Politics of Urban Runoff: Building Relations through Active Citizenship - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 164

In cases in which problems cannot be simplifi ed to technomanagerial
governance, regulatory authorities resort to public education to persuade
the public to act as more diligent environmental stewards. 22 With urban
runoff, structural controls are those strategies that the municipal govern-
ment can control, and nonstructural controls are those that are outside
of technomanagerial governance, creating a division of labor between
government and residents as well as a cognitive split between technical and
social approaches to environmental management. 23 This two-pronged ap-
proach of rational politics, composed of prescriptive government activities
and voluntary public actions, is the dominant form of environmental man-
agement practiced today and creates a particular arrangement of human/
nonhuman relations. Urban residents are understood as receivers of mu-
nicipal environmental services rather than an integral part of the nature/
culture nexus and are called upon only when technomanagerial strategies
cannot meet environmental quality goals.
Furthermore, community advocates argue that rational politics and
technomanagerial governance strategies are insuffi cient to develop long-
term, democratic forms of governance. Political scientist Frank Fischer
makes an explicit connection between environmental fl ows and gover-
nance, arguing that “the environmental crisis is as much a crisis of the
institutions that have to interpret and regulate risks as it is a physical
phenomenon pertaining to natural processes.” 24 This suggests that the
solutions to the problem of environmental degradation in cities not only
lies in the development and enforcement of more stringent environmental
regulations but also involves a fundamental reassessment of the political
institutions that conceptualize and manage urban nature.
“Power to the People”: Populist Politics
The fl ip side of the top-down, broadly applied regulatory approach of
rational politics is populist politics. This model, as its name implies, is
bottom-up and is practiced by nongovernmental organizations and in-
dividuals who focus on discrete local issues. The environmental justice
activities in East Austin and the Northgate Mall controversy in Seattle are
both quintessential forms of populist politics directed at issues of urban
runoff. In both cases, individuals and local organizations directly chal-
lenged the economic development strategies of the municipal government
and powerful consortiums of property owners and developers due to the
social and environmental impacts that would result. The populist actors
highlighted the negative implications of applying citywide or regional