Just as we whoosh away the fluids that leave our bodies, we whoosh away the fluids dumped upon us from above. Like sewage, stormwater is swiftly ushered out of sight. It gushes into the gutters, ditches, drains, and underground pipes whose engineers saw it only as a problem to be eliminated.

Until now, the likelihood of foul backups and geyser floods hinged on the diameter of the smallest tube. Water was sped away from cities in ugly concrete channels—wreaking all sorts of havoc downstream, in neighborhoods too poor to have any political say.

But the age of conquest is over. Today’s zigzag of droughts and deluges is forcing us to see water more humbly.

“Our roads, our houses, our pavement are all impervious surfaces, and we just completely disrupt the way a natural hydrological system works,” says Irene Compadre, lecturer in landscape architecture at Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts. “And that literally trickles down through the watershed and puts a lot of strain on our river systems. [...]

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