A growing scholarship suggests hydrological models have political power as they embed and reinforce specific understandings of water and society relations which, in turn, shape future visions of how and for whom water is to be managed. In this commentary, we explore how the power of models can be explicitly and constructively engaged with, thereby expanding their potential to support transformations to water justice and sustainability. To achieve this, we suggest understanding, analyzing, and doing hydrological modeling as a situated knowledge practice. We take inspiration from feminist scholarship that emphasizes that all forms of knowledge are inherently partial, situated within specific contexts, experiences, and circumstances, and shaped by power relations. Situating hydrological modeling, we argue, requires opening up modeling processes to ask where, how, for whom, and by whom models are developed and used, and how outcomes influence water distributions and conditions of access for different social groups. Situating also opens opportunities to explore what it would take for hydrological modeling to explicitly pursue justice and sustainability goals in context-specific and tangible ways. We present initial insights and invite further experimentation towards making models active agents of a more inclusive, transparent, and transformative water management.

Ecological Urbanism and Water Sensitive Urban Design have a central contribution to make in protecting and caring for people, nature and water in cities but readings of Urban Political Ecology evidence how ecological metaphors in urban design can easily translate into discriminatory urban development processes. This paper posits that for UPE to become meaningful for urban design practice, it is necessary to move beyond a critique. Instead, the insights of UPE should be pro-actively mobilized to develop a new vision of water sensitivity. The paper therefore identifies ways in which the key learnings of the critical social sciences, namely UPE, can be mobilized to support Water Sensitive Urban Design practice. How can ecological urbanists imagine new, more politically astute, forms of water sensitive living, charting design processes that not just recognize but also actively question and challenge uneven socio-ecological dynamics? In answering this question, the goal of this article is to make use of critique from UPE to influence Ecological Urbanists' goals and activate their political alignment with agendas that prioritize social equity. In imagining a new form of WSUD, we tried as much as possible not to over-instrumentalize UPE by rejecting the suggestion that some UPE ‘lessons’ or ‘insights’ could simply be inserted into ecological urbanism. On a different direction, we argue for a different emphasis in WSUD that does not deny the causes of current environmental degradation, pollution and depletion but, on the contrary, actively takes issue with and challenges the extractive and exploitative roots of contemporary urbanization processes.