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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 Defects in sanitary‐sewer infrastructure enable exchange of large volumes of fluids to and from the environment. The intrusion of rainfall and groundwater into sanitary sewers is called inflow and infiltration (I&I). Though long recognized in the assessment of sewers, the impacts of I&I on streamflow within urban watersheds are unknown. We quantified rainfall‐derived I&I (RDI&I), groundwater infiltration (GI), and total I&I using measured flows within sanitary‐sewer pipes serving four watersheds near Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Flows were monitored in pipes that parallel local stream channels and compared with streamflow measured at nearby gauging sites. Freshwater diverted into the sewer system due to I&I ranged from 24% to 36% of the flow measured within individual pipes. The RDI&I was the smaller component of I&I, ranging from 4.2 to 9.8 mm per year among watersheds. The GI was typically an order of magnitude greater than RDI&I, ranging from 24 to 41 mm per year among watersheds with annual stream discharge of approximately 500 mm. The I&I occurring at specific moments in time commonly represented 0%–20% of the flow measured in the adjacent stream. The enhancement of low flows in streams that could be achievable if I&I were abated ranges from as much as 6%–36% across watersheds. Our discussion presents explanations for the seasonality of I&I and associated impacts on streamflow in urban watersheds, while identifying important sources of remaining uncertainty. Our results support the conclusion that I&I substantially reduces flows in urban streams, especially low flows during dry weather.