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  • Hazardous Metropolis: Flooding and Urban Ecology in Los Angeles
  • Carl Abbott (bio)
Hazardous Metropolis: Flooding and Urban Ecology in Los Angeles. By Jared Orsi. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. xiii+276. $39.95.

Given the journalism of John McPhee in The Control of Nature (1989), the polemics of Mike Davis in The Ecology of Fear (1998), and regular news reports on the aftermath of winter storms off the Pacific Coast, many Americans know that the Los Angeles region has two water problems: not enough "tame" water from local sources to meet growing domestic and industrial needs, and too much "wild" water when the annual rainy season turns extreme.

Jared Orsi's book takes on the second problem, examining the evolution of flood control politics and engineering through the course of the twentieth century. He uses key flood events in 1884, 1914, 1933-34, 1938, and 1980 to introduce the water management systems that successive generations of Californians put in place to control runoff from the mountains. The geographic focus is the San Gabriel Mountains, with their multitude of steep canyons, the foothill communities at the canyon mouths, and the wide plain that the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers cross on their way to San Pedro Bay.

Orsi has substantial blame to pass around, because few of the key actors approached the problem with an open mind. Urban boosters proclaimed that safe years were the norm, while disregarding the local knowledge of the city's Mexican population. Politicians and voters wanted to be reassured that relatively inexpensive engineering would provide adequate protection. Engineers argued among themselves and then dug in to defend their preferred schemes and solutions. Contractors knowingly worked on flawed projects. Both technical and political decision makers spoke with more assurance than justified by the limited empirical and experimental information available. In sum, Hazardous Metropolis is another cautionary story about the hubris of engineering.

Orsi appears to have worked in every relevant manuscript collection and archive, and his study is solidly documented by engineering reports, professional journals, newspapers, agency memos, correspondence, newspapers, and other sources that illuminate both the technical debates and the political context in which engineers worked. Indeed, the heart of the analysis is the politics of engineering. Orsi clarifies how the specifics of local financing and management of flood control favored quick and partial solutions during the first half of the twentieth century, and how a shift of control to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers brought a more stable and somewhat more effective system.

One of the book's overarching frameworks is the now fashionable critique [End Page 460] of modernism, the argument that human attempts to intervene comprehensively in complex physical and social systems are bound to fail because of the chaotic nature of such systems. The emblematic example was the effort in the 1920s to build a high San Gabriel Dam to solve flooding and water-supply problems with a single huge wedge of concrete, an effort that failed because of uncooperative geology. It is certainly true that Los Angeles's decision makers and voters demanded action before the San Gabriel drainage system was adequately understood. Is such action bound always to fail? Perhaps, but one might also make a historical argument that part of the problem was that Progressive Era faith in science and engineering outpaced the advance of scientific knowledge and professional practice.

It is also interesting to note that the critiques of modernism in the sphere of social and environmental policy lead to very different alternatives. The first supports a belief that "government is the problem" and evangelizes for return to free-market religion in the style of Edward Banfield. The second points toward increased community control, as with the example of the Chinatown Yard Alliance and the remaking of a short section of the Los Angeles River.

Finally, Orsi's very good book makes a strong argument for thinking of urban ecologies as systems in which the natural and built environments interact as a single, identifiable entity. Rather than viewing the city as one thing and nature as something else (a remnant, an add-back), we should think of metropolitan regions as places...

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