Households as infrastructure junctions in urban sustainability transitions: The case of hot water metering

Abstract

The integration of infrastructure domains and resource flows such as electricity, heat, water and waste increasingly gains currency in strategies to achieve more resource-efficient, smart and resilient cities. While widely discussed concepts of a nexus of resource systems, such as energy–water–food, aim at a more optimised and integrative management of resource flows, this article investigates how infrastructure integration is accomplished through the establishment of new interfaces and junctions between formerly separated systems. In particular, it focuses on households as an arena where different urban infrastructures intersect and different kinds of sometimes contradicting demands are imposed to co-manage these infrastructures, such as in the case of own electricity generation from photovoltaics along with the charging of electric cars and the management of household energy consumption. The installation of meters and the constant monitoring of resource use and consumption feedback to household members is regarded as a crucial element in such a transition towards more sustainable urban infrastructures. Empirically, the article studies the introduction of hot tap water meters in urban households in Sweden and the resistance and reactions of these households to such a metering regime. Our study shows how meters as new junctions between energy suppliers and users but also between separate infrastructures of electricity, hot tap water and room heating become contested political terrains which are linked to broader socio-political questions of urban change. In contrast to system management perspectives, such an ‘inside-out’ approach rather lends itself to context-sensitive and navigational governance approaches of infrastructure integration.