Randle, S. (2025). Replumbing the city: Water management as climate adaptation in Los Angeles. University of California Press. ISBN 9780520394056 (paper back, US$30)/ ISBN 9780520394049 (hardcover, US$95)/ISBN 9780520394063 (ebook, US$30), 250 p.
URL: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/replumbing-the-city/paper
By David Zetland, Leiden University College, The Netherlands
To cite this review: Zetland, D. (2025). Review of “Replumbing the City: Water Management as Climate Adaptation in Los Angeles”, University of California Press by Sayd Randle, Water Alternatives, https://www.water-alternatives.org/index.php/boh/item/393-la
I was excited to review this book, since I did my PhD work on surface water management in southern California and am now writing on climate change adaptation. Indeed, I, like Randle, was a Ciriacy-Wantrup fellow at UC Berkeley.
But the book’s content and main points do not really match its subtitle. Instead, it looks at how communities are engaged (or involved or burdened) by efforts to recycle wastewater and capture stormwater on smaller, local scales. These topics are important, but they do not capture either the scope or scale of challenges that Los Angeles — or any city reliant on imported water — faces.
Randle drew heavily upon her PhD fieldwork for this book, which is organized into two parts: Reuse and Recharge. In both parts, Randle, as an anthropologist, recounts the stories and dynamics of the people with whom she worked — groups of volunteers working for NGOs who sought to help residents install greywater systems or storm water sinks on their residential properties. To provide context, she provides a lot of useful background on the larger systems importing water to the area (the Los Angeles Aqueduct, for example) as well as those handling the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s (LADWP) wastewater and storm water.
Randle investigates the progress, if any, in increasing local water resilience by using grey water for irrigating outdoors and diverting storm water into local aquifers. In both cases, the goal is to reduce reliance on imported water supplies, but there is hardly any mention of reducing demand for water. I find the lack of a demand discussion concerning. On the one hand, many experts assume that “hardened” demand cannot be reduced. On the other, the fact that 35 percent of all city water goes to outdoor watering calls for attention.1 Randle, as an anthropologist, could have brought some useful insights on changing the “culture of lawns” in such an arid place.
But, what about those local supply-side efforts? Randle brings an academic eye to her observations of how large and small-scale programs affect whites and non-whites, rich and poor, humans and non-humans (i.e., plants). In the process, she focuses a bit too much, in my opinion, on hypothesizing why structural inequalities may be leading to unfair outcomes (her “moral-ecological undertaking”) instead of focusing on how systems are working for some or how to diversify adaptation methods.
Consider the work of Elinor Ostrom, who didn’t just explain how commons work and fail, but who also did her PhD work (UCLA 1965) on groundwater management in Southern California. Ostrom focused on the nuts and bolts of cooperation for protecting common-pooled goods (such as LA’s groundwater) and building public goods (such as the organizations that can help residents save water locally). Some of that perspective might have helped Randle see a more nuanced situation in her fieldwork.2 Indeed, I was often surprised by Randle’s injections of various academic theories into a paragraph on lawn maintenance or commuting to work. Yes, it’s useful to identify patterns in the world around us, but it’s misleading to impose patterns that her subjects may neither recognize in their “lived experience.”
In some sections, for example, she writes how people are happy to be working (for free) on maintaining water-retaining landscapes that NGOs have installed; in others, she writes of others who cannot find the time or energy to do that work. Is it important that the happy people are white and rich and the non-happy people are non-white and poor? I’m not sure when it comes to both groups agreeing to have those systems installed on their properties. To me, it seems that there was a need for community building.
The commons are “used by all and owned by none.” In the cases here, the commons refer to shared waters, shared hydrologies, and shared pollutants. In the distant past, these commons were managed on smaller scales by the people who depended on them, which made it easier for those people to collectively govern and contribute their labor and resources to those commons. But those communities were not “efficient” when it came to scale, and they were a lot of work, so many people were happy to pay for services from large impersonal utilities run by engineers and planners who saw meters instead of people, infrastructure instead of rivers and lakes, treatment facilities instead of ecosystems. Those utilities did not always deliver fairness in their quest for efficiency, and their one-size-fits-four-million people (LADWP’s “user base”) programs worked worse for the poor and weak. I have written about how LADWP’s water tariffs favor those with larger property sizes, who tend to be the rich.2 So, yes, there are issues with justice — environmental and otherwise, but I think that Randle spends too much time declaiming (importing?) injustice and too little time on diagnosing the challenges that small scale, community-driven efforts face. These efforts require work more than new (old) technologies, and they must join if they are going to replace large-scale projects. But that will not happen until some group provides organization as a public good. In the meantime, all Randle is seeing— and all I’d expect to see — are work by the “10 percent” who care enough to spend too much time and money on doing the right thing, while “the 90 percent” (these shares are my rules of thumb; they correlate with social preferences, not race) who are too busy with work, family and struggle to protest against the quite reasonable services they get from LADWP. Yes, we need to adapt to climate change, but collective action is hard — as we’ve found out with efforts to mitigate climate change.
One thing that could help Randle and others hoping for more action in these areas are higher water prices. I know that economic incentives are not super exciting to people who worry about the cost of living or how humans have a “right” to water, but it’s pretty hard to convince people that water is scarce or precious when it only costs $2.84 per ccf (centrum cubic feet; 748 gallons or 2,830 liters) for LADWP’s most expensive (tier 4) water.3 Do I really need to install a greywater system when I can get ten liters of clean drinking water from the tap for one penny? Why should I worry about capturing stormwater when someone else is doing that job?
My bottom line is that Randle could have written a shorter book by reducing theory and jargon and focusing more on the struggles of building community resilience. We are going to need a lot more of that as climate change drives waves and waves of challenges against cities, large and small.
Notes
1 Exhibit ES-H in LA’s Urban Water Management Plan, 2020. https://www.ladwp.com/sites/default/files/documents/LADWP_2020_UWMP_Web.pdf
2 https://www.kysq.org/pubs/backups/Zocolo.pdf
3 https://www.ladwp.com/sites/default/files/documents/Water_Rates_Ordinance_4_15_16.pdf
