have a hand pump or tube well for extracting water from an aquifer, those who can afford it will do so.
If we zoom out, we can see that this is also the case in Jakarta, Mexico City, and Addis Ababa, all cities that I profile in my exhibition. In each of these cities, people turn to groundwater because municipal water is nonexistent, unreliable, or polluted. These three factors accelerate the privatization and decentralization of groundwater.
Do you foresee designing for water becoming central to the way architects and designers practice?
Designing with water in mind has been a longstanding practice in architecture and urban design. What has changed is the context—the increase in population and the decrease in publicly accessible forms of drinking water. Often, the focus is on technological fixes at the scale of a single house or building, like diverting rainwater to private cisterns or green roofs. However, it’s imperative to think about how neighborhoods and cities can develop shared systems of water management. For instance, parks can be designed as spaces for recreation and leisure while simultaneously recharging aquifers and managing stormwater. How one configures these spaces and processes over time rewards design expertise and experimentation.
Where do you see architects best engaging with groundwater in their practice? How do designers at all scales—urban, architectural, landscape—find a position and mode of operating in human/water relationships?
Before architects and landscape architects can better engage with groundwater, we must learn how to draw and model it. When it comes to demarcating property boundaries or defining a river or lake, our conventions of drawing are beholden to lines. However, groundwater oozes and percolates from the ground with no discernible boundary. One of the reasons that groundwater has largely gone unregulated across the world is because it’s hard to separate it from property rights. To give an example, in 1935 the Works Progress Administration commissioned a film titled Ground Water. The animations made for the film illustrate how rainwater saturates the ground and then connects with rivers and lakes as well as natural springs. Drawing it as a dynamic and common space, much like we draw air, is the first step.
Similarly, we as architects have the capacity to model the subsurface as a protagonist. This is something I explore in the exhibition. In much the same way that a geologist takes core samples to better understand the condition of an aquifer, I modeled large core samples from several cities and hung them inverted from the ceiling. We see the layers of geological strata and tube wells piercing them, with a mirror beneath to see a reflection of the patterns of settlement on the surface. This way, what is usually drawn from top to bottom is drawn from bottom to top. Such a reorientation privileges the subsurface and how it reshapes the surface.
What does the groundwater situation look like 10 to 20 years from now? Is there room for optimism?
I think there is always room for optimism. I see the greatest potential working at a middle scale that can address the highly privatized and atomized galaxy of tube wells and hand pumps. Going forward, the challenge for designers is to learn from other fields, primarily the sciences, without relinquishing the responsibilities of design in shaping the built environment.
I currently lead the Ganges Lab at Collaborative Earth, a transdisciplinary group of scientists, engineers, and designers. Our lab is developing new forms of civic infrastructure that integrate the rhythms of the monsoons with urban growth and agricultural production. Shared terms can then evolve into spaces of collaboration like this, one where designers and scientists can also work together without one becoming the other.
Sebastián López Cardozo is an architectural designer and writer based in Toronto. He is a founding editor of Architecture Writing Workshop and a coeditor of Nueva Vivienda: New Housing Paradigms in Mexico (Park Books, 2022).
Harish Krishnamoorthy is an architectural and urban designer based between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Bangalore, India. His writing has appeared in Log, PLAT, and Paprika!, and he is currently an editor at PAIRS.
