Reconstruction 6.3 (Summer 2006)
Return to Contents»
Dams, Plants, Pipes and Flows: From Big Water to Everyday Water / Fiona Allon
Abstract: This paper focuses on patterns of domestic water consumption. It develops an approach that emphasises the importance of seeing water use as part of a broader set of consumption practices associated with the space of the home, the garden and suburban living. Water consumption is considered as a practice that is embodied and embedded in daily life. The paper also presents the project Everyday Water as a case study of recent cultural studies research on domestic water use. The cultural approach adopted in the project represents a significant departure from much conventional resource and environmental management-based work. The Everyday Water project moves away from thinking of water as a discrete resource or utility, and instead understands its consumption in terms of shifting definitions and uses of services, cultural traditions, and the intersection of everyday practices and expectations with sociotechnical systems. Through focusing on the specifics of people's patterns of consumption, the project aimed to increase our understanding of the wider cultural, social, and importantly, emotional field in which values and practices around domestic water exist. The paper also considers the possibility of different kinds of water cultures.
Life has few pleasures to compare with dam-building … The pleasure comes from the elegance of the compromise you strike between where the water wants to go (guided by gravity and the medium it's moving over), and what you want to do with it (Banks 1984: 84).
Introduction
<1> Water, in terms of both its supply and scarcity, has emerged as one of the most important issues of the 21st century. Information and education campaigns aiming to create public awareness of the value of water have become common in many countries. Meanwhile, around the world, more than one billion people still lack access to clean drinking water. While reduced rainfall due to drought and climate change has undoubtedly contributed to current water shortages, it has become readily apparent that 'water scarcity' is only one small part of the much bigger picture. The growing, global 'water crisis' involves more generally a widespread reassessment of all aspects of urban water provision, from the financing and maintenance of public infrastructure, the technics of supply, to levels of consumer demand and consumption.
<2> Throughout the 20th century, urban water supply in the Western world became the basis of urban expansion and sanitation, and the guarantee of a country's status as a modern, and modernising, industrial nation. Large-scale infrastructure projects such as dams, reservoirs, sewage treatment plants, and complex networks of pipelines were central to the development and growth of modern, national economies, labour power, and capital expansion. Such projects went hand in hand with the centralisation of state control over water resource management, and were an integral part of a wider, public-owned and funded system of facilities and services organised and managed by the state. Large-scale engineering projects, especially those involving water supply, and infrastructure development in particular, were also an essential part of the great modern dream of technological conquest and the taming of nature. These 'big' projects were spectacles of technoscience and engineering, and represented the manipulation of nature's resources by extraordinary feats of human power and will. For Kaika (2005:141), the construction of big dams and water infrastructures all over the world in the 20th century represents the apogee of modernity's Promethean project of conquest and control. As water became tamed and domesticated through such development, its presence also became 'normalised' and 'naturalised', gradually forming a part of the essential, though taken–for-granted, background of modern, everyday lives and routines. Indeed, flows of water became so naturalised, commonplace and everyday in domestic urban environments that water, harnessed by technology, was seen as constantly available, an abundant, never ending supply accessed simply by the turn of a tap.
<3> At the beginning of the 21st century, both faith in the Promethean conquest of nature by modern progress and the optimistic belief in a steady flow of always-available water have significantly faded. Many of the dams that were once seen as engineering triumphs are now regarded as ecological disasters, and are no longer worshipped as icons of progress or shrines for weekend suburban pilgrimages. Water itself, once seen as a universalpublic good (supposedly, even though the reality was markedly different and the benefits of 'progress' unevenly shared), is treated more and more as a scarce, valuable and expensive commodity best regulated by the market economy and private enterprise. Yet, despite these significant shifts in both economic practice and socio-cultural perception, many of today's solutions to water shortages seem to be, astonishingly enough, merely the recycled heroic visions of water engineering that were first seen in the early 20th century. Once again, massive development projects such as new dams, giant pipelines, reservoirs, desalination plants, and even membrane-covered canals are being promoted as the answer to nature's scarcity, while similarly unimaginative demand management strategies are limited mainly to punitive measures such as restrictions and price increases.
