One Water in Los Angeles? Contesting the Circular City through Infrastructural Practices

Plans to enhance water sustainability by closing urban water cycles are proliferating worldwide. However, the forms of politics shaping circular water cities and what they entail for governing urban nature and space need to be better understood. This article explores technology as a site of power and difference in circular city-making by reviewing scholarship on technopolitics in Los Angeles, California and by tracing how actors in this modern metropolis under increasing water stress reconfigure water flows through infrastructural practices. To decouple urban growth from water imports and pollution, public water utilities combine centralized infrastructures in a singular “One Water” cycle and remake homes, gardens, and watersheds as components of this system. However, these dynamics and user-driven infrastructural practices draw water circularity endeavors into local histories and presents of environmental injustice, climate adaptation, and privilege. This process of infrastructural translation produces plural versions of water circularity. We argue that the specific histories, cultural meanings, and geographies linked to artifacts constitute novel “technopolitics” that harbor differing rationales of resource productivity and relations between state experts and users. The article demonstrates conceptually how technology’s material-semiotic aspects that are emphasized within circularity agendas shape broader regimes of urban environmental governance and explain their (in-)stability.