The Dilemma of Water in the City - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 15

water quality and to address multiple goals of quantity and quality simul-
taneously. Despite four decades of scientifi c research and practice, urban
runoff has largely eluded control by technological means. As a stormwater
engineer notes, “The fundamental problem with conventional stormwater
management may be the mindset. It does not treat water as a valuable
resource but more like a problem to solve, or even worse, seeks to export
it as a waste product.” 65
To address the systemic problem of urban runoff, there is a need to re-
fl ect on this idea that the city is somehow devoid of nature. Once we begin
to understand the connections between water fl ows and human habitation,
and between nature and cities, we can start to recognize urban runoff as
an issue that transcends technomanagerial strategies and has profound
implications on broader issues of urban development. In the next chapter,
I examine the approach of landscape architects and ecological planners, a
group of urban practitioners whose work on urban water has gone largely
unacknowledged until recently. They have long forwarded an alternative
to the Promethean approach of total control of nature and instead em-
braced different ideas of human/nature relations in the city. Such ideas
recognize the systemic character of urban runoff and the importance of
water fl ows in the production of urban space.