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The research for this article was funded by the German Hans-Boeckler-Foundation (grant #394952) and by Utrecht University. The empirical fieldwork was co-financed by Utrecht University's Ronald van Kempen Urban Geography Fund and was conducted during several research stays of both authors. We thank all interviewees for their time, dedication and candor. We are grateful to Stephanie Pincetl, who hosted Valentin Meilinger at the California Center for Sustainable Communities at the University of California. In addition, we thank her and Jonathan Rutherford as well as three anonymous IJURR reviewers for their constructive feedback and insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Our thanks to Ana Lúcia Britto for kindly hosting Valentin Meilinger at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where this article was presented and discussed. Finally, we are grateful to Joy Burrough for her professional language editing of a near-final draft of this article. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Climate change and ongoing urban growth intensify water scarcity, flooding, and water pollution in cities worldwide. To tackle these challenges, cities have widely endorsed urban water circularity as a new paradigm for infrastructure development that enables more circular water flows. Sewers, Ponds, and Gardens draws on a case study of Los Angeles, California, to explain shifting constellations of urban water and wastewater infrastructures in the context of growing water challenges and proliferating ideas of circularity. The study shows how attempts to realize urban water circularity through infrastructure renewal produce novel, power and value-laden arrangements of governing urban nature and space. Conceptually, the study draws from debates in urban political ecology, science and technology studies, and studies on urban infrastructures. Its analysis of the political power constituted by technology emphasizes the instability of different technological cultures of urban nature through which urban environments become known and governed. Ultimately, the study highlights avenues for rethinking institutions, actor roles, as well as knowledge and values in water governance to overcome contemporary urban water challenges.

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