People, Place, and Power: Exploring How Land and Water Policies Shape Spatial Injustice

The Lincoln Institute provides a variety of early- and mid-career fellowship opportunities for researchers. In this series, we follow up with our fellows to learn more about their work.

Six years ago, Jessica Bremner was preparing to spend a year in Brazil studying housing issues on a Fulbright scholarship. She was scheduled to depart at the end of March 2020.

“We know what happened, everything shut down—so I needed to pivot,” says Bremner, now an assistant professor of urban geography at California State University, Los Angeles. She turned to her past experience: A trained urban planner, Bremner had spent several years as a planning director for the Kounkuey Design Initiative, working on community-led designs for public spaces in California’s Coachella Valley. “Because I had such a long history in Coachella, and an understanding of the Eastern Coachella Valley, in particular, some of the issues I’d seen there around water inequality became the central idea for the dissertation,” she says.

With the support of a Babbitt Center Dissertation Fellowship, which assists doctoral students researching water sustainability and resilience, Bremner examined the history of Indigenous water dispossession—an obscured but no less harmful form of land dispossession—that fueled the colonial settlement and agricultural growth in the Coachella Valley.

Her research, published in the Journal of Political Ecology in 2024, identified the practice of groundwater overdraft as an understudied and systematic form of dispossession, in addition to practices such as water grabbing, reallocation, or diversion. “Successful white settlement in the Coachella Valley could only happen through Indigenous water dispossession,” Bremner wrote in the paper, noting that “groundwater overdraft is not just a characteristic of early US settler colonialism in the Coachella Valley; it is ongoing.”

In this conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Bremner explains why good community engagement should allow a shift in power structures (but rarely does), shares a lesson she’s learned from her students, and describes why understanding the relationships among place, people, and power is essential to repairing any kind of injustice.

JON GOREY: What is the general focus of your work?

JESSICA BREMNER: My general focus is around spatial justice and spatial inequalities. Before doing the Babbitt Center research, I’d been much more focused on issues of housing. And in the Coachella Valley, housing is very much connected to issues of water—water quality, water scarcity, and water inequality.

I started working in the Coachella Valley in 2011 when I was working for the organization Kounkuey Design Initiative. We were invited by another organization who has a much longer history in the Coachella Valley, that had been working with Polanco parks [informal farmworker communities of up to 12 mobile homes] on many of their water quality issues. They invited us to work with them at this 100-household [mobile home] park in the eastern Coachella Valley. They had taken over the park from the previous owner to upgrade the housing conditions, and in the interim, they invited us to help spearhead a community engaged design process for this central public space. That’s actually how I first encountered these questions around water in the valley.

The settlers who came to the Southwest came with a particular view of how water works from the Eastern states … so usages and policies developed out of this geographic mismatch in how water functions. There’s a really interesting historical synchronicity between when the area was developed and what was going on … at the federal level in terms of infrastructure investment that has allowed water usage to grow through this infrastructure of water grabbing.

JG: What are you working on now, or hoping to work on next?

JB: There are some extensions of that project that I’m working on. Some of that work was really around this mismatch between land use regulations and water use regulations, and so I’m really interested in looking at that at the policy level. At the urban planning level, we’re not thinking about water when we’re making zoning decisions—that’s for the water district to let us know if there’s enough water for a certain use, right? Many people are looking at data center water use, and that’s not what my lane is. But I definitely see that it is highlighting that deficiency in how we zone for uses, and the relationship between those uses and water.

The [California State University] system has what’s called CSU Water, which is a network of researchers across the CSU system who work on different issues related to water in the state, and I’m a campus rep for that network. So I’m hoping to continue to work on multidisciplinary collaborations around water in California and tap into ongoing projects around water access, in particular. I’m also looking at moving back toward the housing side of the research, housing inequalities and affordability and informality, in particular informality in California.

JG: Your work with the Kounkuey Design Initiative was very community driven. Can you talk about the importance of community engagement in policy and planning work?

JB: I have kind of a fraught relationship with community engagement, mainly because I think community engagement is incredibly valuable when it is deep and long—long in terms of time, and deep in terms of the type of engagement—and when it can really be about shifting power. Unfortunately, most of the engagement that we do in urban planning is short and superficial, and does not involve any sort of decision-making power shifts.

That does happen at the community organization level, like the projects that I’ve worked on and other community organizations have worked on, where you are more place-based, you’re engaging with community members, doing real organizing work and letting decisions be made through iterative discussions, and allowing community members to actually make decisions — and then, as someone who has power in a project, for instance, allowing those decisions to be … made, and not changing them. It’s an incredibly powerful process that we don’t really do in our formal government engagement processes.

JG: Have you encountered anything surprising or counterintuitive in your research?

JB: Almost everything, in many ways, was unexpected, except for the thing that I knew existed, which was the inequality. Some of the questions around growth and water dispossession… I hadn’t really thought much about before the work and maybe should have.

JG: What’s one thing you wish more people understood about spatial injustice or cultural geography?

JB: I end up structuring a lot of my classes around the relationship between people, space, and power, and how that actually structures the places we live in, and how those relationships are different based on local context. Being able to understand what those relationships are is really important if you are interested in enacting some sort of movement toward repairing any sort of injustice, whether it’s social or spatial. You need to understand what the relationship is between place, people, and power.

JG: Is there anything that you, in turn, have learned from your students?

JB: Just the importance of communication, and, for me, remembering that if someone isn’t understanding what is being said, it is not their fault, it’s my fault. If they’re not fully understanding, that means the guidance I give needs to be better, or there’s base information, foundational information, missing that I need to then add into whatever conversation we’re having. Just a reminder that we’re not all coming at an issue from the same level, and so it really is about first bringing everyone up to the same kind of basic knowledge base to be able to have any sort of nuanced and focused discussion.

JG: When it comes to your work, what keeps you up at night? And what gives you hope?

JB: I am always staying awake at night thinking about how I can structure the classroom so that students are able to craft and share their opinions in a productive, discursive setting, because it is so incredibly difficult to have people sit down and discuss a journal article or a larger concept.

And then I have hope because I enter the classroom at the beginning of the semester, and students are sitting at their desks with their phones in front of their faces, and the lights off, not talking to anyone, and by the end of the semester I’m coming into the classroom, and they’re sitting in their groups, talking to each other, and having lively discussions—to the point where I’m like, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t even start the class yet, because I don’t want to stop them engaging with each other like that.’

JG: What’s the best book you’ve read lately, or TV show you’ve streamed?

JB: I used to be a reader, but ever since the dissertation, you don’t read anymore … I talked to someone, and she was like, ‘It took me five years after I graduated to start picking up novels again.’ But two shows that I’m very excited to watch again are Drops of God and Ted Lasso. Especially Ted Lasso is such a nice antidote to the time we’re in. So I’m waiting for Ted Lasso to come back on, so I can get a new subscription for a month and binge watch both of them.

Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: Jessica Bremner, assistant professor of urban geography at California State University, Los Angeles. Credit: Courtesy photo.