<4> So, despite increasing scepticism towards the modernist myth of progress and the ideological subjugation of nature, the logic of development retains for many an enduring and seductive appeal. And, despite the growing interest in discourses of 'sustainability', large-scale systems that favour unsustainable (in the long term) separations between technologies, various water authorities and 'experts', and ordinary, domestic user expectations—with actual resources being positioned as something external to, or beyond the realm of everyday use and responsibility—continue to be the preferred option for many governments. In China , for example, The Three Gorges Dam was promoted with the promise of 'water and electricity for all', and went ahead with little concern for the 700,000 people who were displaced by the project. In Spain, the country's national hydrological plan is considered to be one of the most ambitious dam projects ever undertaken, and in the UK new reservoirs (such as the Upper Thames Reservoir) are being built to support new urban housing developments (see also Kaika 2005:170).
<5> Meanwhile, in Australia some states ( New South Wales and Western Australia ) have considered building expensive, energy-intensive desalination plants to support their urban water networks. Furthermore, in Western Australia, a region experiencing particularly acute water shortages, recent controversial proposals have included a giant pipeline to transport water from the far north to metropolitan areas situated well over 1,000 kilometres away, and a membrane-covered canal over the same distance, ideas which directly hark back to a number of (unrealised) monumental engineering projects first mooted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (see Sofoulis 2005). It seems that while many things change, they also stay the same. Although large parts of Australia are currently suffering long-term drought, and urban water storage reservoirs are at unprecedentedly low levels, few policies or practical initiatives are directly aimed at developing cultural innovations that could reduce water demand. There is very little water recycling, and in some cities, most notably Sydney , most waste water is pumped into the ocean as treated sewage. Every Australian city faces what has been a termed a 'water deficit', a substantial—and increasing—gap between the demand for water and the resources available to meet it.
<6> The growing, if belated, recognition of the scale of this water 'crisis', however, has gradually shifted the focus of public discourses from questions of production and supply (Big Water) to questions of demand (Everyday Water). Yet, whilst managers of natural resources have been encouraged to find ways of reducing domestic water consumption, dominant frameworks for thinking about 'demand management' have been revealed as having considerable shortcomings. By underestimating the histories and cultural conventions involved in water use (including most significantly the fantasy of endless supply), strategies of demand management usually overlook the complex and messy terrains where ways of life, and personal, social, civic, local and national identities, are both individually and collectively negotiated. These are the terrains of everyday life, where values are rendered meaningful through daily practice, and where consumption patterns, habits and routines are collectively acted out, maintained and subject to change.
<7> This complex world of everyday life experience is crucial for understanding resource consumption, necessary for developing more effective natural resource management strategies, and vital to the adoption of more sustainable urban lifestyles. This approach, therefore, emphasises the significance of the cultural domain (water use in and around the home and garden, for example) and specific everyday practices, and regards water consumption patterns as embedded in daily life and formed through interaction with the suites of technologies and sociotechnical systems that comprise domestic environments. Recognising this complex convergence and interaction of technology, cultural values and meanings, and everyday practice is essential, I believe, for adequately understanding domestic water use, and for finding ways to change long-standing conventions by mobilising people's creativity, resourcefulness, and senses of connection to larger life-worlds. In this paper, I develop this approach through a discussion of a recent research project on domestic water habits and attitudes in Sydney —Everyday Water: Values, Practices, Interactions.[1] The aim of the project was to develop a better, more 'multi-dimensional', picture of everyday 'water cultures' as practical lived experience, involving physical spaces, objects and bodies. In this sense, the project also aimed to produce 'situated knowledge' (Haraway 1991) about community attitudes to water, actual patterns of use, and residents' approaches to water conservation and change. This essay continues in the same spirit.
The Engineers of Everyday Life
<8> The current technological and institutional infrastructures for water delivery in urban Australia , and indeed throughout most Western industrial societies, can be characterised as 'Big Water' (see Sofoulis 2005; Allon & Sofoulis 2006). This is a system typified by the heroic, monumental engineering efforts that were designed to control and harness water resources for urban development and use. These large-scale infrastructure projects created both new natures and new landscapes: giant reservoirs and catchment areas, mountains pierced with pipelines and aqueducts, and of course, massive dams, pipe networks, pumps and central treatment plants. As one of the quintessential products of modernity's 'engineering era', Big Water embodied long-standing fantasies of mastering nature, including the dream of making the desert green, and of creating abundant, always available, flows of water.
