When it rains: Stormwater management, redevelopment, and chronologies of infrastructure

Abstract

Across the United States, a number of older cities face the immediate challenges of aging and inadequate water systems. Given the fragilities of water systems, municipalities have begun to manage the effects of flooding and reduce the impact of disruptive weather events using a range of stormwater management strategies. This article offers an ethnographic account of flooding and stormwater management in the city of Newark, New Jersey, examining stormwater management, urban redevelopment, and their entanglements in a postindustrial landscape. It discusses the implications of stormwater management strategies in a city that is reinventing itself with an eye to a history of economic decline and deindustrialization and another to chronic flooding and increasingly vulnerable infrastructures. First I analyze public contestation surrounding redevelopment and displacement to argue that a focus on infrastructure burdens as it pertains to flooding helps us to understand urban transformation as it is experienced through the body. Then I focus on the use of open space gardens for stormwater management, revealing the ways in which flood resilience is built into the landscape and the lives of residents. Juxtaposing increased density and vacancy in different parts of the city, this article reveals how concurrent measures of time, progress, and development emerge through stormwater management in the process of building flood resilience.