Book Launch - Replumbing the City: Water Management as Climate Adaptation in Los Angeles

At our recent book launch organised in collaboration with the SMU College of Integrative Studies, we delved into the complex labour of re-engineering LA's water system for a climate-changed future. The discussion, featuring an incredible panel of scholars, moved beyond technical fixes to explore profound questions of justice, work, and Urban Imaginaries.

Key insights:

💧 Beyond "Business as Usual": Climate Adaptation can be paradoxically unambitious. The goal is often to sustain unlimited water provision (a BAU ideal) rather than transform consumption. This "reliability" imperative can sideline more radical rethinking.

🧑‍🌾 Unpaid Ecological Labour of Adaptation: A central theme was "who does the work?" with questions on equity of distributed responsibility, especially when it falls on historically Underserved Communities.

🌿 "Terrestrial Imaginary" Framing: A way of living that reconnects the city with its local ecology. It’s not just new pipes, but new relationships, where humans learn to work with, instead of against, natural processes.

🗺️ Lessons for Singapore & Beyond: The conversation powerfully connected LA’s story to other urban contexts, asking how we can use the book’s vocabulary to think across scales, especially about the challenges of Groundwater Management in sinking metropolises.

❓ Does the Concept of "Water" Hold Water: A provocative meta-question was posed: when a category like "water" becomes so radically relational and entangled with institutions, cultures, and injustices, does it risk becoming too fragmented to be a useful analytic?

Congratulations to Prof Sayd Randle and massive thanks to our discussants, moderator and participants for a truly generative discussion!