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Los Angeles’s water supply is a topic of near-mythological scope, extending back to its noirish capture of eastern Sierra water rights at the beginning of the 20th century to the formation of the Metropolitan Water District soon after. Though plumbed to three far-flung watersheds by world-renowned aqueduct systems, the city has begun to develop its internal water resources in the face of climate change and environmental restrictions. In her fascinating new book, Replumbing the City: Water Management as Climate Adaptation in Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2025), Sayd Randle studies this reorientation from an ethnographic perspective, identifying important challenges and opportunities when localizing urban water supplies.
So, what does Los Angeles water look like to an anthropologist? In short, like a bunch of humans trying to figure things out. There are no “water buffalos” — what water people call themselves when they reach a certain age — or think-tank experts laying out a strategy for the next 50 years. Instead, we meet a series of “interlocutors” from non-governmental organizations, city departments, engineering firms, and Los Angeles residents — all speaking to the natural and human services that make their lives possible. The ethnographic approach centers perspectives from and about real people.
Randle focuses on areas of the San Fernando Valley where the city has situated major replumbing efforts. She deftly summarizes the storied history of the Los Angeles Aqueduct opening this once-remote area to agriculture and urban development, sealing off the land’s natural capacity to recharge runoff from the surrounding hills. Now that Los Angeles seeks to develop that recharge capacity for storing water to use when it is needed, there is a limited amount of land left to provide this service. Similarly, the city seeks to convert wastewater flows into a new, local, drought-proof water supply, but doing so requires a reliable flow of wastewater. This conflicts with the hyperlocal development of greywater systems that reuse non-septic wastewater on properties, thus diverting the wastewater supply for centralized recycled water systems. Additionally, internalized water development inevitably overlaps historical and current land use impacts and inequities written directly — often in red lines — onto the urban landscape. Stormwater capture and recharge must contend with not just gravity but balkanized and concreted watersheds, and wastewater reclamation and reuse requires not just treatment and public acceptance but a conceptual as well as physical reorientation of the meaning of “waste.”
Replumbing the City explores these challenges through on-the-ground observations and lived experience framed by important and at-times dizzying contexts. Many water professionals might be surprised to learn they have adopted a “‘neosanitarian’ subject position on urban water reuse” informed by “grey epistemology,” while certain Angelenos might be interested (or bemused) by how their “phatic labor” provides “water infiltration services” to the general community. I was fascinated with Randle flagging, both in the Los Angeles context and more generally, the “rhythmic” interactions between the “stillness” of groundwater storage and the constant water and wastewater “flows within the grid.” Similarly, her informed discussion of “infrastructural nature,” “ecological services,” and “green infrastructure” echoes Erica Gies’s broader survey of “slow water” nature-based solutions to water management challenges.
Randle’s insight from experiences with a non-governmental organization and a greywater installation company inform her approach to the broader greywater topic. On the positive side, we get to learn a great deal about little understood non-public sectors of water management (see Buzz Thompson’s excellent survey). On the negative side, these sectors are relatively small in influence compared to the larger complex of public utilities and engineering firms who will drive, at scale, the monumental shift required for replumbing the second largest city in the U.S.
While Randle may too easily dismiss valid concerns that greywater systems reduce wastewater flows needed for reclamation activities, her defense of greywater does point to a larger issue of public agency control of water use. Water and wastewater systems are built to meet projected demands, but these projections can often be wildly off the mark. Public water agencies are increasingly understanding that demands drive our systems, not vice versa, making demand management at long last not just the result of our fears but part of our menu of services.
Randle also calls into question Los Angeles’s emphasis on water service reliability. Continuous drinking water service on demand is not just an expectation but a nationwide regulatory requirement that meets universal (not particular) community standards and provides significant health and economic benefits. Characterizing reliability as an “allure” or a construct of “urban imaginaries” seems to denigrate this pinnacle of public enterprise. That said, it is reasonable to expand the concept of reliability beyond volume to safety and affordability. Randle correctly identifies these issues, or, rather, questions — can I drink this water? can I afford it? — as deserving much broader and deeper discussions.
Most importantly, in Replumbing the City, Randle provides a valuable — one might even say vital — understanding of “hybrid labor” of humans and non-humans in maintaining groundwater-replenishing landscapes. Water agencies are becoming more aware that incentivizing landscape makeovers must be matched with resources to assist landowners in the never-ending chore of maintaining these cool but complicated yards. As someone who installed curb cuts, passive and active rainwater harvesting, and greywater systems at my home — with tremendous assistance from private and public professionals — I can attest to the joys and sorrows (and expense and savings) of this work.
Replumbing the City should help inform and improve water agencies’ reorientation to a comprehensive “one water” paradigm in which water customers become co-managers of the cyclic water system within which all water, wastewater, and stormwater systems operate. How will property owners, elected officials, and public agencies be convinced to invest in replumbing efforts on private properties when such networked installations have not yet demonstrated the same level of success as large-scale infrastructure projects? Can urban water agencies appropriately and cost-effectively incentivize homeowners and water users to change their behaviors, landscapes, and plumbing to provide both individual and system-wide benefits? Where can natural services be harnessed in an urbanized environment without requiring uncompensated human labor and reinscribed injustices? Randle and her interlocutors help answer these questions.
