Moving between shower drains, aqueducts, rain gardens, and even kitchen sinks, Replumbing the City traces the enormous urban waterscape of Los Angeles in a state of flux. For more than a century, the city of Los Angeles has relied on faraway water for the vast majority of its municipal supply, but climate change is making these distant sources much less dependable. To adapt, Angelenos—including city engineers, advocates at NGOs, and residents—are developing new water supplies within the space of the city. Sayd Randle’s ethnography examines the labor of replumbing LA’s sprawling water system, detailing how a desire to sustain unlimited and uninterrupted water provision for paying customers is reshaping the urban environment and its management. Tracking how such projects redistribute the work of water management, the book explores thorny questions of how the labor of climate adaptation should be mobilized and valued.
Sayd Randle is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Singapore Management University.
"Taking us on a journey through the unlikely waterscapes of Los Angeles, Sayd Randle reveals the hidden but lively work of urban water management in supplying the city with municipal water from within. This ethnographically rich and compelling book is an essential contribution to understanding the emerging entanglements and dynamic reconfigurations of the urban fabric in the face of climate change."—Kristian Karlo Saguin, author of Urban Ecologies on the Edge: Making Manila’s Resource Frontier
"In careful and capacious ethnographic detail, Replumbing the City maps the rescaling and renaturing of Los Angeles’s water systems and the homes, households, and non-humans whose free labor sustains these infrastructures. This book is an essential companion for grappling with the limits and possibilities of urban adaptation for cities on the edge of climate breakdown."—Sophie Webber, Senior Lecturer in Geography, University of Sydney
"How can a vast metropolis, long dependent on faraway sources of water, adjust to a changing climate? In this nuanced and sophisticated ethnography, Randle shows how environmental activists, water engineers, and urban residents are working to transform the system of water provision in Los Angeles. Replumbing the City is a vital contribution to our understanding of urban climate adaptation."—Andrew Lakoff, author of Planning for the Wrong Pandemic: Covid-19 and the Limits of Expert Knowledge
250 pp.6 x 9Illus: 19 b/w images, 6 b/w maps
9780520394056$29.95|£25.00Paper
Apr 2025