The Dilemma of Water in the City - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 2

also in establishing the practice of comprehensive city planning. 6 These
systems not only required long-range vision on the part of municipal
offi cials for population growth forecasting, technical network design,
and infrastructure fi nancing, but also called for a permanent bureau-
cracy to administer them continuously. 7 Political scientist John Dryzek
describes this as a process of “administrative rationalism” wherein en-
vironmental problems were resolved through the harnessing of scientifi c
expertise by the administrative state. 8 As a whole, these systems are socio-
technical amalgams of hardware (pipes, roads, pumps, transfer stations,
etc.) and software (municipal bureaucracies, technical experts, urban
residents, codes and regulations, etc.) that constitute an idealized urban
metabolism. 9
In this chapter, I examine a particular form of urban water, storm-
water runoff, to understand how technical experts were tasked with tam-
ing urban nature through technological intervention. I begin with a brief
overview of the evolution of urban runoff and emphasize the role of late
nineteenth-century engineers and public health offi cials who advocated for
an increase in the hydrologic metabolism of cities to improve sanitary con-
ditions. A well-drained city allowed for economic development to fl ourish
while also creating sanitary conditions that improved the health of urban
residents. The logic of urban runoff shifted in the 1960s and 1970s from a
drainage approach that emphasized the effi cient conveyance of water away
from the city as quickly as possible to a stormwater management approach
that involved slowing down and treating water volumes to address issues
of water quality, erosion, and fl ooding. 10 The evolution of urban runoff
networks also contributed to the rise of local and regional governments
while situating technomanagerial actors as the central arbiters of human/
nature relations in cities.
The Promethean Project and the Control of Nature
The control and rationalization of the urban landscape in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries involved a multitude of activities to tame and
control nature through technology, human labor, and capital investment.
Geographer Maria Kaika identifi es three phases of this so-called Pro-
methean Project of Modernity. 11 The fi rst phase, the Nascent Promethean
Project, began in the early nineteenth century as advocates of urban devel-
opment attributed deteriorating social and environmental conditions to an
unruly and undisciplined natural landscape. During this period, technical
experts and public health offi cials called for ambitious, far-reaching plans