Q&A with Sayd Randle, author of "Replumbing the City"
Sayd Randle, author of Replumbing the City: Water Management as Climate Adaptation in Los Angeles, is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Singapore Management University.
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In your career as an Urban Studies academic and scholar, what specifically interested you in urban water systems?
Water is essential to urban life. But in many cities, few people know how and why it moves to and through the urban landscape as it does. Examining the history of any metropolitan water system quickly reveals that power and politics have fundamentally shaped the routes by which the resource travels into and within the city. I began my graduate work in a period when urban leaders increasingly recognized that earlier generations had built out their cities’ water provision systems based on assumptions of resource availability that would become irrelevant as climate change advanced. In response, many cities were exploring ways to manage urban flows long understood as wastes – such as runoff and sewage – as water resources. While this might sound like a dry (sorry), technical process, it is also one that demands new investments, infrastructures, and everyday practices within the space of the city. Recognizing the potential scope of the changes that these initiatives could bring to the urban fabric drew me to studying water systems and the people working to transform them.
Water provision can be a challenge for any large city, but what makes the Los Angeles water system unique and more challenging than others?
LA – like much of California – is a place where hydrological variability has long been the norm. Both droughts and floods are expected there. Of course, those aren’t ideal conditions for rapid urban growth. Recognizing the challenges, the city (with considerable help from county, regional, state, and federal entities) spent much of the 20th century investing heavily in infrastructure to bring faraway water into LA and efficiently move the city’s stormwater out to sea. The result: enough water supply to a city of four million through drought years (at considerable cost to hinterland environments and communities) and (mostly) contained local floods.
But as climate change rachets up both the dry and wet spells, the city’s distant water supplies and stormwater infrastructure both look increasingly inadequate. As a result, LA is in the peculiar position of anticipating a future of both too much and too little water. And while the city isn’t especially interested in relinquishing its claims to faraway water, it is attempting to address both problems within the space of the city through programs of stormwater recharge and wastewater reuse. This focus on in-city resource production marks a significant departure from LA’s earlier approach to obtaining water supply, which was grounded in seeking out sources farther and farther afield. Attempting to secure its water future through interventions within city borders, LA is breaking with its past – and many observers have lauded the city for this shift. As I show in Replumbing the City, however, these efforts will not affect all residents or sections of LA equally, raising complex questions of equity and environmental justice.
In 2025, Los Angeles saw devastating fires followed by pointed critiques of the water system’s capacity to address the blazes. How might the disaster and its aftermath affect the future of water management in the city?
January’s fires were devastating and their subsequent politicization has been disheartening. No one with deep knowledge of LA’s water system is arguing that there was an inadequate volume of water within the city’s network to fight the fires. Challenges related to rapidly moving water to the burning neighborhoods did complicate the response, circumstances exacerbated by windy conditions that prevented early aerial water dumps. Experts have emphasized a key reality about the disaster: the city’s system of localized water storage and circulation was not built with anywhere near the capacity necessary to address this scale of fire under these conditions… and building out that capacity would require a staggering level of investment. Given that LA’s water system is publicly owned, the decision to pursue that sort of infrastructural transformation would be the stuff of local politics and (I’d bet) feisty debate.
In contrast to the detailed dissections of neighborhood water tanks and the pressure in hillside fire hydrants, the national conversation has centered on President Trump’s false claim that LA lacked the necessary water within its borders. Many have rightly responded by emphasizing how much supply LA and other Southern California jurisdictions had at their disposal thanks to their aqueducts, despite the local drought conditions. While not disputing this defense, I’m curious – and more than a little worried – to see if there’s a return to city leaders celebrating and justifying all water imports as essential to protecting LA… no matter the damage they cause to distant landscapes. Even before the fires, the city quietly reneged on its commitment to voluntarily reduce its water extraction from the languishing Mono Lake watershed in northeastern California. Following the blazes, it’s all too easy to imagine LA disavowing recent efforts to limit the harms to faraway ecosystems and communities caused by its sprawling water system.