Whether touted for its burgeoning economy, affordable housing, and pleasant living style, or criticized for being less like a city than a sprawling suburb, Phoenix, by all environmental logic, should not exist. Yet despite its extremely hot and dry climate and its remoteness, Phoenix has grown into a massive metropolitan area. This exhaustive study examines the history of how Phoenix came into being and how it has sustained itself, from its origins in the 1860s to its present status as the nation’s fifth largest city. From the beginning, Phoenix sought to grow, and although growth has remained central to the city’s history, its importance, meaning, and value have changed substantially over the years. The initial vision of Phoenix as an American Eden gave way to the Cold War Era vision of a High Tech Suburbia, which in turn gave way to rising concerns in the late twentieth century about the environmental, social, and political costs of growth. To understand how such unusual growth occurred in such an improbable location, Philip VanderMeer explores five major themes: the natural environment, urban infrastructure, economic development, social and cultural values, and public leadership. Through investigating Phoenix’s struggle to become a major American metropolis, his study also offers a unique view of what it means to be a desert city.

Few Sunbelt cities burned brighter or contributed more to the conservative movement than Phoenix. In 1910, eleven thousand people called Phoenix home; now, over four million reside in this metropolitan region. In Sunbelt Capitalism, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer tells the story of the city's expansion and its impact on the nation. The dramatic growth of Phoenix speaks not only to the character and history of the Sunbelt but also to the evolution in American capitalism that sustained it. In the 1930s, Barry Goldwater and other members of the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce feared the influence of New Deal planners, small businessmen, and Arizona trade unionists. While Phoenix's business elite detested liberal policies, they were not hostile to government action per se. Goldwater and his contemporaries instead experimented with statecraft now deemed neoliberal. They embraced politics, policy, and federal funding to fashion a favorable "business climate," which relied on disenfranchising voters, weakening unions, repealing regulations, and shifting the tax burden onto homeowners and consumers. These efforts allied them with executives at the helm of the modern conservative movement, whose success partially hinged on relocating factories from the Steelbelt to the kind of free-enterprise oasis that Phoenix represented. But the city did not sprawl in a vacuum. All Sunbelt boosters used the same incentives to compete at a fever pitch for investment, and the resulting drain of jobs and capital from the industrial core forced Midwesterners and Northeasterners into the brawl. Eventually this "Second War Between the States" reoriented American politics toward the principle that the government and the citizenry should be working in the interest of business.

The Encanto-Palmcroft neighborhood in central Phoenix was created in the twilight of the "City Beautiful Movement", a philosophy that supported beautiful surroundings to promote moral and social order. Even in the 21st century, this neighborhood maintains its integrity and significance due tot he participation of residents who realize its historic importance.

Typical development in the American Southwest often resulted in scraping the desert lands of the ancient living landscape, to be replaced with one that is human-made and dependent on a large consumption of energy and natural resources. This transdisciplinary book explores the natural and built environment of this desert region and introduces development tools for shaping its future in a more sustainable way. It offers valuable insights to help promote ecological balance between nature and the built environment in the American Southwest-and in other ecologically fragile regions around the world.

Though the new metropolis is one of America's largest, many are unaware of Phoenix's rich and compelling history. Built on land once occupied by the most advanced pre-Columbian irrigation society, Phoenix overcame its hostile desert surroundings to become a thriving agricultural center. After World War II, its population exploded with the mid-century mass migration to the Sun Belt. In times of rapid expansion or decline, Phoenicians proved themselves to be adaptable and optimistic. Phoenix's past is an engaging and surprising story of audacity, vision, greed and a never-ending fight to secure its future. Chronicling the challenges of growth and change, fourth-generation Arizonan Jon Talton tells the story of the city that remains one of American civilization's great accomplishments.

One Water: Downtown Tucson 2050 is a book and exhibition by students from the University of Arizona, School of Architecture; sponsored by GLHN Architects and Engineers; and supported by five community mentors from Tucson Water, Pima County Regional Flood Control, and Pima County Regional Wastewater Reclamation.Experience the future of downtown Tucson in 2050 where all water is a potential resource and we thrive within a sustainable supply!

From the year of Arizona’s statehood to its centennial in 2012, narratives of the state and its natural landscape have revealed—and reconfigured—the state’s image. Through official state and federal publications, newspapers, novels, poetry, autobiographies, and magazines, Kim Engel-Pearson examines narratives of Arizona that reflect both a century of Euro-American dominance and a diverse and multilayered cultural landscape. Examining the written record at twenty-five-year intervals, Writing Arizona, 1912–2012 shows us how the state was created through the writings of both its inhabitants and its visitors, from pioneer reminiscences of settling the desert to modern stories of homelessness, and from early-twentieth-century Native American “as-told-to” autobiographies to those written in Natives’ own words in the 1970s and 1980s. Weaving together these written accounts, Engel-Pearson demonstrates how government leaders’ and boosters’ promotion of tourism—often at the expense of minority groups and the environment—was swiftly complicated by concerns about ethics, representation, and conservation. Word by word, story by story, Engel-Pearson depicts an Arizona whose narratives reflect celebrations of diversity and calls for conservation—yet, at the same time, a state whose constitution declares only English words “official.” She reveals Arizona to be constructed, understood, and inhabited through narratives, a state of words as changeable as it is timeless.