Science and technology studies and urban political ecology have made important contributions to the understanding of water provision in the Global South. In this article we develop insights from these fields with the aim to understand the blurring boundaries of urban water regimes and their power relations mediated by actors, institutions and technology. Furthermore, we explore how urban water regimes can form a critical interface which is a form of institutional–actor space where formal and informal water regimes encounter each other through conflict and cooperation.

Water and sewage (WS) systems are, like most grid based infrastructural systems, often centralised and hierarchical and the end user has almost no possibility to influence the technical standards, business models or system architecture. The preferred method for connecting new areas to the grid are underground water pipes and gravity flow for sewage. Thus, the WS system is “tightly coupled”. It is hard to change and conservative in its system culture, exhibiting a strong “momentum” or “path dependence”. In this article we investigate an unusual case in the development of WS-systems. As a rule, WS-systems, as most infrastructural systems, develop gradually through incremental innovations, and system owners/utilities traditionally build their systems “from the inside out”. In our case, we investigate a situation where the end users took the initiative to connect a residential area, Aspvik, part of the municipality of Värmdö, outside Stockholm, Sweden, to the municipal grid and thus expand the WS-system, not from the inside out, but from the outside in. Furthermore, we highlight another unusual feature: the role of a resident that acted as the “entrepreneur” in this process of WS-system expansion. The entrepreneur had unique trust building abilities in the local community, which the regime actor (the WS utility), could not match. Historically, inventor-entrepreneurs have been common, acting as “system builders” in the establishment phase of new infrastructural systems. However, entrepreneurs outside the regime are not common in the WS sector. Although atypical in mature WS systems in developed countries, these types of local initiatives or hybrid solutions are common in developing countries. In this article, we argue that there are lessons to be learnt from our case, when dealing with system expansion processes both inside and outside the Global North.

This article deals with ongoing attempts to recover heat and greywater at property level, based on an in-depth study of Stockholm, Sweden. We explore different socio-technical development paths from now up until 2050 using a novel combination of on-property technology case-studies, actor studies and system-level scenario evaluation, based on Artificial Neural Networks modelling. Our results show that the more conservative scenarios work in favour of large-scale actors while the more radical scenarios benefit the property owners. However, in the radical scenarios we identify disruptive effects on a system level due to disturbance on wastewater treatment plants, where incoming wastewater can be critically low for up to 120 days per year. At the same time, net energy savings are relatively modest (7.5% of heat demand) and economic gains for property owners small or uncertain. Current policies at EU and national level around energy-efficient buildings risk being counter-productive in cases when they push property owners to install wastewater heat recovery technology which, in places like Stockholm, can create suboptimal outcomes at the system level.

Development research and interventions were for many years based on the assumption that richcountries had superior knowledge, solutions and expertise that could and should be transferred to"developing" countries. Strengthening capacity, institutions and scientists in low-income countries soonformed part of the agenda in order to increase their "absorptive capacity", create a more level ground forinternational research collaboration, and boost development. There is a growing need of placing theSouthern hemisphere in the forefront in global sustainability research. However, little attention has beengiven to the advantages of collaboration with low-income regions in order to produce new insights withglobal relevance. In the global South, there are experiments and innovations which might well inspirenew practises as well as alternative ways of understanding, and solving, sustainability challenges.Further, juxtaposition and distance may enable those in the north to see phenomena ‘at home’differently. In this paper we explore some distinct aspects of what can be gained from researchcollaboration with the global South.

In this paper, we explore co-creative processes between researchers, art institutions and artists and new roles emerging for engineers in that process. The modern infrastructure ideal of universal, uniform, networked infrastructure has dominated the imagination of planners and engineers in the Global North and South for over a century. However, the dawn of the Anthropocene has triggered new concerns and challenges for critical infrastructures (water, electricity roads etc.) disrupting the modernist imagination. Somewhat unsurprisingly, these concerns have been translated into academic and policy discourses about the development of more resilient and socially inclusive critical infrastructures. 

