Hydrosocial hinterlands: An urban political ecology of Southern California’s hydrosocial territory

Abstract

Urban political ecology has conceptualized the city as a process of urbanization rather than a bounded site. Yet, in practice, the majority of urban political ecology literature has focused on sites within city limits. This tension in urban political ecology evokes broader conversations in urban geography around city-as-place versus urbanization-as-process. In this paper, I bring an urban political ecology analysis to examine co-constitutive urbanization and ruralization processes, focusing on sites beyond city boundaries in three empirical case studies located within the broader hydrosocial territory of urban Southern California. By focusing on the rural components of hydrosocial territories, I show that each of the three case studies has been shaped in very different ways based on its enrollment within urban Southern California’s hydrosocial territory; in turn, the rural has also shaped the cities through flows of politics and resources. The paper demonstrates how urban political ecology can be usefully applied to understand rural places, illustrating how processes of urbanization can be involved in the production of distinctly rural—and distinctly different—landscapes. The cases demonstrate the utility of urban political ecology as an analytical framework that can examine co-constitutive urbanization/ruralization processes and impacts while maintaining enough groundedness to highlight place-based differences.

Missing power: Nostalgia and disillusionment among Southern California water engineers

“…Wrapped by their promoters in the language of utilitarian rationalization of nature – enabling once-wild rivers to provide the ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ by moving their flows to the Southland (Hundley, 2001) – agencies like the LADWP and MWD shaped the conditions of possibility for development across the US West. Scholars of many stripes have examined the concentration of power produced by such ‘Promethean’ approaches resource management (Kaika, 2005) in California, via rural disenfranchisement (Cantor, 2020; Piper, 2006), elite capture of public water agencies (Reisner, 1993 [1986]; Worster, 1985), and the subtler forms of alignment that have flourished between urban water agencies and the region’s storied ‘growth machine’ (Erie, 2006; Gottlieb and Fitzsimmons, 1991). MWD’s 1959 Laguna Declaration, a document expressing the agency’s bedrock commitment to providing adequate water to support any new building within its service area, has been fingered as an example of an ostensibly apolitical agency policy that serves developers far better than it does residents of the increasingly crowded region (Zetland, 2009).…”

Urbanizing Islands: A Critical History of Singapore's Offshore Islands

“…Formerly known as Pulau Belakang Mati -meaning 'the Island behind Death' in Malay -Sentosa Island was initially populated by Malay, Bugis and Chinese villagers although a mysterious epidemic in the 1840s almost decimated many of the inhabitants (Turnbull, 1972). 6 The island then functioned as a British military base since the late 19th century, before being developed into a "tropical island resort and South Sea Island paradise" in the 1970s (Campbell, 1967;Ho, 2015;The Straits Times, January, 1969). This required renaming the island in 1970 to reflect the island's new image (Sentosa means "peace and tranquillity" in Malay).…”

“…Furthermore, we illustrate how landscape approaches can help to expand urban metabolism research within UPE to gain a deeper understanding of the socio-ecological and spatial dynamics bound up with urbanization. By examining the way in which Singapore's offshore islands have coordination of metabolic processes and infrastructural configurations that are financed by public and private forms of fixed capital and regulated through domestic institutional frameworks within geographically localised production systems (Cantor, 2020;Swyngedouw, 2006;Usher, 2018). Urban metabolism is a concept that has been adopted by urban political ecologists to theorize the extensive networks of resources, including food, energy, water, and other materials, that are integral to the development and maintenance of urban areas (Heynen et al, 2006;Swyngedouw, 2006).…”

“…Therefore, the spatial transformation and reorganization of the city's periphery has had significant benefits for Singapore as a whole, but has in the process irreversibly transformed the socio-ecologies of its outlying islands. This is because such processes of capitalist accumulation and spatial reorganization always occur in political and social contexts shaped powerfully, if not exclusively, by central state power (de Koninck et al, 2017;Usher, 2018;Cantor, 2020). Indeed, Singapore is the quintessential developmental state, which places a premium on physical and economic development to secure its legitimacy (Neo, 2007).…”

Representation justice as a research agenda for socio-hydrology and water governance

“…There have been numerous calls to integrate social science with socio-hydrology to investigate the roles of power relations in water systems (Wesselink et al 2017, Di Baldassarre et al 2019, Ross and Chang 2020. Hydrosocial studies in particular address social, political, cultural, and economic factors affecting hydrological outcomes, including meaning-making, knowledges, and structural oppression in water-society interactions (Lave 2012, Linton and Budds 2014, Haeffner et al 2017, Rusca et al 2017, Pacheco-Vega 2019, Cantor 2020, Mukherjee 2020. This perspective may enhance socio-hydrology by opening novel lines of inquiry, introducing new methods, and deepening understanding.…”