ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the city of Los Angeles to examine three responses to inaccessible water infrastructure. Three main problems with control of water resources are identified, and then approaches are posited that unpack and clarify how designers, cities, and individuals might develop more equitable use of urban water resources. These three approaches, accepting the situation, incremental infrastructure, and the Cyborg City, address contemporary efforts to balance individual needs, the presence of nature in the city, and industrialization within marginalized/orphaned spaces. The manifestation of landscape in the city was, by nature, feminine or other marginalized space, it was the advent of the garden and of orphaned space. Orphaned space appears in three paradigms of thought as cosmic shift, commodification of water and landscape elements, primary fit of humans to the landscape. One way to address the inequities and environmental harm stemming from masculine water infrastructure/political ecology of the city is the Cyborg City concept.
