Infrastructures in Practice

The Dynamics of Demand in Networked Societies

Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann, Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138476165
• eBook ISBN: 9781351106153
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Infrastructures in Practice shows how infrastructures and daily life shape each other. Power grids, roads and broadband make modern lifestyles possible – at the same time, their design and day-to-day operation depends on what people do at home and at work. This volume investigates the entanglement of supply and demand. It explains how standards and 'normal' ways of living have changed over time and how infrastructures have changed with them. Studies of grid expansion and disruption, heating systems, the internet, urban planning and office standards, smart meters and demand management reveal this dynamic interdependence.

This is the first book to examine the interdependence between infrastructures and the practices of daily life. It offers an analysis of how new technologies, lifestyles and standards become normalised and fall out of use. It brings together diverse disciplines – history, sociology, science studies – to develop social theories and accounts of how infrastructures and practices constitute each other at different scales and over time. It shows how networks and demands are steered and shaped, and how social and political visions are woven into infrastructures, past, present and future.

Original, wide-ranging and theoretically informed, this book puts the many practices of daily life back into the study of infrastructures. The result is a fresh understanding of how resource-intensive forms of consumption and energy demand have come about and what is needed to move towards a more sustainable lower carbon future.

PART I

Evolving infrastructures

1

Introduction – infrastructures in practice

The evolution of demand in networked societies

Elizabeth Shove Frank Trentmann Matt Watson

This book is about the connections between infrastructures and daily life. In modern societies, there are few social practices which do not depend on infrastructures in one way or another. Getting to work, having a daily shower, communicating with friends and family, cooking a meal and much else of what we do depends on power grids, water mains, broadband services and other networked features of the built environment.

On a global scale, these arrangements are responsible for massive and growing levels of energy consumption. According to the US Energy Information Association (2016), by 2040 total world consumption of marketed energy is expected to have increased by 48% from 2012. Worldwide internet use is also escalating: in ‘2017, there will be more internet traffic than all prior internet years combined’ (Hosting Facts, 2016). These figures are indicative of the extensive and profound interdependencies between infrastructures and contemporary ways of life.

The aim of this book is to make these interdependencies visible and to chart their evolution – past, present and future. While few would dispute that infrastructures matter, the precise ways in which they enable, sustain or change what people do has attracted remarkably little thought and analysis. Ironically, the very triumph and ubiquity of infrastructures in modern industrial societies has made it difficult to see how their component parts intersect with the social practices which shape them and on which they depend. Pylons, pipes, wires, electric charging points, gas stations and grids – these can be physically imposing sights, but in the analysis of daily life, they might just as well be invisible.

In Western societies today, consumers routinely take infrastructures for granted despite the fact that without them, vital flows of people, goods and information would come to a standstill. Equally, infrastructure experts rarely trouble themselves to understand the many and varied social practices which create demand for infrastructures in the first place. Instead, providers and policy makers tend to treat the resources and requirements of ‘modern life’ as some underspecified, generalised need.

The chapters in this collection take issue with this collective amnesia and show that much can be learned by explicitly attending to how infrastructures and practices are woven together. Such analyses are vital to understand how modern societies came to operate the way they do. Such knowledge is not only about the past, however. It is just as critical for anyone who is seriously thinking about what infrastructures might look like in the future and how ­networked societies might confront coming challenges including climate change.

Conceptualising infrastructures in practice

In detailing the relations between infrastructures and practices, contributors draw on established bodies of work but move beyond them in critical ways. That demand has to be constructed alongside systems of provision and supply, for example, is not a new observation, especially not for those who have studied infrastructures-in-the-making and as sites of innovation, investment and system building. In his classic book, Networks of Power (1983), Thomas Hughes noted how important it was to establish the need for electricity alongside the means of producing and distributing it. At the same time, Hughes’ analysis remained limited to the first step in a much bigger story of the making of demand. While his account of infrastructures crosses over the threshold of the home and considers the development and diffusion of powered appliances, the actual impact of these devices and of electric lights on daily routines in households and offices remains in the dark. To understand how people consumed energy, and how much energy they consumed, we surely need to know what people did with the resources provided. By bringing analyses of practices into discussions of infrastructures, this book makes a contribution to that larger story.

This emphasis on social practices – which are shared across space and time – sets our approach apart from those who concentrate on ‘users’. Within science and technology studies, the ‘user’ is an important figure (Oudshoorn and Pinch, 2003; Hyysalo, Jensen and Oudshoorn, 2016), featuring as the necessary ‘decoder’ of artefacts and devices (Akrich, 1992; Silverstone, 1993; Suchman, 2007), and as the potential co-producer or co-designer of things in action. In the context of debates about sustainability, the ‘prosumer’ – part producer, part consumer – is similarly significant. Acknowledging that consumers have an active and not only passive part to play in the use of technologies is important. However, more is required to show how forms of infrastructural provision co-constitute ‘needs’ and practices, and to understand how these emerge and circulate (Shove, Pantzar and Watson, 2012). For example, a century and a half ago, taking a bath, let alone a daily shower, did not exist as a recognised practice in industrial societies. Today, the daily, or even twice daily shower is the dominant norm (Health Science Journal, 2016). What happened in between these moments is that infrastructures and practices spurred each other on and became entangled in a dynamic that simultaneously constitutes particular ways of life and related patterns of consumption.

