The Hinterlands of Urban Resilience

• In Event: Assembling Resilience - II

Abstract

This paper asks how urban water managers in Southern California prepare for the disruptive future effects of climate change. It focuses specifically on the investment by the Metropolitan Water District in a massive new tunnel system several hundred miles away, in the Sacramento – San Joaquin Delta, on the grounds of the need for “resilience.” For most of its history, the goal of metropolitan water management has been to ensure the ongoing reliability of supplies. This has meant anticipating and planning for growth by adding additional capacity to the water provision system, with an assumption that the future of water availability would look more or less like the present. However, with the onset of the effects of climate change including species loss, flood risk, increased salinity levels, and snowpack decline, the meaning of reliability has shifted; it now indicates a need for resilience, the ongoing maintenance of current levels of supply in the face of anticipated disruption. As the paper will show, ensuring the resilience of the water supply requires interventions into ecological and infrastructural systems far away from the metropolis. In this sense, the norm of resilience reframes the relationship between the city and its hinterlands: from extraction in the service of ongoing urban expansion to adaptation to an uncertain and potentially catastrophic future.

Author

• Andrew Lakoff, University of Southern California