Centralized vs. Distributed Climate Adaptation
Innovation on the Recycle, Reuse, and Recharge Frontier
In her intriguing new ethnography of climate change adaptation in Los Angeles, Replumbing the City, Sayd Randle unearths the fissures in how the city of angels is rethinking and reworking its water management system in response to drought and climate change.
These tensions broadly pit a more centralized, engineering strategy of “replumbing” against more localized and distributed nature-based adaptations.
The book starts by examining how water planners and engineers with the L.A. Department of Water and Power (LADWP) have been focused on ensuring the reliability of water provision and how this has led them to favor water recycling efforts. But the LADWP's focus on reliability also leads them to stress the value of maintaining a diverse portfolio of water resources, which is in tension with the efforts of others to "relocalize" L.A.'s water usage.
Randle then describes the lively politics of "greywater," especially the tensions between a more centralized vision of recycling and a more distributed household model.
The book then shifts from a focus on water reuse to an examination of the issues swirling around the idea of recharge, where stormwater is used to recharge groundwater. Randle investigates the LADWP's efforts to develop new recharge grounds and the efforts of environmental activists to encourage smaller-scale green infrastructure that increases water infiltration.
Efforts to develop distributed recharge systems prove particularly challenging and Randle's ethnographic approach proves its mettle here by helping us to understand the hurdles to advancing such efforts. She describes the "ecosystem duties" required of local citizens who sign up for local recharge projects and raises the wider issue of how nature-based solutions can impose various forms of maintenance labor on citizens.
Replumbing the City explores the frontier of climate change adaptation in a city where water has always been at the forefront of politics.
Join Sayd Randle for a Center for Catastrophic Risk Management webinar this Wedesday, March 4th at 5:00pm (Pacific Standard Time) to learn more about these issues. To receive a zoom link for the event, please sign up here: