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201 Urban basins cHiCago, by natUre, is not upstream from St. Louis. But beginning in 1900, it began sending its effluent by gravity via the Illinois River to the Mississippi River. The somewhat clandestine and deliberately premature opening of a canal linking the two basins fundamentally reconfigured the hydrology of the country’s interior and repositioned Chicago hydrologically upstream from St. Louis rather than Lake Michigan.1 This engineering feat inverted both its downstream and upstream relationships to protect the city’s public health and enable larger scale waterborne commerce. During an extended drought a century after Chicago’s hydraulic imperialism, a seriously parched Atlanta attempted to reconfigure its “legal,” if not natural, watershed by staking a claim for water in the tantalizingly proximate Tennessee River basin. Its unsuccessful grasp extended across a state boundary and a basin divide where a more abundant supply of potable water flowed out of the southern Appalachians. Contrasting priorities between upstream urban consumers and downstream riparian users have prompted interstate water conflicts. These two examples illustrate the complex relationship of cities to their respective watersheds. Several factors frame the relationships of cities to adjacent waterways and by consequence their urban-hydrological metabolism. Scale, the river’s characteristics, and the city’s location on the waterway all play critical roles. Both the size of the city (and its needs for water and effluent removal) and the volume and seasonality of the river’s discharge influence the underlying relationships as well. The position of the city in the drainage basin—near the headwater, downstream from other cities, or near the mouth—shapes the political, legal, economic, and technical challenges a •11 FLUiD GeOGraPHies Urbanizing river basins Craig e. Colten 202 Craig e. Colten city faces when seeking to use the essential fluid resource. And of course, the prevailing technological, political, and legal capabilities to deal with water resource issues directly influence choices urban leaders make. Furthermore, larger climatic and meteorologic events can provide powerful impetus to compel manipulations of waterways. Scholarly attention to rivers has seen numerous high stages. Richard White introduced the widely adopted term “organic machine” in his discussion of the Columbia River, and it emphasized the physical reconfiguration of a stream’s hydrology to benefit the needs of an urban and industrial society .2 The organic machine approach focuses primarily on the river channel and its ecology while advancing the notion that society and the environment are thoroughly intertwined. Joel Tarr introduced the concept of the “search for the ultimate sink,” which proposes that society discharges undesirable wastes into water bodies until that sink is overwhelmed.3 After passing the point of toleration, society may turn to another waste disposal sink or modify the means of effluent release to reduce its objectionable qualities. Another option is to seek a purer source of water—either from an untainted supply or by treating the polluted water so that it is acceptable. Ted Steinberg and Christine Rosen have directed their attention toward the legal role in river management. While their conclusions differ, their analyses place water into a container as a commodity.4 The search for the ultimate sink and the water-ascommodity approaches step back from the riverbanks and examine the larger social context, sacrificing some of the direct concern with the waterways themselves. Tarr also has borrowed the notion of urban metabolism from the sanitary engineer Abel Wolman. He states that “cities consume their environments and cannot survive unless they reach a point of equilibrium with their sites and their hinterlands in regard to the consumption of air, water, and land resources .”5 Other scholars have adopted the urban metabolism metaphor but see the relationship as more than the bio-physical-hydrologic flows of energy and related resources, and they place greater emphasis on socio-physical networks . That is, they argue “nature and society are . . . combined to form an urban political ecology, a hybrid, an urban cyborg that combines the powers of nature with those of class, gender, and ethnic relations.”6 Their perspective emphasizes the social production of urban space that takes scholarship beyond the organic machine, the search for the ultimate sink, and urban metabolism. They seek to understand the expanding influence of cities, the urbanization of rural spaces or the creation of an urban nature that is thoroughly intertwined with natural process but that is no longer apart from nature.7 Despite claims to the contrary, these authors deemphasize the physical properties of rivers and their basins while highlighting the political...

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