<9> A dam is one of the ultimate expressions of technological modernity, and around the world their construction came to exemplify the spirit of modern progress and the achievements of instrumental reason and rationality (Heidegger 1977). The Hoover Dam on the Arizona-Nevada Border, the Marathon Dam in Athens, and the Snowy Mountains Scheme in Australia, to give a few iconic examples, were all integral parts of modern nation-building, representing not only an 'ideology of conquest' over energy resources such as water but the 'heroic' nature of modernisation, as well as the literal and metaphorical construction of development as an accepted and ultimately necessary 'way of life' (see Allon 1994; Kaika 1995).
<10> The opening of a dam, as demonstrated by the countless reels of archival footage that accompanied their construction, was in itself an important spectacle and a celebration of the technological sublime. This footage invariably features an awe-struck public, gazing breathlessly at the bursting forth of water through the concrete facade of the monumental edifice. Capturing the reverential expressions of the public contemplating the feat of power and skill before them, these images worked to confirm the exalted status of such projects. As Lines (1991: 200) argues, 'the spectacle of conquest overrode mere economic considerations. Engineers proclaimed the coming of a technological utopia'. Big Water was part-and-parcel of this utopia, both precursor and product of an industrial promised land.
<11> In fact, when Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies opened the Snowy Mountains Scheme in 1958, the rhetorical strategy he chose hinged upon exactly this point:
In a period in which we in Australia are still handicapped by a slight distrust of big ideas and big people or of big enterprise, this scheme is teaching us to think in a big way, to be thankful for big things, to be proud of big enterprises and to be thankful for big men (Menzies cited in Wigmore 1968:194).
This exuberant faith in development is echoed in many of the cultural texts produced at the time, demonstrating the euphoria surrounding large engineering enterprises. In the novel Clean Straw for Nothing, George Johnston's alter-ego David Meredith invokes this faith in his description of the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme , describing the 'gigantic new hydro-electric and irrigation scheme that was designed to drill tunnels through the rocky hearts of mountains and to reverse the courses of five rivers'. As he explains 'the sheer audacity of the concept' to his wife Cressida he can barely contain his enthusiasm, declaring 'it's like coming to an oasis in a desert, when you've been thirsting for something of promise, something to believe in, it's magnificent darling!' (Johnston 1969: 88-89).
<12> 'Big Water', however, refers not only to the giganticism of the engineering projects themselves, but also to a whole network of relationships between human beings and nature, nature and the city, and domestic users and technical authorities/experts. These relationships can be clearly seen in the history of water provision, which in most Western countries until quite recently was managed by large, government-owned public utilities. Traditionally, the role of such large public utilities was to ensure the 'good of the public' and to maintain the public's assets. This was a role that required a particular distribution of responsibility away from individuals and its investment instead in large, government structures. The large-scale systems that were delegated responsibility for supplying the continuous flows of water across the modern city went hand-in-hand, of course, with a dispersed system of domestic users who naturally came to expect, and eventually take for granted, the normalised presence of water in their households. Simply turning a tap became the natural thing to do to access a seemingly constant flow of water whose source (both physically and symbolically) was far removed from the urban environments where it was actually used, but whose presence as an always available resource had been officially declared by modernity's engineers as the symbol of a rational, comfortable, modern life. As Kaika (2005: 146) puts it, 'Water became something “out there”, beyond the city's boundaries, external to society, something which could/should/would be dealt through scientific and technical means and managed by a technocratic elite'.
<13> Moreover, Big Water's collective conventions of water use and distributions of responsibility can also be seen as naturalised by, and effectively 'baked in' to, many domestic objects and technologies themselves, including the conventional features of household plumbing, standard water fittings like taps, drains, sewer systems and automatic washing machines: convenient 'user-friendly' interfaces designed to make it easy to use water (Allon & Sofoulis 2005). Together, in a mutually shaping dynamic, this sociotechnical network of technologies, large-scale systems, and relationships between domestic users and water authorities (shorthand for a mix of government, corporate and statutory bodies), have co-evolved to produce a counter-rational (but nation-building) fantasy of an unending seasonally invariant flow of water. While this attains the civic goals of a clean and sanitised population inhabiting green suburban spaces, it usurps almost all responsibility for both supply and wastes, and lays down infrastructures that literally cement these powers unobtrusively into the urban landscape and housing design. Yet, in a 'water crisis', Big Water avoids admitting its own responsibilities and blames the individual users, expecting them to compensate personally for the wastefulness and unsustainability of a system on which most households are dependent.
