Urban Runoff and the City of Relations - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 19

while redefi ning the relations between water and urban residents. There is
a growing consensus that source control will eventually become the domi-
nant form of stormwater management, although this transition will likely
occur over decades if not centuries due to the ubiquity of the conventional
stormwater management logic in the built environment.
Source control represents a signifi cant break from conventional storm-
water management but technical experts continue to dominate, with engi-
neers joined by biologists and ecologists. Further, municipal and regional
governments continue to be the central arbiters of human/nature interac-
tions; the traditional structure of environmental management remains
fi rmly in place. As such, source control is more an evolution in stormwater
management than a revolution, as many of its advocates would have us
believe. The idea that natural systems and human systems are somehow
separate continues to pervade the logic of source control, as does the
Promethean faith in human ingenuity to overcome the problem of nature.
Landscape Architecture and Urban Water Flows
The emergence of source control as an alternative logic of stormwater man-
agement highlights the infl uence of another group of urban practitioners
who are frequently overlooked in the history of urban water: landscape
architects and ecological planners. Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. is often cited
as the father of urban planning and landscape architecture; his work in the
second half of the nineteenth century exemplifi es an alternative concep-
tion of the relationship between urban residents and their surroundings. 8
Olmsted developed his design approach from earlier landscape gardening
practitioners in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century.
He was also a prominent fi gure in the sanitary reform movement in the
United States in the mid-nineteenth century; this movement emphasized
a connection between the moral reform of urban residents and material
conditions. 9 By the late nineteenth century, Olmsted had developed an
organic philosophy for landscape architecture and urban planning that
integrated the social and natural metabolisms of the urban environment.
Olmsted strove to differentiate the work of landscape architects from
other experts of the built environment, namely engineers, architects, and
horticulturists. He felt that the landscape architect had a “constructive
imagination” that was frequently missing from those other disciplines,
and he was particularly critical of engineering in this regard. He wrote,
“A good Engineer is nearly always impatient of [the] indefi niteness, un-
limitedness and mystery which is the soul of landscape.” 10 In contrast,