The material politics of integrated urban stormwater management in Los Angeles, California

Abstract

ABSTRACT Cities worldwide have embraced the idea of integrated stormwater management using more decentralised and green infrastructures to enhance urban sustainability. Los Angeles County has recently introduced a new stormwater tax that envisions achieving sustainable stormwater futures through far-reaching infrastructural change. While embracing such visions, however, different actors seek to use tax revenues for diverging infrastructure designs. Our paper therefore explores shifting stormwater politics in Los Angeles by highlighting the social relations underlying technology. Technical disputes that we frame as combinations of material artefacts, discourses, expertise and institutions provoke the specific “material politics” behind the emergence of a hybrid stormwater system in which centralised stormwater practices of incumbent public utilities predominate but increasingly co-exist with more decentralised landscape-centred practices and become interdependent on them. We argue that technical disputes reflect ambiguities about a future stormwater system and engender the renegotiation of responsibility, knowledge orders and the overall rationale of stormwater management. An inherited focus on controlling stormwater volumes thwarts attempts to couple stormwater and urban greening improvements more tightly. We conclude by emphasising that infrastructures are relational systems that carry many potential stormwater futures and by outlining ways to better align stormwater management with wider urban sustainability objectives.