That each city might have a particular psychological effect on its inhabitants, or that the very act of living in cities might entail its own brand of cogni­tion, is not an original claim. Such lines of thinking have formed a thriving undercurrent in European thought for at least the past two centuries. Where Mark Kingwell tries to break new ground in 

, however, is in applying historical texts, from Walter Benjamin and René Descartes to Sigmund Freud and the novels of J. G. Ballard, to problems of contemporary city planning, including Chinese Olympic architecture and skyscraper design. In a book heavy on philosophy, Kingwell discusses boundaries, thresholds, and the multivalent borders that divide inside from out. He looks at how spatialization ­affects—­and is affected ­by—­historically specific styles of ­thinking.

Can a city be the material realization of an era of ­thought—­and can cities retroactively inspire certain states of what Kingwell, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, calls “conscious­ness”? The word choice here is not ideal; whereas a term such as “subjectivity” might have better communicated the changing, socially defined nature of thought, “consciousness” carries far too much baggage for use in a rigorous analysis. It becomes merely another word for the soul, and is, ironically, a holdover from another era of ­thought.

Kingwell’s basic line of inquiry is nonetheless exciting. When a building is added ­to—­or, as in the case of the World Trade Center’s twin towers, violently removed ­from—­the urban landscape, “how is your experience, and mine, altered by this new place”? Kingwell proposes a radical possibility here: that urban experience, as the “shared horizon” of humanity, can itself be politicized. In other words, what could be considered a private, internal ­experience—­Kingwell’s “consciousness”—­can be reconceived as a public event subject to political regulation, even to historic preservation. What would it mean to preserve somehow an era’s prevailing mode of ­thought—­and is this perhaps what architecture has been doing all along? Rather than pursue these questions, which are seemingly the ultimate example of how difficult it can be to draw clean lines between inside and out, Kingwell steps away into a discussion of Descartes’ ­17th-­century ideas about individual self-­perception.

As this example shows, Kingwell’s ­citations—­the texts with which he aligns ­himself—­often get in the way of the book’s promise. In fact, David Hume, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Paul ­Virilio—­all of the thinkers Kingwell calls ­upon—­overshadow important questions at the heart of 

. Still, it is these questions that make the book ­worthwhile.

 the built environment affect what King­well calls consciousness? In his examination of New York City’s Grand Central Station, for in­stance, he finds the possibility of an “expansive individualism” that exceeds the promises of more ex­plicitly political monuments such as the Statue of Liberty. In Grand Central, Kingwell writes, “

 is everything”; it is a Romantic space that both inspires and enables a particularly American way of being. Nodes such as these within cities—­New York, Shanghai, Berlin, ­Vancouver—­deserve their own psychological catalog, their own social narrative, their own historical accounting. Pursued rigorously, this approach could offer revolutionary ­insights.

The irony, though, is that a book striving toward analytic radicalism comes across as remarkably ­well ­behaved. At moments it is tempting to pull Kingwell aside and assure him that many of the historical texts he trots out are relevant only insofar as scholars continue, unnecessarily, to quote them. Kingwell would have done himself a favor by sticking to the thoughts of Mark ­Kingwell—­an original thinker with provocative ideas that, in the future, we must hope he will have the courage to ­explore.

Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City

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In Concrete Reveries, writes reviewer Geoff Manaugh, philosopher Mark Kingwell offers only a glimpse of what makes him "an original thinker with provocative ideas."

Mind and Matter

Any book about dams and water politics in the American West risks comparison to a daunting predecessor: Marc Reisner’s 

Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water 

(1986), the standard reference for an unu­sually complex field. Indeed, the breadth and moral conviction of Reisner’s argument against the irrational excesses of western water use has yet to be matched. Nonetheless, in 

, James Lawrence Powell achieves something that Reisner did not: force of ­concentration.

Powell, executive director of the National Physical Science Consortium, focuses on just one dam: northern Arizona’s Glen Canyon Dam, constructed starting in 1956 on a remote stretch of the Colorado River. Dead Pool zeroes in on the astonishing compli­cation of ­factors—­legislative, topographic, and ­meteorological—­that shaped the dam’s creation. While the bulk of the book describes the rapid growth of the Bureau of Reclamation, a branch of the U.S. Department of the Interior founded in 1902 to help irrigate the desert West, it also reminds us of the strangeness of the water­world in which the western states now ­thrive.

In the 1950s, the Colorado River, flowing from the Rockies to the Gulf of California, presented an irresistible target for industry lobbyists, politicians, and federal hydrologists inspired as much by the experience of the Dust Bowl as by the electrical and agricultural needs of a ­westward-­moving popula­tion. Hoover Dam, née Boulder Dam, had proved, upon completion in 1935, that the canyons of the West could be dammed; the Grand Canyon itself, incredibly, had only barely missed being flooded in the early ­1950s.

The upper basin ­states—­Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and ­Wyoming—­needed their own reser­voir to help protect against the future thirst of California, and the federal government responded by building Glen Canyon Dam. Behind it is Lake Powell, an artificial sea capable of storing 27 million acre-feet of water and, after spinning through the dam’s eight 155,000-horse­power turbines, generating more than four billion ­kilowatt-­hours of elec­tricity a ­year.

The construction of Glen Canyon Dam was not an act of collaborative hydrology. The Colorado River states are, in fact, in stiff competition with one another, and Powell forecasts dire conse­quences for their inability to agree on future water rights. “As the hydrologic system falters,” he sug­gests, outlining a scenario in which long-­term severe drought returns to the West, “how might the legal system respond?” His short answer: It won’t. A regulatory labyrinth of unbelievable proportions has emerged, functioning, like all true bureaucracies, at the precise intersection of illogic and inertia, and helping to produce absurd irrigation schemes worthy of a Monty Python sketch. (As Powell understatedly points out, “Reclaimed lands had often proved to be worth less than the money it took to irrigate them.”)

’s environmental politics are relatively easy to parse, it’s unclear what Powell advocates. Radical conservation of local water resources? Wholesale abandonment of the West? ­Central—­that is, ­federal—­control over the rivers of the western states? Or a ­states-­based approach to water management? These are fundamental questions involving water rights, taxation, agricultural productivity, endangered species displaced by flooding, summer lakeside recreation, and electrical power for tens of millions of voting Americans.

It is precisely the lack of easy answers that leads Powell, late in the book, to break away from history altogether and write what could be called speculative nonfiction, predicting the future of Glen Can­yon ­Dam—­and of the American West in general. We go 10, 20, 50 years into the future, and watch climate change and drought afflict the region, dams fill with silt, and whole cities go thirsty, their lights fading into darkness. At times, the book verges on the apocalyptic: “One day every trace of the dams and their reservoirs will be gone, a few exotic grains of concrete the only evidence of their ­one-­time existence.”

While Powell’s vision of the future is not always convincing, 

 ends as a historically important, ­well-­timed, and memorable addition to the growing library of books about water and the ­West.

 is senior editor of Dwell magazine; his blog, BLDGBLOG, can be found at

Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West

 by James Lawrence Powell, University of California Press, 283 pp, 2011.

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Geoff Manaugh examines a "historically important, well-timed, and memorable addition to the growing library of books about water and the West."