Description
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.
Table of Contents
Part I: Evolving Infrastructures
1. Introduction
Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann and Matt Watson
2. Infrastructures, Practices and the Dynamics of Demand
Olivier Coutard and Elizabeth Shove
Part II: Varieties of Infrastructures
3. Wires
Conor Harrison
4. Situating Electrification: Examples of Infrastructure-Practice Dynamics from Thailand and Laos
Mattijs Smits
5. Chopping, Stacking and Burning Wood: Rhythms and Variations in Provision
Jenny Rinkinen
6. Self-Sufficiency in Architectural and Urban Projects: Toward Small-Pipe Engineering?
Fanny Lopez
Part III: Standards, Planning, Adaptation
7. The Office: How Standards Define ‘Normal’ Design Practices and Work Infrastructures
Noel Cass, James Faulconbridge and John Connaughton
8. The Construction of Central Heating in Britain
Anna Carlsson-Hyslop
9. District Heating in Belgrade: The Politics of Provision
Charlotte Johnson
10. Unleashing the Internet: The Normalisation of Wireless Connectivity
Janine Morley
11. Making Space for the Car at Home: Planning, Priorities and Practices
Nicola Spurling
Part IV: Drawing Boundaries and Managing Networks: State, Market and Designers
12. Contentious Interfaces: Exploring the Junction between Collective Provision and Individual
Consumption
Catherine Grandclément, Magali Pierre, Elizabeth Shove and Alain Nadaï
13. The French Electricity Smart Meter: Reconfiguring Consumers and Providers
Aude Danieli
Part V: Steering, Managing and Disrupting Demand
14. Co-Constituting Supply and Demand: Managing Electricity in Two Neighbouring Control Rooms
Antti Silvast
15. Prices as Instruments of Demand Management: Interpreting the Signals
Yolande Strengers
16. Disruption in and across Time
Heather Chappells and Frank Trentmann
17. Infrastructures in Practice: Implications for the Future
Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson and Frank Trentmann
