In the Western Mojave desert, two sites in particular offer instructive case studies: California City and the Tehachapi Pass wind farms. While these sites might seem disparate, both are sprawling developments erected on vast expanses of desert, dependent on the extraction of resources. Each site, too, was envisioned respectively as a model for a utopian future which once ignited the American imagination (and perhaps still does). Both sites, moreover, serve as examples of the desert operating in continuity with the city — which is to say, they illustrate how our perception of the desert landscape is used to obscure capitalist modes of production, extraction, and profit.

Developers bought the land for California City in 1958, the middle of the postwar suburban boom.^[3] Through advertisements in the Los Angeles Times, they sold the plots based on the strength of their idea: a perfectly organized community, pre-planned with downtown shopping, industrial and recreation areas, and cheap land where every family could own a slice of the American dream, in a city that developers claimed would soon rival Los Angeles.^[4] But those who were taken in by this sales pitch soon discovered that the difference between the idea and the reality of the site was stark. They found a maze of empty, unpaved cul-de-sacs etched into the desert floor, often without electricity, telephone service, or even sewage.^[5] It wasn’t until 1972, over a decade later, that the state of California ordered the city’s development company to cease and desist, demanding it stop lying to the public.^[6] And this was only after consumer advocate Ralph Nader published a report that had been commissioned but then suppressed by the state.^[7],^[8]

The Tehachapi Pass wind farms, first developed in the early ‘80s, stand about 20 miles to the west.^[9] Unlike California City, which represents an outmoded vision of life centered around the automobile and low density development, the turbines signal a greener future organized around the hope for renewable energy. Wind turbines present a solution to one of the most urgent problems of contemporary civilization: climate change. But increasingly, their promise of a greener future is proving to be more idea than reality, more marketing than solution. For starters, manufacturing each turbine requires the use of materials that cannot themselves be extracted with renewable energy.^[10] But aside from that, and even assuming that one day we’ll be able to build turbines themselves using renewable energy, there is the problem of economics: The turbines are largely privately-owned, producing power that is sold back to the state for profit, or in other cases, used for entirely private ends.^[11] This creates a tension between what is good for the state and what is good for profit, which of course creates perverse incentives.^[12]

These turbines, and many others like them across the country, are often pursued by corporations in spite of, or even at the expense of, the communities in which they’re imposed. Residents in these communities might understand that wind energy can, in theory, help ease reliance on fossil fuels. But their first-hand experiences with the turbines are not infrequently negative: their loud noise, their vertical intrusions, the way they decimate the landscape and wildlife around them.^{[13],[14],[15],[16]} This leads to populations organizing against the building of wind farms.^{[17],[18],[19]} This raises critical questions: Can the idealization of wind power be made actual? And can the promise of wind energy in particular (and renewable energy more generally) be instantiated in a way that actually offers a better future — one where local populations not only tolerate but celebrate the presence of turbines? Or must this hope remain an unrealized potentiality?^[20]

California City and the Tehachapi Pass wind farms both capitalize on the popular perception of the desert as an empty place existing “outside of all places.” It is precisely this perception that allows the desert to be filled with developments for utopian cities and wind farms. As architecture critic Reyner Banham put it: “In a landscape where nothing officially exists (otherwise it would not be ‘desert’), absolutely anything becomes thinkable, and may consequently happen.”^[21]

The desert is a site where one can find oneself,^[22] where one can find god,^[23] or where one can come face to face with the meaninglessness of existence.^[24] It is also a space to imagine new and better futures. In the case of California City, this magical thinking about the desert allowed land and homebuyers to imagine purchasing the American dream, and for cheap. The wind turbines, then, offer the promise of a future not just for oneself but also for the world; where energy is renewable and plentiful, where living is more sustainable and more harmonious with nature.

This mythology of the desert as an empty expanse is weaponized by private corporations: If the desert is readily accepted as empty, it is easier, then, to gain approval — and raise money — to build housing developments and massive infrastructure such as wind farms without considering the potential downsides, objections, and significant costs to prospective and existing populations. The desert’s imagined lack means that anything can be imagined, constructed, and even abandoned, as is the case with large swaths of California City. Only time will tell whether the Tehachapi Pass wind farms will suffer the same doomed fate as California City: a gargantuan project that once promised a utopian vision of the future, but which ultimately failed to deliver on it.

[1] Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Translated by Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 24. https://doi.org/10.2307/464648.

[2] For an analysis of the desert landscape as a heterotopia see Andrew Ballantyne, “Remaking the Self in Heterotopia,” in Foucault on Arts and Letters, ed. by Catherine M. Soussloff (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 181-198.

