The movie Chinatown highlights the ways acquiring water helped Los Angeles grow and hints at what may need to happen for the city and region to keep growing:

If Chinatown’s ending forces the audience to sit in a feeling of hopelessness, it should also disturb anyone invested in Los Angeles’s future. The history of water in 20th-century California was defined by mammoth feats of engineering and an enduring belief that someone like Mulholland would eventually come along and enable the impossible. Each new dam or aqueduct only guaranteed the arrival of the next one—the population growth allowed by Mulholland’s aqueduct, for example, later resulted in L.A. tapping other water sources, such as the Colorado River. California has had a few good years of rain recently, but the long-term sustainability of the state’s water supply depends on collective conservation efforts: drastically reducing the amount of water used by Big Agriculture, moderating suburban tasks such as watering lawns, regulating the state’s groundwater.

“There is no more water to capture with big projects. There just isn’t. The future is really about much smarter water management,” Stephanie Pincetl, a UCLA professor who specializes in urban policy and the environment, told me. Conservation measures, she argues, are the way forward even if politicians wish they could stump for some grand technological innovation the way their 20th-century predecessors did: “The approach to the 21st century has to be a lot more subtle, a lot more place-based, and a lot more guided by the realization that water is a scarce resource, and so we need to treat it like a scarce resource.”

Finding water in Los Angeles, the Southwest, the West, and the United States more broadly may become more paramount in the coming decades. Which cities and regions would do well in competing for water? Would a lack of water in some places lead to growing populations in places with plenty of water?

While we are at it, why not tell more exciting stories in these categories:

1. Origin stories of modern places. Take any of the big cities in the United States and put its origin story in a movie or a miniseries. How about the rise of Phoenix?
2. It would be interesting to popularize more stories about water and other necessary resources in daily life. How about a thrilling tale about concrete? It is hard to imagine modern life without out. Or air conditioning. Can’t have a lot of the global development of the last century without it. Or salt. Where do we get all this salt in our daily lives from?

If Chinatown can entertain and inform about place, why not engage in more storytelling that explains where places have come from and where they might be going?