The Cultural Architecture of Water Security

Water Security Architecture

Archipelagos II: The Cultural Architecture of Water Security
María Páez González & Brendon Carlin with James Kwang Ho Chung, James Mak, and Jongwon NA

Given time, water will seep through and dissolve anything that tries to contain it. Water is not only H₂O, but simultaneously a resource, commodity, data, and, for some, a living kin member and capricious, sentient entity that, depending on how it is treated, can nurture or destroy civilisations. Across and between cultures, water has been a locus of hybrid ontological and epistemological practices—never a neutral medium, always shaping and shaped by worlds.

This year, PG16 will investigate how architecture can take the side of, and bolster, emerging practices concerned with the re-enchantment of our relationship to waterscapes in crisis. We will work with and learn from movements assembling plural architectures of relation—blending the technical, ecological, cultural, political, and spiritual in care for and enjoyment of water. We invite you to develop your ideas and propositions for experimental hydrocultural zones—watersheds in common ownership, governance, and care—where biodiversity regeneration and multispecies inclusion are central principles, and where legal, economic, spatial, and hydrological democratisation is recognised as essential to restoring flourishing waterscapes and reversing the ecosocial effects of exclusion and depletion.

The UK faces a socioecological crisis that is also a crisis of “security” and critical infrastructure, most visible in the condition of water. Floods, droughts, contamination, biodiversity collapse, and interlinked pressures of poverty and political instability are forcing a reckoning with an ideology whose heyday in the 1980s saw the mass privatisation of water infrastructure, but whose roots stretch back centuries. The Water Act 1989 dissolved the ten Regional Water Authorities, selling them to private corporations and creating new regulators. Public utilities were reclassified as profit-generating infrastructure for shareholders, with long-term consequences for maintenance, investment, and pollution control (National Audit Office 2023). These changes accelerated a trajectory—centuries of enclosures and dispossessions of watery lands and bodies—that stripped people of common use, enjoyment, and care, and severed intimate, direct, and vulnerable relationships with watery beings, flows, lands, and infrastructures.

Contemporary governance frames scarcity and pollution as deficits to be solved with more investment, metering, and grey infrastructure. Yet hydrosocial scholarship (Bakker 2023; Di Baldassarre & Wanders 2024; Swyngedouw 2015) shows that such technocratic solutions paradoxically intensify water and social crisis. Management excludes the needs, rhythms, and lifeways of humans and nonhumans who co-produce flourishing waterscapes. Infrastructures of capture and distribution invisibilise co-producers, alienating communities from dependencies on clouds, forests, rivers, wetlands, and hydrocultural zones.

This alienation is deeply architectural. The 19th-century Public Health Acts established the dominant typology of atomised housing—self-contained “factories of one” with private kitchens, bathrooms, and indoor plumbing—an infrastructural regime that redefined the relationship between domestic space and the wider waterscape. Water’s journey, from tap to building, to sewer, to river, to forest, to cloud, is an architecture of co-production across scales, blurring the boundaries between a shower and a watershed ecology. Yet under privatised governance, this cross-scalar architecture is reduced to a supply chain, stripped of reciprocity, care, and enjoyment.

As Spice (2018) and Barney (2021) remind us, infrastructure is not neutral—it is material politics, the battleground of contemporary struggles over embodied relationships. Waterscapes, technologies, ecologies, and bodies are pluralistic, cultural, political, multispecies worlding spaces, co-produced by beings whose flourishing is entangled. Architecture must work with this plurality—designing for re-enchantment and regeneration, and bolstering emergent forms of governance and care.

We will learn from UK water commoning movements: daylighting culverted rivers in Sheffield and Rochdale; restoring floodplains; protecting chalk streams; declaring Rights of the Cam; swimming the Avon; and defending watersheds through rights-of-nature campaigns and land buy-backs such as at Langholm. These are experimental architectures in themselves—blending technical, ecological, cultural, and cosmogonic practices.

Our design work will treat waterscapes as architecture: from forests and marshes, to dams and canals, to civic institutions, leisure and sports architectures, archaeological sites, houses, kitchens, and bathrooms. We will ask how riparian and hydrocultural zones can be reimagined as experimental watersheds—sites of decolonised rewilding, co-ownership, and co-governance, removed from centralised grids and made more autonomous so that dependencies, vulnerabilities, and responsibilities come into stark relief. These will be propositions for the UK’s most crucial security infrastructure: the green, blue, and cultural fabric of human–nonhuman relations that underlies all grey, technological, and economic systems.

Against architecture’s historic role in making domination desirable, we will take the side of those experimenting with new architectures of relation—common worlds in which all beings—more-than-human, living, “inanimate,” unborn, and invisible—are included in the forms of architecture, practice, and assembly from which politics is really composed.