<14> Such large-scale systems, then, inevitably and unavoidably produce and maintain a whole network of 'flows of power' (Swyngedouw 2004a; 2004b). It is, therefore, not surprising that the dominant discourses on water conservation conveniently ignore the effects of large-scale systems and urban water infrastructures in shaping, naturalising and normalising expectations about water supply and use habits. In fact, public discourses continue to be dominated by 'experts'—resource economists, engineers, ecologists, biologists, etc.—in what sociologist Elizabeth Shove labels as an 'environment-centred' inquiry. This is an approach preoccupied with predicting supply and demand of future resources as calculated in terms of global, regional or national needs. In such analyses, humans, if they appear at all, usually do so only as 'the aggregate consumers of socially anonymous resources' (Shove 2003: 5-7). The emphasis of much of this resource-based or environment-based work is on scarcity and the need for restraint, with individuals held responsible for excess consumption and for making choices to reduce it, and with sciences of social engineering (market research, consumer psychology, macro-sociology etc.) brought in to develop campaigns to persuade or demand users to change. As such, it rarely accounts for cultural practices, expectations and traditions. Nor does it pay much attention to the specifics of people's practices and patterns of consumption. There is little understanding of the wider cultural, social and, importantly, emotional field in which values and practices around domestic water exist (in contrast see Parr 2005).
<15> Such 'environmental instrumentalism' (Macnaghten and Urry 1998: 2) also seems to inform current policies of reducing the domestic consumption of water through demand management. Water restrictions, fines, and other punitive measures targeted at the domestic user have become part of this 'demand' oriented solution. 'Demand management' here seems to involve simply blaming the users and demanding they change, and imposing restrictions that ignore and suppress rather than support diversity in values, capacities and meaningful water practices, while failing to address the social, cultural and industrial dynamics driving up demand for water and energy.
Habits, Homes & Gardens
<16> In contrast to the dominant discourses outlined above, and following Shove (2003:9), I argue for the relevance and necessity of social and cultural studies 'that set “the environment” aside as the main focus of attention' and look instead at what people's habits and expectations actually are. This cultural approach situates water as part of a broader set of consumption practices associated with the space of the home, the garden and suburban living. Recent research shows that everyday water consumption is not experienced as the use of X number of litres of the anonymous resource 'H 2O', but rather is entangled with users' habitual enjoyment of the services, technologies and experiences water makes possible (Sofoulis & Allon 2005). This approach underscores the importance of investigating the ordinary, unspectacular dimensions of daily life and scrutinising those rituals of water use that have become, to a great extent, routinised, habitual, and therefore, practices of inconspicuous consumption. This is the 'practical consciousness' of embodied water consumption, a set of actions, behaviours and habits normalised through everyday use and domestic interactions (Anthony Giddens cited in Shove 2003: 7-8).
<17> So, continuing this lead, I would like to invert the lens of 'Big Water' and focus on water at the other end of the spectrum. I'd like to explore the arena of what could be called 'little water' or more correctly, 'everyday water', the minutiae of everyday practices around water use in the domestic home and garden. I would like to start with a story. Last year I became the guardian of a garden. As a city apartment dweller, the extent of my gardening experience tends to not go much further than the pots of functional herbs that sit on my balcony. My attitude to these plants could be described as somewhere along the lines of Darwinism crossed with an episode of Survivor—they do their best to survive with minimal attention and care, and although they sometimes get into trouble, I'm happy to say that none has yet been voted off the balcony. I left the family home, where I'd occasionally help my mother in the garden digging and planting, in my late teens, so it had also been a considerable number of years since I spent any serious time paying much attention to gardening. Anyway, after the death of my father, my mother planned a trip back to England , back to the northern city of Hull in Yorkshire , England , which is where they were both from. She wanted to visit all the relatives, explain my father's illness and death to his brother (who lives alone without a telephone, and without any hot water, I might add), and to meet up again with her family. She planned to be away for around six months and she asked me to look after her garden during the time she was away.
