Holding water for the city: Emergent geographies of storage and the urbanization of nature

Abstract

In the US West, water stories are often aqueduct stories, narratives of moving the vital resource from one place to another. This paper, in contrast, explores nascent efforts to keep the water still, in the name of helping buffer cities from the anticipated impacts of climate change. Scripted as potential holding sites for an urban water reserve, aquifers and the task of filling them now orient a range of policies and material investments across Southern California. Building on writings that explore the multi-scalar politics of storing and stockpiling vaccines, resources, and lively or uncooperative commodities, this analysis approaches storage as a key moment within circulation, a dynamic, constitutive stillness that conditions flows. Three early-stage subterranean water stockpiling projects connected to the City of Los Angeles are explored, and used to demonstrate how the pursuit of storage is remaking material and political relationships within and between urban jurisdictions, while complicating long-fraught urban–rural relations within the region's waterscape. These shifts suggest the value of reorienting the notion of the urbanization of nature to better attend to the geographies of resource storage, in addition to those of resource flows and circulations.

Regulatory Alchemy: How the Water Cycle Becomes Capital in the California Desert

“…They claimed that aquifer storage would prevent contamination and minimise evaporation. The water from times of surplus would be available during later times of dearth, what might be called “strategic water stockpiling” (Randle 2022:2284). When water prices increased, they would be able to sell the water for more money than they had initially used to buy the land.…”

“…Like other large infrastructure projects, water has become financialised as companies theorise households as future revenue streams that offer safe returns (Loftus and March 2016). In Southern California, the 2011-2017 drought also pushed water districts to seek to diversify their water sources to prepare for future scarcity (Randle 2022). As I argue, Cadiz Inc has always viewed its water as a future revenue stream and financial asset.…”

Emergent landscapes of renewable energy storage: Considering just transitions in the Western United States

“…Critical resource geography examines power relations, values, and political economic dimensions of resource extraction and use, connecting biophysical, infrastructural, and sociocultural dimensions of energy, land, and water [19,25,26]. Resource storage has recently received closer consideration, with attention to how resource circulations shift when storage infrastructures are developed [27]. Energy storage-relevant scholarship in critical resource geography has primarily examined fast-evolving extractive frontiers and strategic resource politics developing around lithium mining worldwide [28].…”

Geographies of storage

“…A survey of recent literature, however, suggests that a shift is under way within the empirical literature. Both within and beyond geography, emergent arrangements of carbon, energy, water, waste, cryogenic, commodity, and data storage are drawing intense scholarly attention (Amoore, 2018; Bayona‐Valderrama et al., 2021; Bell & Macfarlane, 2022; Bridge & Faigen, 2022; Graeter, 2020; Hoag, 2022; Hogan, 2015; Ialenti, 2020; Kon Kam King et al., 2018; Lemke, 2021; Malm & Carton, 2021; Randle, 2022; Simpson, 2019; Turley et al., 2022; White‐Nockleby, 2022; Wolff, 2021). This efflorescence has been accompanied by renewed interest in established and historical configurations of commodity and critical resource storage (Banoub & Martin, 2020; Cousins, 2020; Folkers, 2019; Orenstein, 2019).…”