In the ongoing project entitled Examining nature and society through urban infrastructure (NATURE) we develop an art exhibition in collaboration with the art institution Färgfabriken, in south of Stockholm. Sketches from the co-creative dialogues and interviews are used to illustrate how art can have a more central role the intellectual and public policy deliberations that shape new imaginaries of critical infrastructures.  Future development of infrastructure may once again become trapped into a (less resilient and less inclusive) modernist pathway. In other words, today’s infrastructure challenges pose a threat to critical infrastructures but also a window of opportunity for environmental humanities propose strong and novel ideas shaping future infrastructures. In this paper, we will explore how the arts can help draw attention to the importance of the role of previously unarticulated socio-natures and the role of the non-human in infrastructure imaginaries. The aim of the paper is also to initiate a discussion about how arts can become catalytic for translating key insights on critical infrastructures from the environmental humanities into more widely accessible and publicly deliberated. 

The modern infrastructure ideal of universal, uniform, networked infrastructure has been challenged across the Global North and South. We therefore observe a growing set of concerns across the North and South about what a more resilient and socially inclusive way of providing basic water infrastructure might entail. A set of transformative processes that vary globally are set in motion that are more about embracing diversity in infrastructure that has been articulated elsewhere as  ‘heterogeneous infrastructure configurations’ (Lawhon et al. 2018). This heterogeneity is also evident in narratives such as ‘working with nature’, which seek to bring into the discussion of infrastructure a different way of thinking about environmental risk and uncertainty. Such narratives may draw attention to the importance of socio-natures that were previously not articulated in water infrastructures. Most of these narratives however have been articulated in Northern contexts and in relation to formal infrastructure. In this paper, we seek to lay out a theoretical framework that brings socio-nature and water infrastructure in conversation with global south literature, science technology studies and urban political ecology. Importantly, we seek to develop a framework that focuses on the importance of heterogeneity as well as political and power related implications of narratives of socio-nature. 

Globally, there is an increasing consensus around the need to realise deep transformations invital sectors of society such as those related to urban water supply and energy, particularly in cities where the largest share of the global population is living. Taking the example of recent changes in energy requirements for buildings in Sweden, the government has proposed that, by 2021, all new houses shall have” near zero” energy demand, which for a multifamily house in Stockholm translates into a primary energy demand of 85 kWh /m2 per year. This has generated a new kind of niche experimentation in the building sector that cuts across traditionally disconnected domains of innovation around water and energy. For example, technologies around greywater re-use and heat recovery from wastewater have become associated with reduction in water use and important energy gains. These innovations propel private users and organisations - notably in the real estate sector - towards new investments as part of realising ambitious energy and water targets. As end-users of networked water and energy services, actors make technology-decisions that save energy, water and reduce their dependence on centralised network providers. But this also causes negative commercial and physical effects on the established networked configurations of water and energy, in the form of reduced economic revenue, less heat circulation, and colder wastewater causing problems in the treatment plants. In our study we focus on the winnersand losers of energy and water transition in Sweden, to learn about how transition in energy and water is evolving and why it is being negotiated along particular trajectories by a range of relevant actors.

Historically, the modern infrastructure ideal has dominated the imagination of urbanists. As a consequence, cities and their infrastructures of pipes, roads, wires and trams, have largely been built in the same way all over world. Or have they? Recent urban scholarship suggests that cities and their modes of service provision needs to be re-envisaged, especially in the global South, not just through the lens of the ’situated’ but through disentangling it from the modernist framing altogether. The multilayered challenges - including new types of vulnerabilities of technology and users - experienced by cityregions worldwide imply that a new thought-model is called for. This paper picks up the concept of ‘Heterogeneous Infrastructure Configuration’ (HIC) suggested by Lawhon, Nilsson, Silver, Erntson and Lwasa (2017). In somewhat speculative fashion we go on to hypothesise that Stockholm, Nairobi and Kampala are at interesting historical junctures in terms of conceiving infrastructures and how they distribute power and risk across user spectrums. Are urban infrastructures across the globe being re-engineered from below, but for different reasons? We sketch at a research agenda where grounded and diverse experiences of global North and South will generate new insights for sustainable transformation of cities globally.