<18> My mother's garden is a serious affair. There is the front and back garden, and the front section has three separate levels between the house and the street. While there are a few large Australian eucalyptus trees and quite a few other natives, and a large Mulberry tree which, considering the amount of time I'd sit in it, became like a second bedroom during my childhood, the garden is basically an English-style garden, with lots of roses, azaleas, daffodils, snow-peas, and an odd assortment of other types of flowers.
<19> My parents emigrated to Australia in the mid-1960s. It was a migration experience that was reproduced countless times by families all over the British Isles , indeed all over the world, which believed that the promises of a better life were to be found in the Great Southern Land. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Australia saw itself, and was likewise generally perceived by the rest of the world, as the newest, most modern example of European civilisation: a land of sunshine and opportunity, a working man's paradise, where new ideals about democracy were being worked out, far from the shadows of rigid British and European class systems. For a young family from a seaport on the bleak east coast of Northern England , this was a land of newness and adventure, of beginning again without the burden of tradition or the limitations of place or class-based identity.
<20> The piece of Commonwealth land that my mother selected from the land lottery was an impossibly steep and rugged, quarter-acre block of bush and sandstone that my father had to clear and develop on his weekends away from the migrant hostel on the other side of the city. Over the years, the cultivation and making of the garden became an integral part of their domestication of a new environment and settlement of the land. As they cleared the rock and sandstone, and put in a lawn and flowered beds, the garden became, for my parents, a significant material component of the Australian suburban dream, which like many others, they considered the order of the day. But, for this couple from Hull (whose strong accents rivalled that of their Australian television idol, celebrity-gardener and fellow Yorkshireman Peter Cundall) the garden also became a site for their memories of England and Englishness, and images of English village life. In this sense, the garden became an important site in the wider landscape of memory, and a space for working through ideas of place and identity and narratives of social relations. As Jean Duruz has also argued, in this way the garden and landscape was a site for an active, thinking engagement with nature and culture, and with myths of both Australianness and Englishness (Duruz 1994).
<21> As far back as I can remember my parents always spent a great deal of time in the garden, digging, planting, or mowing. And of course they'd water regularly. But whether it was my parent's nascent environmentalism or just the Yorkshire parsimonious spirit—I'm not sure which—my parents were always careful savers of water. There were six of us, a relatively large family, and consequently we produced a not insignificant amount of laundry. To my absolute disgust, especially when I was a teenager and focusing obsessively on abjection wherever I could find it, my mother never ceased using the 'Suds return' function (this automatically recycles the used 'grey' water of one load of washing for a second or repeated use) on her Simpson washing machine. And she still does.
<22> We also developed the habit of sharing our bath water. I can't recall how many times this habit, now just a natural automatic reflex, has got me into trouble in share-households over the years. But when I was a child, it was rare to have a daily bath or shower. Instead the Saturday night bath, a standard feature of British family life, was the highlight of the week and the time for careful, thorough ablution. On other days it was just a quick going over with a wet flannel. I can't remember when this routine changed, and was replaced by patterns of daily showering and bathing. Few can pin down just how and when their habits change, but again there is a sense that things were not always so, although the arrival of new, more demanding expectations is hardly ever noticed (see Shove 2003).
<23> As the bathroom tended to be a contested, fought-over space that offered little privacy or seclusion, the garden for my parents was a compensatory space of escape and solitude, pleasure and sensuality. Most studies of gardens, however, unfortunately concentrate quite narrowly on questions of style and status. They also tend to be fairly dismissive and demeaning. Stephen Knight, for example, in his analysis of gardens as a concerted quest for style, writes about the English-style cottage garden in this way:
It was flowers, mostly, that led the cottage garden, fragile ones, white, pink or delicately red. They matched the blooms on the curtains and chair covers inside, and the Peter Pan collars and floral hair clips of the superior peasants who ... worked on their gardens with expensive gloves, elegant tools, kneeling pads, and above all, books (Knight 1991: 31).
