water
Water is not only a resource. It is infrastructure, ecology, governance, risk, culture, and everyday practice.
This world follows water across catchments, streets, institutions, homes, and histories to understand how it organizes settlement.
Questions that organize this world
Start with the question.
- 01Who controls water?
- 02Where does rain go?
- 03What happens when centralized systems fail?
- 04How can cities live with floods and drought?
Satellite images can show green returning to Qa al-Azraq. They cannot tell us, by themselves, whether the oasis has returned, or whether the water regime sustaining that recovery is itself sustainable.
The Wetland Seen From Space: What Greenness Means at Qa al-Azraq
A research-led reading of vegetation recovery at Qa al-Azraq in Jordan. Satellite analysis documented a major expansion of vegetation between 2015 and 2025, while bird monitoring, groundwater evidence, and the artificial pumping that sustains part of the wetland reveal a more complicated ecological story. The article asks not only what remote sensing can show about recovery, but what kind of water future can sustain Azraq without reproducing pressure on its depleted aquifer.
Read field guide →Across the gravel plains and wadis of southern Jordan, acacia trees stand far apart. Yet each one gathers shade, soil, moisture, insects, birds, mammals, and traces of water into a small concentration of life.
Under the Acacia Crown: Trees of Wadi Araba
An ecological reading of the native acacias of Wadi Araba, Jordan, exploring their relationship with water, landform, soil, shade, and other species. Rather than treating the trees as isolated botanical objects, the article looks at the small ecological worlds that form beneath and around their crowns.
Read field guide →Where should sanitation investment go first? This research translated that question into a spatial decision-support framework by combining infrastructure, population, groundwater, land, rainfall, and other vulnerability indicators across Jordan.
Mapping Sanitation Vulnerability in Jordan
This research developed a GIS-based Sanitation Hotspot Index for Jordan to identify districts and neighborhoods with the greatest need for sanitation intervention. Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process, expert and stakeholder input, and multiple spatial datasets, the study combined ten criteria into a national vulnerability model. The resulting maps were designed to support sanitation planning, funding allocation, donor prioritization, and infrastructure investment.
Read field guide →A wastewater treatment system does not have to hide behind concrete walls and mechanical equipment. In a constructed wetland, treatment can become a living landscape where water, plants, microorganisms, soil, and time do much of the work.
Constructed Wetlands: When Wastewater Treatment Becomes Landscape
A Field Guide to constructed wetlands as nature-based wastewater infrastructure. It explains how engineered wetland systems treat wastewater through physical, biological, and chemical processes while offering opportunities for low-energy operation, decentralized treatment, water reuse, biodiversity enhancement, landscape integration, and circular resource management. It also examines their limitations, including land requirements, pretreatment, clogging, maintenance, and the need to match treatment performance with intended reuse.
Read field guide →Some of the most consequential planning decisions never appear in a planning department. They happen around kitchen tables, rooftop water tanks, laundry schedules, family routines, and conversations between neighbours.
Planning Happens in Kitchens
A reflection on everyday planning through the experience of intermittent water supply in Jordan. The article argues that households do more than cope with scarcity: they forecast, prioritize, coordinate, adapt, reuse, and learn. Drawing on insurgent planning, counter-conduct, democratic planning, and the changing role of the planner, it asks whether planning should focus less on inviting citizens into formal processes and more on recognizing the planning practices citizens have already created.
Read field guide →The endurance of ancient water infrastructure was not produced by construction alone. Water systems remained useful because people could enter them, clean them, remove sediment, repair masonry, restore channels, manage flows, and repeat the work when conditions changed.
Ancient Water Systems Were Built to Be Maintained
A historic lesson about maintenance as an integral part of water infrastructure. The guide reads access shafts, inspection openings, sediment traps, repair masonry, channel linings, overflow routes, and maintenance paths as evidence that water systems were designed for continued intervention rather than permanent completion. It connects archaeological observation with contemporary planning questions about accessibility, stewardship, repair, and the long-term operation of decentralized infrastructure.
Read field guide →A cistern is easy to see as a container. It becomes more useful when it is read as part of a small water system connecting catchment, rainfall, storage, demand, overflow, maintenance, and the surrounding landscape.
The Cistern as a Planning Unit
A field guide to reading rainwater cisterns as distributed water infrastructure rather than isolated tanks. It follows water from catchment to conveyance, storage, use, overflow, and maintenance, and shows how planners can map these relationships across buildings, sites, and neighborhoods.
Read field guide →A terrace wall is easy to notice. The larger system is harder to see: slope, runoff, soil, infiltration, cultivation, overflow, repair, and the repeated labor that keeps the landscape functioning.
Reading Terraces as Slow Infrastructure
A field guide to reading terraces as landscape infrastructure rather than isolated walls. It explains how terraces alter slope geometry, runoff pathways, soil retention, cultivation, and maintenance, and offers a practical method for interpreting terrace systems through topography, field evidence, historical imagery, and GIS.
Read field guide →A channel, cistern, terrace, shaft, or dam is rarely the whole water system. The larger story is written into the slopes, catchments, routes, soils, storage spaces, and maintenance paths that connect these structures.
Reading Ancient Water Systems as Landscape Infrastructure
A field guide to reading ancient water systems as complete landscape infrastructures rather than isolated monuments. It offers a method for tracing water from source to use, distinguishing capture from conveyance and storage, recognizing the role of topography and maintenance, using GIS carefully, and interpreting surviving remains without overstating their original function.
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Ancient Water Systems Were Built to Be Maintained
A historic lesson about maintenance as an integral part of water infrastructure. The guide reads access shafts, inspection openings, sediment traps, repair masonry, channel linings, overflow routes, and maintenance paths as evidence that water systems were designed for continued intervention rather than permanent completion. It connects archaeological observation with contemporary planning questions about accessibility, stewardship, repair, and the long-term operation of decentralized infrastructure.
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