Alexander Robinson is Associate Professor in the Landscape Architecture + Urbanism program at the USC School of Architecture. Through his Inclusive Infrastructure Design Lab and other initiatives, he seeks to reinvent our most consequential anthropogenic landscapes through collective authorship, multidisciplinary methods, and community engagement. He is the author of two books, Living Systems: Innovative Materials and Technologies for Landscape Architecture and, more recently, The Spoils of Dust: Reinventing the Lake that Made Los Angeles. Prior to joining USC, Robinson practiced professionally and helped author multiple award-winning master plans, including the Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan. He is a member of the American Society of Landscape Architecture and was a recipient of the Prince Charitable Trust Rome Prize in 2015. He is also an active contributor of the community landcare initiative, TEST PLOT.

Beyond Control: Seeking Agency in Southern California’s Water Infrastructure  

The defining landscapes of Los Angeles’ most iconic water infrastructure—Owens Lake and the Los Angeles River—are the products of accidents, crises, and the willfulness of water itself. Each reveal how critical infrastructure can be reordered through complex entanglements with water and landscape. Yet even when acknowledged as hybrid terrains—part landscape, part utility—they remain notoriously difficult to design as such. Their apparent affinity for landscape architecture masks a deeper reality: they function more like roads than parks, engineered to perform, constrained by regulation, and only incidentally treated as “landscape.” 

Owens Lake, once eradicated by the Los Angeles Aqueduct, now thrives as an engineered dust-control system whose ecological performance dictates water allocation. It has become an advanced regulatory landscape—where environmental, aesthetic, and economic values are continually renegotiated among multiple specialties. The LA River, by contrast, has resisted transformation: a smooth, “featureless” flood-control channel that, through protest and neglect, has evolved into an accidental greenway and tentatively embraced by Angelinos. In both, moments of rupture—broken pipes, unexpected flooding, shifts in law—have revealed water’s civic and landscape power and its levers, opening space for design to influence its trajectory. 

Looking ahead, the future water infrastructure lies in deepening and shifting its entanglement with the diverse forces that exerts agency over it—regulatory bodies, flood managers, engineers, ecologists, community groups, artists, and the landscape itself. The next phase of implementation must treat them as co-authors in on-going stewardship. By hybridizing engineering, landscape architecture, environmental monitoring, and civic engagement in ways that openly negotiate and connect these practices we can embraces their agency while shaping an infrastructure with a landscape that is adaptive, equitable, and inseparable from the complex systems that sustain it.