Similarly for Fiske, Hodge and Turner in their book Myths of Oz, the Australian suburban garden is a site of playfulness and creativity, where 'thinking women' cheerfully make sense of their lives within that most maligned of environments, suburbia (41).
<24> For some reason, neither position quite catches my parents' lived experience. But one thing does appear quite clearly. With their red-brick and tile house, and their tamed quarter acre block, and their constant calls of 'look after it yourself … I'm busy in the garden', my parents were participating in, building, and actively constituting the Australian suburban dream and the ideal of the ongoing suburbanisation of the city, and indeed the whole country. But, from the vantage point of today, the seemingly unstoppable pattern of suburbanisation that began in the 50s and 60s has now led to a metropolitan region that knows no end, whose relentless extension inscribes the cultural fantasies and sensibilities of low density suburban dreaming. Sydney, for example, is the 56th most populous city in the world but occupies the 11th largest surface area. It has 25,000 kilometres of sewerage piping, much of which requires urgent maintenance, compared with just 6,000 kilometres in Tokyo, a city of 25 million people (see Connell 2000: 4). The ability to provide and supply water in the near future to the existing areas of the region has recently been called into question, and this is quite apart from considering the water demands of the rapidly developing areas on the region's periphery. With 94 per cent of households receiving their water supply from water mains, policy makers and utility authorities face, therefore, not only the physical difficulties of supply, but complex social and cultural histories, forms and ways of living and being, in their attempts to ensure adequate water availability. This includes the history of 'Big Water' and the large-scale corporatisation of water provision that has resulted, it is now clear, in a precarious balance between the long-term sustainable supply of water and the adequate maintenance of corporate infrastructure and assets. As one newspaper article summarised the situation, 'suburbs had been built with no regard for the fact that Australia is the driest inhabited continent on Earth', while 'Sydney residents have been encouraged to believe that at the other end of their taps is an endless supply of water' (Woodford 2004).
<25> But, in considering domestic water consumption, it must be recognised that patterns of water use in and around the home have also changed quite dramatically over the last twenty years. According to one study, outdoor use in particular, has increased (see Askew & McGuirk 2004). As much as 50 per cent of the water supplied to households is used externally in the garden, in the swimming pool, spa, in water features or in other activities such as washing the car or hosing down driveways and pavements. The lawn, that quintessential icon of Australian suburbia, an icon that functions variously as a sign of distinction, conformity, respectability or just combined physical and symbolic labour, also features significantly in regard to outdoor use. The average lawn, for example, can consume up to 90 per cent of all water applied to the garden.
<26> It was the burden of such statistics, family history, suburban memory, and the plain oppression of the responsibilities of the dutiful daughter that weighed on my brain like a nightmare when I considered my guardianship of my mother's garden and the neglect of my duty of care. It had been several weeks since her departure, Stage Two water restrictions had been imposed, and still I hadn't made the trek back to the suburbs to tend to the garden. When I finally did make the journey, I hardly recognised the place. The lawn was parched and brown, the azaleas were half gone, plants here and there had already died, and things whose names I never could remember looked as if they were on their way out. It was a late Sunday afternoon, and the devastation of the garden before me made me seriously consider picking up the hose then and there, before the allowed time, to surreptitiously water the garden. Yet I worried about the neighbours calling the water police and dobbing me in, and how I'd explain the incongruity of receiving a water fine for irresponsible water use or water delinquency, as we've termed it in our research project, at the same time as conducting research on Everyday Water. Earlier in the day, when I'd mentioned my concern about my mother's garden to the neighbours who had recently moved in next door—a young couple, obviously environmentally aware, who'd been forced, no doubt by obscenely unaffordable housing prices, to buy well-outside the city—they'd dismissed my worries and said 'We're all in the same boat'.
<27> But, as I stood on the front lawn, looking around at the places where numerous family pets had been buried over the years—rabbits, dogs, birds, goldfish—and feeling a quite profound sense of loss and grief about the fate of my mother's garden, I realised that no, we're not all in the same boat. We're all actually in quite different boats. Marketers and demographers have for some time now discussed the limitations of conventional demographic analysis, and the inability of traditional demographic categories and market segmentations to account for the diversity, dynamism and fluidity of contemporary social formations, which rarely map neatly onto conventional structures and models. Similarly, values and beliefs do not necessarily correspond with actual practices. A person may say they are a keen water saver/conserver, and truly believe it, but their actual practice may in fact reflect high-end use.
