Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

10-2021

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.

Keywords

Storage, infrastructure planning, water, urbanization of nature, temporality

Discipline

Urban Studies and Planning

Research Areas

Integrative Research Areas

Publication

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

Volume

5

Issue

4

First Page

2283

Last Page

2306

ISSN

2514-8486

Identifier

10.1177/25148486211047387

Publisher

SAGE

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486211047387

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