Lillian Ball's art project WATERWASH creates a new ecological imaginary in the South Bronx. Building on a tradition of 'maintenance art', the work exhibits the power of soil, plants and microorganisms to clean water -in effect maintaining urban water. An overarching goal of WATERWASH is to educate local people about the metabolism of urban water, causes of river pollution, and to familiarize them with the capacity of soil and plants to respond to that problem. As part of its creation, the project provided diverse groups of people with opportunities to participate, including a group of Bronx youth who assisted in planting the wetland. Several of these apprentices will be involved in future monitoring of the effectiveness of the wetland in mitigating parking lot runoff. I use Isabelle Stengers' notion of 'diplomacy' to interrogate the efforts of the artist in negotiating and creating an occasion in which people with divergent interests can both recognize and maintain the relationships of care that sustain them. In effect, this effort extends the feminist discourse of maintenance work to include that undertaken by the 'other-than-human'. teenagers, and scientists who collaborated with the artist in the work. They explain how the pipe carries water running off the warehouse's 30,000-foot parking lot after rain or snow, and feeds it into the constructed wetland, which will slow the water and allow it to gently percolate through soil and plant roots, thus cleaning it of hydrocarbons and other pollutants before it makes its way into the river.This art project offers new ways of thinking about the Bronx River. Different approaches to urban water are posed by the signage of the installation, and by the flow of the design. WATERWASH brings visitors to a tiny slip of riverbank next to an expressway in an industrialized area where the river, if thought of at all, has been considered a waste channel. Much of the riverbank in this area is off -limits to public access, blocked long ago by warehouses and factories, and further removed as a desirable place by decades of pollution. The art suggests that even here we can reimagine the nature of cities and urban water, and entertain new symbioses among rain, people, plants, soil, and rivers.Key to this reimagining is WATERWASH's location in the South Bronx, a place that has long been a dumping ground in a number of ways. The area has the lowest ratio of parks to people in the city, but takes in 40% of New York City's waste, the handling of which results in over 60,000 diesel truck trips into the Bronx each day (Carter 2001). Encircled by a number of highways, the Bronx is home to Hunts Point Wholesale Markets (world's largest wholesale market), a municipal sewage sludge processing plant, a privately owned sludge drying plant, and 19 public and private waste transfer stations. The area also hosts a municipal wastewater treatment plant and a large number of manufacturing facilities, all of which result in high concentrations of truck activity and diesel emissions in the proximity of s...