Will Medd

Making Water Work: Intermediating between Regional Strategy and Local Practice

Since the early 1990s there has been a proliferation of calls for integrated water resource management as a strategy for sustainable water management. While literatures have examined the extent to which institutions can adapt to management defined by hydrological zones, the significance of other sociotechnical spaces to sustainable water management has been overlooked in these debates. In this paper, having demonstrated the hybridity of the hydrological cycle, we argue that more attention needs to be given to the interaction between regional, network, and fluid spatialities in sustainable water management. More specifically, we examine the fluid work of intermediaries in between regional and network spaces in the translation of regional strategies into local practice. We conclude by looking at the implications of understanding the relationship between regions, networks, and fluids for water governance specifically and environmental governance more generally.

Metabolisms of Obecity: Flows of Fat through Bodies, Cities, and Sewers

Although strategies to tackle obesity have led to renewed debate about the relationship between the body and urban form the (im)mobilities of fat through bodies, cities, and infrastructure reveal a complex web of urban metabolisms. We argue that, to understand the mobilities of fat in a city context, metaphors of urban metabolism become important. The relationships between different flows are contingent and the mobilities of fat in bodies (as individuals), cities (as a collective site of action), and sewers (as infrastructure), we argue, highlight a multiplicity of urban metabolisms, each with different interconnectivities and forms of instability. In the paper we show how, in North America, in response to the rising numbers of ‘obese bodies’ there has been the mobilisation of the concept of ‘fat cities’, involving renewed debate about the relationship between bodies and the city, provoked largely by the innovative representations of Mens Fitness magazine. However, we shift focus to highlight the problems of fat in infrastructure, focusing specifically on the experience in US cities of sewer blockages that reveal quite different sets of processes within which fat is embedded. Strategies of intervention at the level of the body, the city collective, and the sewer involve prevention, removal, and acceptance, each revealing a multiplicity of metabolisms as well as the partial interconnections between them.

Developing Novel Approaches to Tracking Domestic Water Demand Under Uncertainty—A Reflection on the "Up Scaling" of Social Science Approaches in the United Kingdom

Climate change, socio-demographic change and changing patterns of ordinary consumption are creating new and unpredictable pressures on urban water resources in the UK. While demand management is currently offered as a first option for managing supply/demand deficit, the uncertainties around demand and its’ potential trajectories are problematic for water resources research, planning and policy. In this article we review the ways in which particular branches of social science come together to offer a model of ‘distributed demand’ that helps explain these current and future uncertainties. We also identify potential strategies for tracking where the drivers of change for demand may lie. Rather than suggest an alternative ‘demand forecasting’ technique, we propose methodological approaches that ‘stretch out’ and ‘scale up’ proxy measures of demand to inform water resources planning and policy. These proxy measurements could act as ‘indictors of change’ to water demand at a population level that could then be used to inform research and policy strategies. We conclude by arguing for the need to recognise the co-production of demand futures and supply trajectories.

Patterns of practice: a reflection on the development of quantitative/mixed methodologies capturing everyday life related to water consumption in the UK

There is a growing body of research arguing the relevance of practice approaches to understand resource consumption, and to highlight alternative pathways to sustainability. These practice approaches offer an alternative conceptualisation of demand and have been demonstrated largely by qualitative research, particularly in the work on water and energy consumption in the home. However, these historical narratives and qualitative research have not, to date, lead to the development of quantitative or mixed methodologies that could potentially reflect the diversity of performances of practice across populations in a more systematic way. This paper reflects, critically, on one such attempt to scale a practice-based perspective into a quantitative survey on water consumption and practice in homes in the south and South-East of England. The use of quantitative and mixed methodology has substantial potential – from translating practice-based research to policy; developing indictors to track patterns of practices as they change over time; and the exploration of methodologies that reflect the bundling and coordination of practices associated with water use inside and outside the home. The benefits and utility of such a methodological approach are highlighted as cautions and future research directions.

When a "Home" Becomes a "House": Care and Caring in the Flood Recovery Process

This article focuses on the spatialities of care that are revealed, disrupted, and produced by the dependencies and vulnerabilities associated with flood recovery. It is based on a case study of the summer floods of June 2007 in Hull, Northeast England. The authors use a real-time, diary-based methodology to document and understand the everyday experiences of individuals following the floods. In contrast to the literature, which looks at the impact of care and caring on the home, they ask what we can learn about caring when the home is disrupted. Focusing on the diaries, the authors explore what flood reveals about the emotional and physical landscapes of caring in the context of recovery and illustrate the intimate connections that exist between ideas of dwelling and caring. In drawing on the accounts of carers (who are often also those displaced by flood), they explore the tensions and intersections between the spatialities of caring work as these are enacted between the routines of everyday “normal” life and the specific disruptions generated by flood.

