Traces of Water:
Developing the social science of domestic water consumption

Workshop 3 - Shaping water practices by infrastructure (10th November '05)

As with all the networked industries the infrastructural frameworks are crucial to understanding the flows of resources that they enable and increasingly the boundaries between the place of domestic water consumption and that of network management are blurred. How does the water industry see the relationship between the domestic water consumer and the provision of water infrastructures? How do the water companies work across these boundaries? And in what capacity? Perhaps as a service provider, or maybe a network manager? How is the infrastructure designed in relation to different forms of consumption? Have new technologies (e.g. smart metering) changed this? How do particular infrastructures select out different consumers? The social sciences are beginning to explore these types of questions, examining how new forms of infrastructure management are constructing different relationships between suppliers and users, with new roles of mediation emerging. How has social science understood the relationship between the infrastructure and the consumer? How have these relationships been supply and demand positioned the water consumer? How are they negotiated?

Proceedings

• Workshop Report. Download PDF Report
  Will Medd & Elizabeth Shove (Lancaster University)
  

• A social science view on Sustainable Water Supply, Consumption and Sanitation in the Future
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  Gert Spaargaren (Wageningen University)

• Institutions, infrastructures and the construction of water demand
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  Helen Chappells (Lancaster University)

• Water infrastructure and the consumer
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  David Butler (Imperial College London)

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