Remaking stormwater as a resource: Technology, law, and citizenship

Abstract

This review examines how stormwater is being rethought of as a resource in urban planning and governance. No longer administered simply as a conveyance problem, a range of actors are progressively repurposing stormwater as an underutilized resource that can resolve water quality and quantity challenges. I suggest this transition emerged out of the need to address a host of problems rooted in the institutional and infrastructural legacy of treating stormwater as a waste and flood control problem, as well as a new set of concerns associated with climate change, continued urbanization, and fiscal and administrative cuts. As a response, a number of technical and political mechanisms are looking to remake stormwater as a resource. In particular, the review focuses on the role of green infrastructure and technological change, legal structures, and incentives to enroll citizens into the governance process. These practices assemble stormwater as a resource by configuring diverse forms of knowledge, technology, and relations that meet political goals to build smart, resilient, and sustainable cities. This article is categorized under: Engineering Water > Sustainable Engineering of Water Human Water > Water Governance Science of Water > Water Quality

Extending Natural Limits to Address Water Scarcity? The Role of Non-Conventional Water Fluxes in Climate Change Adaptation Capacity: A Review

“…However, rainwater is a resource that must be gathered in decentralized interventions, rather than one large public works construction, as occurs when addressing agricultural water demand [58]. According to Cousins [59], a transition towards water-sensitive cities is needed:…”

Analyzing Evidence of Sustainable Urban Water Management Systems: A Review through the Lenses of Sociotechnical Transitions

“…Figure 12 illustrates our results concerning outcomes within the sample. A key assumption here is that the outcomes of experimentation and transition are manifested in three primary aspects: Technical learning through developing and building a knowledge capacity, and the transition to a new 'technology'; social learning and change; and mainstreaming-replication, upscaling, and knowledge transferability to other contexts [16,28,45,49,51,52,56,65,66]. Using our interpretation, the majority of the studies could be assumed to have achieved some level of technical (e.g., installing and running hydrological-hydrodynamic models) and social learning (e.g., action-research involving marginalized communities).…”

Beekeeping in, of, or for the city? A socioecological perspective on urban apiculture

“…Nevertheless, it is likely that many plants in urban localities benefit from honey bee pollination, and this service, though poorly studied and difficult to quantify, is rightly recognized as a legitimate asset of urban beekeeping. Where beekeeping can be strategically integrated into the production of pollinator-dependent crops in urban agricultural systems, it has the potential to become uniquely of and for the city, functioning as part of an interconnected social, ecological, and technological system (SETS), a stewarded interconnection between social and natural worlds (Markolf et al 2018;Cousins 2018).…”