Urban Runoff and the City of Relations - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 29

its tendency to totalize relations and develop yet another grand theory
of everything. 68 Rather than moving further and further away from the
world to obtain a fuller view, a topologic understanding of space requires
urban practitioners to adopt a local perspective to interpret and shape
hybrid relations. 69
An Example of Relational Stormwater Management: Village Homes
Returning to the topic of urban runoff, a relational perspective provides
an alternative to the Promethean Project of conventional stormwater man-
agement by recognizing the inherent messiness of cities. Rather than at-
tempting to reform conventional stormwater management as prescribed by
source control advocates, a relational perspective requires a fundamental
reconsideration of the connection between humans and their material sur-
roundings. Practices of stormwater management are recast as processes
of relation building that involve technological and ecological knowledge
but also cultural and political knowledge. Instead of being a background
practice of urban management, stormwater management suddenly be-
comes an integral part of daily urban life because it is indelibly hitched
to all activities.
A small number of urban practitioners have promoted a relational un-
derstanding of urban runoff by defi ning space through the connectedness
of landscape and humans. One example of a topologic development with
urban runoff as a central element is Village Homes, a sixty-acre master
development in Davis, California. Designed and developed in the 1970s
by Mike and Judy Corbett, the project consists of 242 clustered houses
connected by walking and bicycling paths and a generous amount of open
space and community agricultural land (see fi gure 2.2). The Corbetts com-
bined ideas from Ebenezer Howard's Garden City model at the turn of the
twentieth century with the social and environmental movements of 1960s
and 1970s; today, the project is celebrated as one of the most successful
sustainable community developments in the United States. 70
The two principal goals of Village Homes were to reduce residential
energy consumption and to emphasize community cohesion. The energy
conservation emphasis of the project is consistent with contemporary
green building practices that use technological and design strategies to
reduce the ecological footprint of human habitation. The houses are ori-
ented to the south and are outfi tted with photovoltaic solar panels and
solar water heaters, resulting in energy savings of about one-third when
compared with conventional houses in the region. 71 However, it is the