Water That Can Wait: Resilience and the Infrastructures of Buffering

• In Event: Assembling Resilience - II

Abstract

In contemporary Los Angeles, water managers’ and environmental advocates’ emergent understandings of the city’s belowground aquifers as potential ecological buffer zones are shaping the politics of the urban landscape. As state attention and capital investment are increasingly oriented towards transforming this subterranean space into a well-stocked emergency reservoir, novel forms of aboveground spatial governance and environmental management are emerging. In the process, new spaces, substances, and actors are coming to be understood as embedded within the city’s infrastructure of water provision – or, put differently, its infrastructure for buffering the metropolis from ecological shocks. Drawing on fieldwork among technical experts and other policy actors within the city, this paper offers an account of how the ideal of urban resilience becoming materially inscribed within urban space. Training the analytical gaze on the metropolitan landscape foregrounds how these ideas affect the material arrangements of terrain and resources. Tracking how urban terrain is enrolled in these projects, the paper highlights the ways in which the materiality of these landscapes shapes the conditions of possibility for the interventions. Notably, certain sections of the urban environment are now approached as spaces that might – if properly managed – serve the city as water-funneling infrastructures. The attendant efforts to fill L.A.’s “empty storage tank” in the name of resource security are reworking the material configurations of and state practices within sections of the city.

Author

• Sayd Randle, University of Southern California