Urban Runoff and the City of Relations - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 17

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Urban Runoff and the City of Relations
It is not suffi cient to understand either the processes of the social system or the
processes of the natural system alone. Both mold the city's physical environment,
which forms the common ground between them.
—Anne Whiston Spirn 1
The Promethean narrative involving the technomanagerial control of ur-
ban nature is dominant in North America and Northern Europe today.
However, other urban runoff logics have been forwarded to reform the
Promethean approach or to embrace an entirely different interpretation
of urban nature. Such practices recognize the folly in attempts to expunge
nature from cities or to bring it under complete human control. In this
chapter, I begin by describing the emergence of Low Impact Development
and Sustainable Urban Drainage as a signifi cant evolution in stormwa-
ter management. These approaches have the potential to be more effec-
tive at reducing the environmental impacts of urban runoff but continue
to perpetuate technology and technomanagerial actors as the ultimate
arbiters of human/nature relations. However, the rise of source control also
opens up urban runoff to other practitioners, namely landscape architects
and ecological designers, with a long but unheralded history in shaping ur-
ban water fl ows. These practitioners often embrace a relational perspective
that rejects modernist dichotomies of city/rural, human/nonhuman, and
culture/nature and instead focuses on the indelible connections between
urban residents and their material surroundings. Such an approach has
radical implications for stormwater practice and more broadly for conceiv-
ing and enacting different forms of urban nature.
Source Control as an Alternative Urban Drainage Logic
Beginning in the 1980s, a small but infl uential group of stormwater
practitioners began to recognize that managing urban runoff would not