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Globally, rapid population growth in cities, regulatory and governance failures, poor infrastructure, inadequate funding for urban water systems, and the impacts of climate change are each rapidly reconfiguring regional hydrosocial relations. In the United States, these hydrosocial reconfigurations tend to reinforce racial inequalities tied to infrastructure, exacerbating environmental injustices. More generally, according to a framework of racial capitalism, infrastructural regions and hydrosocial relations are always already racialized and structured simultaneously by capitalism and racism. In this paper, we integrate hydrosocial and racial justice perspectives with the literature on infrastructural regionalism to examine Atlanta’s position in the so-called tri-state water wars between Alabama, Georgia and Florida. Combining analysis of academic, policy, and legal documents, journalistic accounts, and semi-structured interviews with water conservationists and managers working in Atlanta, we examine conflicts over water use in the infrastructural region of the Apalachicola–Chattahoochee–Flint (ACF) river system. We emphasize that the ACF conflict reworks regional hydrosocial relations through territorializations of racial capitalism. We demonstrate how particular discourses that reify Atlanta as a monolith overly simplify the regional dimensions of the crisis, diminishing the views, roles and interventions of diverse actors in the ACF region. We argue that work on infrastructure regionalism and water governance can be deepened through attention to the hydro-racial fix. 

Abstract Dense understory thickets of the native evergreen shrubRhododendron maximumexpanded initially following elimination of American chestnut by the chestnut blight, and later in response to loss of the eastern hemlock due to hemlock woolly adelgid invasion. Rhododendron thickets often blanket streams and their riparian zones, creating cool, low‐light microclimates. To determine the effect of such understory thickets on summer stream temperatures, we removed riparian rhododendron understory on 300 m reaches of two southern Appalachian Mountain headwater streams, while leaving two 300 m reference reaches undisturbed. Overhead canopy was left intact in all four streams, but all streams were selected to have a significant component of dead or dying eastern hemlock in the overstory, creating time‐varying canopy gaps throughout the reach. We continuously monitored temperatures upstream, within and downstream of treatment and reference reaches. Temperatures were monitored in all four streams in the summer before treatments were imposed (2014), and for two summers following treatment (2015, 2016). Temperatures varied significantly across and within streams prior to treatment and across years for the reference streams. After rhododendron removal, increases in summer stream temperatures were observed at some locations within the treatment reaches, but these increases did not persist downstream and varied by watershed, sensor, and year. Significant increases in daily maxima in treatment reaches ranged from 0.9 to 2.6°C. Overhead canopy provided enough shade to prevent rhododendron removal from increasing summer temperatures to levels deleterious to native cold‐water fauna (average summer temperatures remained below 16°C), and local temperature effects were not persistent.