[3] Mike Anton, “A Desert City That Didn’t Fan Out,” Los Angeles Times, August 14, 2010. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-aug-14-la-me-cal-city-20100814-story.html.

[4] Robert C. Fellmeth and Ralph Nader, Politics of Land: Ralph Nader’s Study Group Report on Land Use in California (New York, New York: Grossman Publishers, 1973), 321, 327.

[5] Fellmeth, 323-5. As the report notes, “[a] land buyer is acquiring a parcel of semi-arid desert land, indistinguishable physically from 30,000 parcels already sold and hundreds of thousands of other parcels available in the surrounding 1,000 square miles of undeveloped land” (342).

[6] David Colker, “California City—A Dream in Progress,” Los Angeles Times, February 11, 1990. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-02-11-me-939-story.html

[7] Extended portions of this report are published in Fellmeth, 321-346.

[8] For extended accounts of how California City was understood and sold as an idea see Shannon Starkey, “The Suspension of Disbelief: California City 1955 – 1972,” (PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2019). Also see

[9] Tehachapi Renewable Transmission Project (TRTP): Environmental Impact Statement (United States: n.p., 2009), 6-1. https://books.google.com/books?id=N6s2AQAAMAAJ

[10] Alexander Dunlap, “End the ‘Green’ Delusions: Industrial-Scale Renewable Energy Is Fossil,” Verso, May 10, 2018. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/3797-end-the-green-delusions-industrial-scale-renewable-energy-is-fossil-fuel.

[11] Dunlap, “End the ‘Green’ Delusions.”

[12] Adam Nix, Stephanie Decker, and Carola Wolf, “Enron and the California Energy Crisis: The Role of Networks in Enabling Organizational Corruption,” Business History Review 95, no. 4 (2021): 765–802. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007680521001008.

[13] Favot, Sarah. “L.A. County Supervisors to Ban Large Wind Turbines in Unincorporated Areas.” Daily News, July 14, 2015. https://www.dailynews.com/government-and-politics/20150714/la-county-supervisors-to-ban-large-wind-turbines-in-unincorporated-areas/

[14] Erickson RA, Thogmartin WE, Diffendorfer JE, Russell RE, Szymanski JA. 2016. Effects of wind energy generation and white-nose syndrome on the viability of the Indiana bat. PeerJ 4:e2830 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.2830

[15] Poessel, S.A., Brandt, J., Mendenhall, L., Braham, M.A., Lanzone, M.J., McGann, A.J., Katzner, T.E., 2018, Flight response to spatial and temporal correlates informs risk from wind turbines to the California Condor: The Condor, v. 120, p. 330-342, https://doi.org/10.1650/CONDOR-17-100.1.

[16] Dunlap, “End the ‘Green’ Delusions.”

[17] David McDermott Hughes, “How Not to Fight a Wind Farm,” in Who Owns the Wind?: Climate Crisis and the Hope of Renewable Energy, (London: Verso, 2021), 43-68.

[18] Favot, “L.A County Supervisors to Ban Large Wind Turbines.”

[19] Richard Fausset, “Palmdale in a Spin Over Windmill Plans,” Los Angeles Times, February 13, 2003, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-feb-13-me-wind13-story.html.

[20] For a sustained discussion of how wind energy projects have been pursued at the expense of local populations and what might be done about it see McDermott Hughes, Who Owns the Wind?: Climate Crisis and the Hope of Renewable Energy, particularly “Conclusion: Wind, Justice, and Compromise,” 214-228.

[21] Reyner Banham, Scenes in America Deserta (Layton, UT: Gibbs M. Smith Inc., 1982), 44.

[22] Meg Bernhard, “The Desert Changed My Life. It Can Change Yours, Too.,” The New York Times, November 20, 2022, http://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/magazine/desert-recommendation.html.

[23] As Reyner Banham writes, quoting Frank Lloyd Wright (who was himself quoting Victor Hugo): “The Desert is where God is and man is not” (Banham, Scenes, 16). As Banham notes, this idea of God, is particularly Protestant. Similar depictions can be found in the bible, for instance Deuteronomy 8:2. Or, in more contemporary source, see Grateful Dead’s song “Blues for Allah,” which imagines the desert as a place “[w]here Allah does command” and where one stands “under eternity.”

[24] Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, ed. Robert B. Pippin, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambrige University Press, 2006), particularly “On the Famous Wise Men,” 79-81.