In a 2022 article on water and storage focused on Los Angeles, political ecologist Sayd Randle opined: "[T]he infrastructural ecology ... demands new spatial and infrastructural practices for the thousands of residents sited above the aquifer, an arrangement that raises questions of environmental justice rarely associated with urban space" (Randle, 2022, 2295). For what are the ways the seeming urbanization of nature reflect local and global situations of resource storage, particularly subterranean water, and how does it shape spatial and social relations.
For the third Heo/Geo Lecture Series for 2026 jointly sponsored by the UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS), Sayd Randle will discuss water storage in a talk titled Replumbing the City: Water Management as Climate Adaptation in Los Angeles, which is also the title of her book which came out in 2025. The talk happens on Friday, 27 February 2026 at 5:30PM (UTC +8) via Zoom. Dr Randle's talk marks the 100th lecture since the Department of Geography initiated the Heo/Geo Lecture Series which is the rebranded name after earlier iterations.
Moving between shower drains, aqueducts, rain gardens, and even kitchen sinks, Replumbing the City traces the enormous urban waterscape of Los Angeles in a state of flux. For more than a century, the city of Los Angeles has relied on faraway water for the vast majority of its municipal supply, but climate change is making these distant sources much less dependable. To adapt, Angelenos - including city engineers, advocates at NGOs, and residents - are developing new water supplies within the space of the city. Sayd Randle’s ethnography examines the labor of replumbing LA’s sprawling water system, detailing how a desire to sustain unlimited and uninterrupted water provision for paying customers is reshaping the urban environment and its management. Tracking how such projects redistribute the work of water management, the book explores thorny questions of how the labor of climate adaptation should be mobilized and valued.
Sayd Randle is an Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Singapore Management University. Trained as an environmental anthropologist, she studies processes of urban ecological transformation with a focus on infrastructure, water, and climate change. Her peer-reviewed research has been published in a wide range of outlets, including American Anthropologist, Antipode, City & Society, Environment and Planning E, Journal of Political Ecology, and WIREs Water.
The Heo/Geo Lecture Series is a monthly lecture given by academic scholars, field-based geography practitioners, members of the local community, and spatial justice advocates to share their knowledge- and practice-based research undertakings. Jointly presented by the UP Department of Geography and PGS, the Heo/Geo Lecture Series which previously underwent several iterative rebranding positions geography as a discipline that not only straddles the realms of natural/physical and social sciences, humanities, political ecologies, regional and area studies, GI technologies and geospatial storytelling, it is also a vibrant and convivial space that welcomes multiplicities and plural voices. The name Heo/Geo is itself an accommodation to the various understandings, meanings and pronunciations of geography in its indigenous and vernacular forms and the Anglicized name that has since been adapted in the local lexicon.
This Heo/Geo Lecture is presented by the Environment and Development Geographies (EDGE) research group of the Department and is in line with the SDG #11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), and #15 (Life on Land) of the United Nations.
To participate in the lecture, please click this link to register: https://tinyurl.com/yvtantve
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References:
Randle, S. (2022). Holding water for the city: Emergent geographies of storage and the urbanization of nature. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 5(4), 2283-2306. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486211047387
Randle, S. (2025). Replumbing the City: Water Management as Climate Adaptation in Los Angeles. University of California Press.
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