Urban rainwater management is the terrain of varied initiatives that challenge existing drainage systems. The initiatives that this article refers to as Urban Rainwater Harvesting (URH), promise a more sustainable urban water approach; however, they remain isolated "niche" projects. The article aims to investigate challenges and opportunities for mainstreaming alternative URHs as sociotechnical systems (STS). It identifies six analytical categories: context, actors, instruments, processes/dynamics, outputs and impacts as a framework for the analyses of URH projects in Stockholm, Berlin and Barcelona. Despite the diversity of socio-spatial contexts, driving forces, purposes, instruments used, technical designs and scale of URH projects, relevant factors for a breakthrough of these systems are discussed. Even though URHs have not yet become a common component of rainwater management in any of the cities, context-specific combinations of these factors are found to be essential if these systems are to become complementary options for the sustainable management of rainwater in cities.

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Studies of rainwater harvesting regularly highlight the rich diversity of technologies used for rainwater harvesting in cities, but rarely devote attention to the equally diverse logics driving rainwater harvesting projects (RWHPs). To rectify this omission this paper presents research from a city -Berlin -which has a long pedigree of rainwater harvesting that has given rise, over the past 30 years, to an astonishingly varied range of schemes. We analyse and compare three cases encapsulating three distinct project types prevalent in the city: public, grassroots and commercial. The paper demonstrates the nature of diversity between the three and illustrates how diverse logics of rainwater harvesting co-exist within one city.More fundamentally, it unpacks these logics using concepts of sociotechnical imaginaries, urban infrastructures in transition and institutional obduracy and change. It is demonstrated, thereby, how each project reflects a particular imaginary of why urban rainwater should be harvested, how and for whom, and how these imaginaries have emerged out of particular institutional and infrastructural contexts in

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