Abstract
This article follows the flow of wastewater in Los Angeles, California, from upstream treatment plants to the Pacific Ocean, to explore struggles over reconfigurations of urban wastewater flows for new policy ambitions in recycling and reuse. We show how ambitious infrastructure visions of circular urban resource management have gained force since California's most recent drought (2011−17) but clash with incumbent gravity-fed water and sewer systems, political economy and urban geographies. Engineers navigate these path dependencies through incremental technical improvements of existing infrastructures to increase wastewater recycling. These interventions largely reproduce given infrastructure configurations and urban geographies of water and wastewater while marginalizing other voices in struggles over water circularity and stymying critical debate about more progressive change. We argue that novel infrastructural practices are deeply political and normative and can be explained by four dimensions of the ‘technopolitics’ of wastewater restructuring in Los Angeles: materiality and inherited topologies of infrastructures; circularity discourses; entrenched knowledge cultures; and institutional orders of infrastructure management and public control mechanisms of infrastructure investments and tariffs. We conclude by discussing how these four dimensions of an emerging technopolitical regime of wastewater recycling expand concepts of power that explain urban metabolic change.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 182-201 |
Number of pages | 20 |
Journal | International Journal of Urban and Regional Research |
Volume | 46 |
Issue number | 2 |
Early online date | 2021 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Mar 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The research for this article was funded by the German Hans‐Boeckler‐Foundation (grant #394952) and by Utrecht University. The empirical fieldwork was co‐financed by Utrecht University's Ronald van Kempen Urban Geography Fund and was conducted during several research stays of both authors. We thank all interviewees for their time, dedication and candor. We are grateful to Stephanie Pincetl, who hosted Valentin Meilinger at the California Center for Sustainable Communities at the University of California. In addition, we thank her and Jonathan Rutherford as well as three anonymous IJURR reviewers for their constructive feedback and insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Our thanks to Ana Lúcia Britto for kindly hosting Valentin Meilinger at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where this article was presented and discussed. Finally, we are grateful to Joy Burrough for her professional language editing of a near‐final draft of this article.
Funding Information:
The research for this article was funded by the German Hans-Boeckler-Foundation (grant #394952) and by Utrecht University. The empirical fieldwork was co-financed by Utrecht University's Ronald van Kempen Urban Geography Fund and was conducted during several research stays of both authors. We thank all interviewees for their time, dedication and candor. We are grateful to Stephanie Pincetl, who hosted Valentin Meilinger at the California Center for Sustainable Communities at the University of California. In addition, we thank her and Jonathan Rutherford as well as three anonymous IJURR reviewers for their constructive feedback and insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Our thanks to Ana L?cia Britto for kindly hosting Valentin Meilinger at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where this article was presented and discussed. Finally, we are grateful to Joy Burrough for her professional language editing of a near-final draft of this article.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Urban Research Publications Limited
Keywords
- Los Angeles
- circular cities
- technopolitics
- urban infrastructure
- urban metabolism
- wastewater recycling