Concepts such as metabolism and circulation figure prominently in (urban) political ecology and resource geography to describe environmental change as a process of social and material
transformation, or what scholars refer to as socio-material change (Lawhon and Murphy, 2011; Swyngedouw, 1996; Whatmore, 2006). Like other hybrid concepts, such as socionatures, socio- material connotes the coproduction of the natural, or material world, and society (Barnes, 2014; Castree, 2002; Swyngedouw, 1996). In other words, these concepts help scholars recognize diverse forms of human and non-human agency and interaction. Largely influenced by science and technology studies and various post-structural and post-humanist theories (e.g. DeLanda, 2006; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Foucault, 2007; Latour, 2005), a goal within much of this research is to show how resources such as water, oil, trees, and land are not simply “natural things” but are also “irreducibly social” in their ability to enable or constrain political and economic relations (Bakker and Bridge, 2006; Bridge, 2009; Latour, 2004a; Li, 2014).
A focus on the socio-materiality of resources foregrounds a relational perspective that brings attention to the assemblage of human and non-human ideas, capacities, and actions that shape social-ecological relationships (Farías, 2011; Karvonen, 2011; McFarlane, 2011;
Swyngedouw, 2006a). Lawhon (2013), for example, identifies sources of “friction” (e.g. spatial configuration, regulation and enforcement, social norms, values and identity, biophysical limits
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and financial constraints) that reveals, but complicates, the distributed and unequal power relations that shape the circulation and metabolism of resources. Similarly, Anand (2011) develops the concept of “pressure” to understand how social and material claims are made to urban water infrastructure through heterogeneous relationships between political technologies, such as laws, as well as the politics of technology. Other scholars, such as Ranganathan (2015), have focused on the tensions between “flow” and “fixity” as a way to reveal the relational politics that assemble storm drains and produce urban flood risk. Yet others have shown the uncooperative nature of resources to commodification (Bakker, 2003b; Prudham, 2003;
Sneddon, 2007). Despite diverse theoretical engagements, a common trend among research into socio-material politics is a focus on the biophysical characteristics and heterogeneous elements of the material world that enroll expert knowledge claims and technologies to render nature visible and governable (Landström et al., 2011; Latour, 2004b; Li, 2007a; Mitchell, 2002; Scott, 1998).
Yet despite substantial research into the socio-materiality of nature within (urban) political ecology, many questions remain largely unexplored. For example, how much of a resource—at what volumes, densities, masses, or qualities—flows and circulates through a system, urban or otherwise? In other words, what is the volume and structure of socio-material flows and how might geographical research better account for social and material flows
simultaneously? Typically when urban political ecologists engage with the actual volumes, weights, units, or quantities of socio-material flows they inform critique, not analysis.
Swyngedouw (2006), for example, points towards the industrial ecology accounting of Toronto’s urban metabolism as an uncritical exercise—useful in its quantification, but lacking in its ability to do more than simply pose the issue of resource consumption. While I agree with Swyngedouw
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that industrial ecology inadequately theorizes processes of urbanization and the transformation of nature, one is left wondering to what extent the actual mass, density, or volume of urban
metabolic throughput matters in shaping socio-material flows and social-ecological outcomes. Similarly, the more quantitative approaches taken by scholars, such as Heynen (2006), typically portray the metabolization of nature in terms of land use land cover change across an area or spatial extent. Although this work is incredibly useful and important for understanding the relationships between economic, cultural, and political processes in shaping environmental change, work in this tradition needs to equally consider the politics of circulation and metabolism in terms of the volumes of resources that flow, are captured and secured, or are transformed (Bridge, 2013; Elden, 2013). As (Elden, 2013, p. 49) notes, “volume matters because of the concerns of power and circulation.” PIE offers just one avenue to explore the volume and structure of socio-material flows, as well as the technopolitical practices utilized to measure, control, and contain the volume of flows of materials and commodities.
Emergent scholarship working at the intersection of political ecology and industrial ecology, as well as ecological economics, is providing a potential means to better account for the complex relationships between social organization and material flows (Kallis et al., 2013;
Martinez-Alier et al., 2010; Newell and Cousins, 2015; Pincetl et al., 2012b). Approaches to combine these fields of study are at times complementary, other times integrative, and yet other times critical (Breetz, in review). For example, Baka and Bailis (2014) integrate industrial ecology methods and political ecology perspectives through a comparative energy flow analysis that examines the energy security impacts of growing biofuels on potentially marginal lands. Similarly, Bergmann and Holmberg (2016) utilize a multi-regional input-output model to
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through globalized production networks and exchange. Yet other scholars take a more critical approach to their engagement with industrial ecology, or what might be termed critical industrial ecology (Bridge and Jonas, 2002; Huber, 2010). Freidberg (2014), for example, analyzed how life cycle assessments (LCA) form the basis of a “footprint technopolitics” centered around the ways corporate food retailers and manufacturers utilize footprints to govern supply chains and promote ideas of sustainable food. Beltrán and Velázquez (2015) also take a critical approach to the virtual water concept to argue that it distorts understandings of socio-economic systems as simple material flows rather than complex systems. Other critical approaches include research into how the metrics of life cycle analysis obscure environmental justice impacts (Mulvaney, 2014) and the contribution eco-industrial parks may offer to sustainable development (Gibbs and Deutz, 2005). Still, other approaches remain more complimentary, such as Demaria and
Schindler's (2015) utilization of urban metabolism as a way to focus on the actual material flows, as well as a means to contextualize conflicts over waste-to-energy transitions.
This paper expands upon this work by focusing on the ways experts have sought to control, manipulate, and manage the volume and material flow of water in order to organize it as a beneficial resource. In this way, my approach is both critical and complementary, as it seeks to understand the relationship between the actual volume and composition of material flows, as well as the social contexts in which urban metabolisms are calculated, applied, and implemented to achieve water conservation, quality, security, and reliability goals. The following section traces the historical arrangement of laws, technical expertise, environmental conditions, cultural and political discourses, and social groups that assembled stormwater as an object of
environmental governance, but also rendered it multiple things. The section shows how
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control through efforts to map, quantify, and make the volumes of stormwater flows governable (Linton and Budds, 2014; Scott, 1998).