ABSTRACT
As Casper Bruun Jensen and Myra Hird both note in their chapters for this volume, infrastructures and environments are profoundly entangled. Infrastructures are often deeply embedded in ecological and geological environments, their functioning depending on ecological processes, like the activities of microbes living within them. Whereas designers and managers of infrastructures are often aware of this entanglement, until recently the implications of this situation have rarely been examined in the social science literature. This chapter aims to explore this entanglement from a slightly different
angle to that of Jensen and Hird. By focusing on the drainage basin, which has served as a basic unit for the environmental sciences and management, it examines the recursive relation between infrastructures and scientific concepts. The formation of the scientific concept of the drainage basin is entwined with the histories of water infrastructures such as irrigation systems and waterworks. However, after having been established as the “universal unit of landform,” the drainage basin in turn began reshaping understandings of infrastructure. It contributed to such reshaping by revealing hidden water flow beneath and behind the solid surface of infrastructures as well as the entwined ecologies and forms of cohabitation of humans and non-humans. In the following, I explore how infrastructures came to serve as models for understanding ecological processes and how this subsequently led to a transformed, ecological view of infrastructure. The drainage basin is the area where water from rainfall flows into a single
river. Because (a significant part of) rainfall flows on land surfaces from higher to lower areas, the runoff from a given area eventually gathers in a river that flows downstream towards the sea. Drainage basins have a long history in Europe. For example, they have long been used to demarcate regions because they are so readily identifiable. One can find caricatured drawing of watersheds – higher areas that hinder water flow across them and thus divide the drainage basins – in historical maps of Europe (Clifford 2011). The European notion of drainage basin gained scientific significance since the seventeenth century through successive efforts to estimate the relation
between rainfall and river discharge. At this time, it was realized that the size of the drainage basin is important for predicting increases of river flows from rainfall (Clifford 2011). As new measurement and calculation methods were introduced in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the relation between rainfall, drainage basin area, and river discharge was continuously elaborated and refined. After the 1950s, these developments laid the foundation for the development of mathematical simulation models (Singh and Woolhiser 2002). Since the mid-twentieth century, however, the importance of the drainage
basin has moved beyond the boundaries of hydrology. In the 1960s, the field of geomorphology came to recognize the fundamental importance of the drainage basin as “the universal unit of landform” (Clifford 2011). Since then, the notion has become a basic unit for hydrology, geomorphology and natural resource management. Due to the prevalence of watershed management in environment policy since the 1980s, it has even taken on moral and aesthetic value. Because the drainage basin reveals hitherto unseen relations between social and environmental processes, it has become significant for imagining sustainable forms of cohabitation of humans and non-humans (Newson 2009). By now, the drainage basin is a central concept-object that holds various
aspects of the environment together. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that it has exhibited a quite extraordinary capacity to connect diverse processes from river hydrology and landform development (Chorley 1969, Clifford 2011) to fluid dynamics and computer simulation (Singh and Woolhiser 2002), to ecological processes and agriculture (Takaya 1987), and, finally, to community and aesthetics (Newson 2009). As I show in the following, the shifting ways in which the drainage basin
model has captured land-water interactions rest on, and resonate with, parallel developments between scientific concepts and water management infrastructures. Facilitating a continuous movement back and forth between science and infrastructure, the drainage basin enabled the revelation of unexpected flows beneath the solid surface of infrastructures. Indeed, it has opened up a new view of infrastructure as shared habitat between humans and non-human species. To develop this argument, I focus on a specific, and rather peculiar, location in the international network of hydrology and hydraulic engineering. The Chao Phraya Delta in Thailand is a very interesting place to explore
shifting framings of water-land interaction. While peripheral to the networks of science, it holds significance as a place where colonial hydrological technoscience and indigenous development intersected. In fact, the delta boasts one of the world’s largest irrigation infrastructures, epitomizing a high modernist view of social and economic development. At the same time, however, the delta is also known for extensive canal networks built in pre-modern times. These canal networks have survived the massive transformation brought about by modern irrigation and, in the face of climate change, they are now gaining much attention as a resilient and flood-adaptive infrastructure (Thaitakoo and McGrath 2010; Morita 2016). As I discuss below, the encounter between the traditional delta infrastructure and the new field of
urban ecology has resulted in a new vision of the city as a waterscape, a sort of drainage basin, which connects natural, social and economic processes through complex water flows.
