Politics of Urban Runoff: Building Relations through Active Citizenship - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 159

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Politics of Urban Runoff: Building Relations
through Active Citizenship
The urban ecology of the contemporary city remains in a state of fl ux and awaits
a new kind of environmental politics that can respond to the co-evolutionary dy-
namics of social and bio-physical systems without resort[ing] to the reactionary
discourses of the past. By moving away from the idea of the city as the antithesis
of an imagined bucolic ideal we can begin to explore the production of urban
space as a synthesis between nature and culture in which long-standing ideologi-
cal antinomies lose their analytical utility and political resonance.
—Matthew Gandy 1
Salmon and salamanders, conservation land strategies and right-of-way
upgrades, passionate neighborhood activists and creative municipal engi-
neers, engineered stormwater ponds and spring-fed community pools: the
stories from the previous four chapters reveal the multifaceted character
of urban runoff and how water fl ows connect to a multitude of vexing
and intransigent issues facing cities today—population growth and urban
expansion, place making and local distinctiveness, social inequity and the
right to the city, governance and regulation, environmental degradation
and restoration, technological obduracy and change, and so on. It suggests
that there are alternative routes or competing pathways to reworking na-
ture in cities and, more broadly, to realize more sustainable urban futures. 2
Urban runoff exposes the contemporary city as a messy agglomeration
of overlaps and confl icts, linkages and ruptures. So what can we make of
these relations? Can we derive patterns and prescribe generalized courses
of action? Or are urban runoff fl ows specifi c to place and contingent upon
particular social, cultural, and material conditions? Should we champion
particular activities over others because of their potential to produce more
desirable future conditions, and, if so, by what criteria?
In this chapter, I propose a political framework to describe the urban
runoff activities in Austin and Seattle. The notion of “politics” is tradition-
ally used to describe a whole host of activities related to the governance