Cloud seeding Los Angeles: Elements of an Unsettled City

Abstract

In February of 1978, heavy rain brought major flooding to the Los Angeles region. Attention quickly turned to the Los Angeles County Flood Control District, which had activated its cloud seeding program just prior to the storm. This event provides a focal point for examining ways in which the physicality of clouds informs an elemental approach to urbanism that is at once epistemological and material. Suspended vapor or ice crystals that might precipitate or disperse, clouds offer an understanding of ways of being and knowing in motion. The materiality of water, wind, mud, and concrete in Los Angeles comes to matter in ways inflected by that of clouds. Like clouds, these are moving, phase-shifting forms of matter that destabilize and elude modes of classification. As a material form for thinking through phase shifting processes more generally, clouds attune us toward an unsettled city.