Sayd Randle, “At Home in the Watershed: Spatial Politics and Environmental Imaginaries in Los Angeles” in “The Greening of Everyday Life,” John Meyer and Jens Kersten, eds. (Oxford, 2016)

In Los Angeles, local environmentalists have long advocated for the city to embrace distributed green infrastructure installations to manage stormwater flows and recharge local groundwater supplies. This chapter uses an urban political ecology lens to examine the processes that have aided (and stalled) the adoption of these techniques into the cityscape. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among NGOs building and helping maintain these installations, I explore the political implications of this “watershed approach” to water and landscape in the city. Particular attention is paid to the human labor that maintaining this kind of infrastructure requires, and the different frames through which this kind work has been represented over the years.