Doctoral Dissertation Research: Informal Water Use in Tijuana

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Provision of municipal water supply is a formidable challenge for environmental planning and governance in urban areas. Desert cities, particularly along the U.S.-Mexico border, face critical shortages in water supply due to persistent droughts, rapid urbanization, and the broader politics of municipal distribution. New efforts to transform wastewater into supply, however, raise key questions of institutional change, political economy, and the role of informal water use in communities located off the infrastructure grid. This doctoral dissertation research project will examine how informal water reuse, such as harvesting rainwater and recycling greywater, transforms formal efforts to reclaim wastewater in Tijuana, Mexico. The doctoral candidate will seek to determine how informal water institutions and infrastructure operate, how they direct resource flows, and how they transform state-society relations. Using ethnographic and geospatial modeling techniques, the student will: (1) analyze the infrastructure systems, institutions, and economic strategies formed in water harvesting through participatory research; (2) model the potential hydrologic effects of water harvesting on stormwater flows and formal reclamation in a geographic information system (GIS); and (3) measure the political effects that water harvesting has on community autonomy and urban development using a survey with a Q-method component. The findings are expected to demonstrate that informal water harvesting and reuse constitute an alternative economy, redefine community autonomy in relation to the state, and improve local conditions of urban runoff and water quality. As Tijuana's wastewater transitions from an environmental "bad" into an economic "good," this research project will help explain the institutional and equity challenges for wastewater reuse in a rapidly growing city. The study will advance scientific knowledge by providing primary data on informal water use systems, institutions, economies, and flow quantities in Tijuana, elucidating hydrologic and management challenges for water provision and reuse. The research results should improve the socioeconomic dimensions of urban hydrologic modeling and evaluate institutional alternatives to formal reclamation, such as household water harvesting. These data will benefit current initiatives to mitigate stormwater pollution and improve water quality management in metropolitan Tijuana-San Diego. Furthermore, as informal settlements continue expanding in cities around the world, this study offers potential insights for policies on equitable water development, urban planning, and community development. This approach can open new theoretical terrain by uniting methodological techniques in water resources modeling with critical insights from literature on political ecology and diverse economies. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award will also provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.