Abstract
Politics, according to Andrew Karvonen, describes “processes of relation building between different human actors to find common ground (in the best of circumstances) or to engage in power plays (in the worst cases) and to orient societies into particular configurations” (p. 160). Critical to the arguments made in this book is his addition to this formulation the importance of “nonhuman actors” such as flows of water, endangered species, the functions that various ecosystems provide to communities or societies, and even impervious surfaces and other engineered objects and systems implicated in the urban stormwater network. This expanded notion of politics—one primarily concerned with “relation building”—is at the core of the “civic politics” that Karvonen argues is necessary to break with the technomanagerial approach to urban nature that has dominated urban planning, urban infrastructure, and even much urban environmentalism over the past 150–200 years.
The book begins with an historical and theoretical explanation of how stormwater has been dealt with in the United States since the early 1800s. The first two chapters include description of the dominant narratives accompanying such practices and an introduction to alternative frameworks and practices beginning to emerge. Karvonen describes our approach to the “problem” of stormwater as one dominated by a Promethean logic that seeks to control and improve upon nature—the groundwork for the “command and control” practices of stormwater management that are so evident even today in most of our landscapes whether urban or rural. In place of this outdated and unsustainable worldview, the author advocates for a “relational” approach to nature, and, by extension, our management of stormwater runoff. Of particular importance to this relational understanding of the world is a shift from topographic space to topological space. The former understands space, and everything in it, as fixed and absolute, whereas the latter focuses on relational connections to which there is no outside to gain a privileged, synoptic vantage point, and thereby devise a monofunctional infrastructural strategy focused only on the command, control, or conveyance of a particular “actor.”
The middle section of the book is comprised of four chapters of case studies—two each on Austin, TX, and Seattle, WA. These chapters offer an essential complement to the more theoretical beginning and ending chapters, and they allow Karvonen to continuously demonstrate how the Promethean worldview infiltrates nearly all aspects of our relationship with urban nature. More practically, the case studies provide “urban practitioners”—a term Karvonen uses frequently to describe individuals working to put into practice a hybrid or relational approach—with a wealth of concrete examples of what has worked and what has not in two cities known for their progressive stormwater policies and projects.
The book’s penultimate chapter is an in-depth discussion of contemporary urban politics, which Karvonen assigns to three categories: Rational, Populist, and Civic. Once again, the author uses this chapter as a way to interweave the practical with the theoretical to clearly demonstrate the outcomes of each political strategy. But it is the somewhat nascent category of civic politics that Karvonen believes is best equipped to “enact the relational perspective of urban nature” through a process of “local, deliberative, and action-oriented programs for reworking urban nature . . . while reinventing the roles of urban residents, governments, and technical experts through radically different forms of political life”(p. 160).
Karvonen closes the book with a chapter titled “Toward the Relational City” in which he outlines a strategy for achieving the relational city comprised of three main parts which include: (1) the development of “civic imaginaries” better able to understand and accept the messy hybridity of our contemporary urba(n)atural situation; (2) the development of a new form of “civic expertise” not so dependent upon the traditional expertise of the Promethean engineer; and, finally, (3) the need for continuous “civic experimentation” through which the ossified forms of technomanagerial, bureaucratic administration of urban stormwater can be slowly but surely replaced with new, more relational, and therefore more sustainable, forms of urban stormwater engagement.
In the spring of 2010, I became involved in a project aimed at raising awareness about sustainability as it relates to urban stormwater, facilitating change in City stormwater management practices, and actually implementing such practices in “pilot” form. The project arose in response to severe flooding problems in a local subwatershed, which is an area of the city where the aging stormwater infrastructure is no longer sufficient to deal with what are increasingly typical storm events. A solid partnership was formed between university faculty from departments such as landscape architecture, environmental engineering, and natural resources, members of the city’s public works, planning, and city council, and a group of concerned citizens that comprised the watershed steering committee. My involvement with the project stretched on for nearly two years (and will hopefully resume soon), and during this time, I witnessed many of the issues confronted in this book—the supposedly apolitical engineers wielding incredible power as a result of their infrastructural expertise; a group of citizens who were passionate in their convictions but not quite well-organized or politically savvy enough to effect enduring change; and a university system seemingly perfectly positioned to engage in such issues and contribute meaningfully to their community and their educational mission but which has yet to evolve an infrastructure capable of catalyzing and supporting the sort of sustained cross-disciplinary activities that such projects entail. The project was not without successes—we did manage to implement some small and scattered infrastructural projects and there is no doubt that the overall awareness of alternatives to the Promethean approach was increased, but I am also convinced that the process would have been significantly more successful if we had been guided by Andrew Karvonen’s Politics of Urban Runoff. The book is neither abstract political theory nor a how-to manual of best management practices. Instead, it offers a productive synthesis of these two poles and thereby produces a useful “third way” resource for urban practitioners.