Disruption and change: drought and the inconspicuous dynamics of garden lives

It is now widely agreed that there is more to sustainable consumption than persuading individuals to make green their brand of choice. Instead, the focus is on how to understand the processes of change, particularly in relation to the transformation of inconspicuous habits. A dominant approach within sustainable consumption research suggests that changing embedded habits and practices requires making them visible and subject to overt decision-making and discussion. An alternative practice-based perspective suggests that enduring change emerges through the amplification of existing social orientations and does not necessarily depend upon explicit contestation and debate. We examine these positions with reference to a detailed study of changing outdoor domestic water consumption habits during the 2006 drought in south-east England. Our analysis of variable responses to the hosepipe ban leads us to suggest that the manner in which disruption generates change in consumption practices is mediated by pre-existing social orientations and by diverse configurations of garden infrastructures and water institutions.

Uncertainties in the governance of animal disease: an interdisciplinary framework for analysis

Uncertainty is an inherent feature of strategies to contain animal disease. In this paper, an interdisciplinary framework for representing strategies of containment, and analysing how uncertainties are embedded and propagated through them, is developed and illustrated. Analysis centres on persistent, periodic and emerging disease threats, with a particular focus on cryptosporidiosis, foot and mouth disease and avian influenza. Uncertainty is shown to be produced at strategic, tactical and operational levels of containment, and across the different arenas of disease prevention, anticipation and alleviation. The paper argues for more critically reflexive assessments of uncertainty in containment policy and practice. An interdisciplinary approach has an important contribution to make, but is absent from current real-world containment policy.

Assembling the flood: producing spaces of bad water in the city of Hull

In this paper we approach flooding as a socio–natural–technical assemblage, a phenomenon that comes into being in relation to the spaces that ‘bad water’ occupies. We use the case of the major flood in the city of Hull (UK) in June 2007, and the accounts of those who experienced it, to follow the water of the flood into homes and household spaces. We find that the spatial and temporal occurrence of the flood is not simply known and definable, but is instead emergent in specific local contexts. We show how the assemblage of the flood can be understood at different resolutions, moving from the flood as a city event; to the street-level processes and interventions which shaped how water flowed locally; and into the detail and materiality of the home, its transgression by water, and the process of the home becoming a flooded space. Through the analysis of data from two parallel projects examining the experiences of adults and children after the June 2007 event, we show that the boundaries of the flood remained open and contested, their spatial and temporal definition fuzzy and socially complex. Implications are explored in relation to the processes embroiled in producing flood status and the consequences for the actors involved. Wider conclusions for understanding the experience of disaster are also drawn.

Patterns of practice: a reflection on the development of quantitative methodologies reflecting everyday life related to water demand and consumption in the United Kingdom

There is a growing body of research arguing the relevance of practice approaches to understand resource consumption, and to highlight alternative pathways to sustainability. These practice approaches offer an alternative conceptualisation of demand and have been demonstrated largely by qualitative research, particularly in the work on water and energy consumption in the home. However, these historical narratives and qualitative research have not, to date, lead to the development of quantitative or mixed methodologies that could potentially reflect the diversity of performances of practice across populations in a more systematic way. This paper reflects, critically, on one such attempt to scale a practice-based perspective into a quantitative survey on water consumption and practice in homes in the south and South-East of England. The use of quantitative and mixed methodology has substantial potential – from translating practice-based research to policy; developing indictors to track patterns of practices as they change over time; and the exploration of methodologies that reflect the bundling and coordination of practices associated with water use inside and outside the home. The benefits and utility of such a methodological approach are highlighted as cautions and future research directions.

It came up to here:learning from children's flood narratives

The growing body of literature that seeks to understand the social impacts of flooding has failed to recognise the value of childrens knowledge. Working with a group of flood-affected children in Hull using a storyboard methodology, this paper argues that the children have specific flood experiences that need to be understood in their own right. In this paper, we consider the ways in which the disruption caused by the flood revealed and produced new – and sometimes hidden – vulnerabilities and forms of resilience and we reflect on the ways in which paying attention to childrens perspectives enhances our understanding of resilience.