Politics of Urban Runoff: Building Relations through Active Citizenship - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 173

cities. 72 It is through activity with our surroundings, both human and
nonhuman, that we become politically engaged actors, or citizens, who
enact human/nonhuman relations.
Civic Politics and Urban Runoff
With respect to urban runoff, rational politics has dominated over the last
century because the governance of urban water has been the responsibility
of the state. Populist political activities arise less frequently and tend to
center on human health issues related to rational political activities such
as fl ooding incidents that endanger human lives and property. And civic
political activities almost never focus on urban runoff issues. 73 However,
there is great potential for urban water activities to be a central element
of civic politics, as illustrated by landscape architect Anne Spirn's work
in the Mill Creek neighborhood of West Philadelphia. 74 Spirn fi rst began
working in this blighted, low-income, African American neighborhood
in 1987 because she was interested in using vacant lots to simultaneously
restore urban nature and improve local conditions for residents. Her in-
vestigation shifted to urban runoff issues when she realized that the empty
lots correlated with a historic waterway, Mill Creek, that had been fi lled
in and paved over through urban development processes. It gradually
dawned on Spirn that these residents lived at the bottom of a watershed
as well as the bottom of the social economy, a common characteristic in
Austin and Seattle as well as many other communities.
Rather than proposing an expert-dominated, environmental restoration
project to resolve the confl icts between social and environmental condi-
tions, Spirn broadened the project to include community members and
her students at the University of Pennsylvania in hands-on activities to
transform some of the low-lying lots into outdoor classrooms, demonstra-
tion projects, detention facilities, and community gardens. 75 Spirn writes,
“To read landscape is also to anticipate the possible, to envision, choose
and shape the future: to see, for example, the connections between buried,
sewered stream, vacant land and polluted river, and to imagine rebuilding
a community while purifying its water.” 76 Spirn's work on Mill Creek is a
combination of historical research, community engagement, collaborative
design, and action-oriented pedagogy. It is also an example of the trans-
formation of Spirn from a landscape architect who focused on form and
a topographic understanding of landscape to a politically engaged actor
with a topologic perspective emphasizing contextual processes that enact
the hybrid urban landscape. Her work is simultaneously cultural, natural,