Such examples force us to question conventional but all too easy distinctions between supply and demand and between technology and consumption. Rather than treating such categories as fixed or given we take a more fluid approach and define infrastructures as material arrangements that enable and become integral to the enactment of specific practices (Shove, 2017). This status is unavoidably provisional: the range of networks and systems that figure as ‘infrastructures’ changes as practices evolve. In following these processes and in showing how electric power becomes embedded in daily life, how car parking spaces facilitate driving and how wood stoves or central heating structure the rhythm of the day, contributors highlight forms of interaction and mutual shaping that are largely absent from policy analyses and from popular debates about present and future needs.

In developing these ideas, contributors challenge dominant and deeply held positions in economics and engineering. In economics, demand generally refers to the utility of goods or services for an individual or a company and is expressed in the price a buyer is willing to pay. There are situations in which such a definition makes sense but for an understanding of the demand for energy this line of thinking is rather unsatisfactory. A lot of energy consumption relates to practices that are routine and relatively immune to changes in price, unless these are catastrophic.

In engineering, demand is described and measured in standardised units: in thousand tonnes of oil equivalent (ktoe) or gigawatt and terawatt hours. Whilst national statistics provide useful snapshots of total energy use, they are silent about exactly what people were doing and hence about the different activities that make up aggregate demand. They are consequently unable to reveal the relationship between people, practices and products in the creation of demand across time and space.

Rather than assuming that the demand for the resources and services that infrastructures enable is ‘out there’, waiting to be met, contributors show that ideals and habits of ‘normal’ comfort, mobility and communication have changed greatly over time and diverge widely, including among societies enjoying similar levels of wealth and development. To give just a few illustrations, over recent decades, the norm of heating and cooling indoor spaces to around 22° C all year round has become widely established; the technologies and equipment of ‘office work’ have been transformed, and new mobile technologies are taking hold with varied consequences for what people do, when and where.

There is an established tradition of analysing transitions like these as instances of socio-technical regime change and of explaining how incoming technologies or fuels take the place of previous incumbents (Correlje and Verbong, 2004; Geels, 2005). Rather than characterising ‘innovation journeys’ of this kind, contributors examine infrastructural changes as part of the shifting nexus of practices, hence their interest in links, tensions and ongoing forms of co-existence.

Investigating infrastructures in practice

The bonds between infrastructures and practices are not ‘hard-wired’ or fixed. Instead, it is more helpful to picture what Fine and Leopold (1993) call ‘systems of provision’, including the organisational routes through which goods and services are produced, distributed and delivered. These are not innocent arrangements. Rather, infrastructures are literally shaped by unequal contests over places, resources and rights (Graham and Marvin, 2001; Graham and McFarlane, 2014; Trentmann and Carlsson-Hyslop, 2017). The outcome of these struggles is, in turn, relevant for what services are provided, who has access to them and at what cost. Whilst the interests of city authorities and utilities do not always coincide, both are deeply involved in planning, constructing, reconfiguring and operating urban networks (Coutard and Rutherford, 2010). The chapters in this book take these ideas a step further, showing how the politics of provision connect with parallel developments in changing practices that are, in turn, integral to the co-evolution of demand.

This approach serves to highlight the ongoing transformation and the variety of infrastructure–practice relations. In Western societies, the term ‘infrastructure’ conjures up images of centralised power systems, massive utility companies and huge investment projects, often underwritten by the state. And for good reason: these have shaped the physical as well as institutional form of utility provision. However, other configurations have existed and are possible, too. Even in Western Europe, centralised, state-owned public systems represent but one chapter in a longer story which initially began mainly with private monopolies in the nineteenth century and has been moving back towards similarly fragmented, privatised models since the 1970s. Alongside such divisions of labour between state and market and between public utility and for-profit service providers the roles of consumer and provider are constantly on the move, generating tensions at every imaginable interface: between tenants, heat meters and heating providers in Belgrade (Johnson, 2018); between electricity consumers, smart meters, and electricity providers in France (Grandclé ment et al., 2018; Danieli, 2018); and between office workers, office infrastructures and standards of office design in the United Kingdom (Cass, Faulconbridge and Connaughton, 2018). As we show, even the most durable looking infrastructures require repair and even the most rugged have a restless existence, always depending on the continued enactment of the various practices on which demand for them depends.

Large-scale networked infrastructures do not just exist to cater for the present; they are also designed to meet anticipated future needs. At the time of writing the estimated cost of the controversial Hinkley Point C, the first of a new generation of nuclear power stations to be built in Britain, will be at least £ 18 billion ($24 billion) – the equivalent of 60% of what the British government spends in a year on transport and more than 50% of its spending on housing and the environment. Such enormous investment assumes that demand for electricity will continue to grow. But what if energy modellers and planners were to anticipate the opposite: a decline in energy intensive habits and practices? If they made different assumptions about need and demand, much of the British government’s rationale for Hinkley Point C would disappear. In this as in other cases, infrastructural arrangements are much more than material artefacts, fixed in the here and now. They cast a shadow on the future, laying the foundations for daily practices in years and decades to come.

Questions about the politics, the varieties and the futures of infrastructural provision and practice run through the book as a whole. In addressing them, contributors combine empirical cases and disciplinary approaches situated at the intersection of social and historical studies of consumption and provision, science and technology studies, social theories of practice and schools of political economy and economic geography. Rather than seeking to include examples from all possible ‘sectors’ or from all parts of the world we have selected studies that illuminate a wide range o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Evolving infrastructures
• PART II Varieties of infrastructures
• PART III Standards, planning, adaptation
• PART IV Drawing boundaries and managing networks
• PART V Steering, managing and disrupting demand
• Index