<28> While the model of consumers as a homogenous mass might be adequate when municipal water supply is the main concern, effective management of water demand cannot ignore the highly diverse, ambivalent, complex and multiple characteristics of human engagement with nature and with natural energy resources. Yet, water restrictions and penalties, and the narrow range of sanctioned 'green' retrofits, are blunt demand management tools based on the 'one-size-fits-all' model that reduces the range and value of different contributions people might make to water-saving (Allon 2004). This is one of the major flaws of both Big Water and the demand management approach as it is currently being developed. It cannot account sufficiently for cultural variables or cultural differences. It tends to assume the public is a homogenous, docile mass, albeit with varying degrees of 'green awareness', simply in need of education and conditioning. It also assumes a one-way, top-down behaviourist approach to this public mass, whereby discipline and regulation—social engineering in other words—is seen to automatically result in cultural change. This is an approach that in most areas of cultural life has been spectacularly unsuccessful. But, this is precisely the mentality that underpins Big Water—a homogenous, one size fits all model. One large boat on one mass of water.
<29> On subsequent visits to my mother's place, I went in the evening. It was the middle of winter and so, late in the night, in the freezing cold, I'd be in the garden providing emergency resuscitation to the plants that most needed it. On many a night I was forced back inside to hunt around for my father's old thick jumper and beanie to wear out in the cold winter air. This experience made me realise the depth and extent of people's emotional, affective and spiritual investments in their gardens. Our Everyday Water research confirmed that my connection to the garden was not just an isolated, individual experience, but rather was shared by many of the interview and diary participants of the project. What emerged strongly in the material we collected was not only an extraordinary sense of topophilia—love of place, including both the home and the garden—but an understanding and relationship to water that was inseparable from memory, identity, the affective emotional realm of familial and social relations, and attitudes to the physical, sensate body. The Everyday Water project also demonstrated that many people are prepared to take on responsibility for saving water (often entailing inconvenient and ad hoc efforts to save, re-use and recycle water while using domestic technologies designed to waste it) motivated in part by keenness to keep gardens alive.
The browning of the backyard
<30> A desire to keep gardens alive under conditions of drought and water restrictions seems to have motivated changes in attitudes to recycled water. People's strong attachments to gardens can be understood against the background of changing patterns of domestic water use over the last twenty years, when homes and gardens have developed as increasingly important sites of leisure, recreation, and the display of identity (Askew & McGuirk 2004; Bhatti & Church 2004). The Everyday Water research confirmed the depth and extent of cultural, affective and spiritual investments in water, especially widely shared in relation to gardens. Many participants expressed an understanding and relationship to water that was inseparable from memory and identity, as well as compassionate connections to other living things:
I soak my whites and things like that, so I let the water go cold and I feed my little plants out the front here. 'Oh, you can have that water' and what-not, you know? You feel sorry for them. And the ones that are actually dying, you know, I've actually taken a watering can where I sort of, you know, fill it up and try and give them a little drink. It's very hard! (laughs). And then we get a bit of warm weather and they're drooping again, you know.
<31> A clear sense of grief, anger and distress about the loss of his garden was poignantly expressed by another participant:
I don't believe people have changed; they are simply acting under duress. They are watching thousands of dollars worth of gardens dry up. They are watching their houses becoming filthier by the day. They are watching their pavers become so dirty they will never come clean. They are watching their expensive lawns choking dust. The following photos express this: [He included photos with the following captions] The remains of my immaculate garden; Pot plant death; The house is filthy; My pond and garden is now dust; More dead pot plants.
<32> In addition to demonstrating the complex affective connections between people and their homes and gardens, our research seems to confirm other water-use studies showing a positive correlation between emotional attitudes and feelings towards the garden and the amount of water use outside the home (see Askew & McGuirk 2004). This reveals that the desire to maintain gardens is a strong motivator for people to recycle or collect water. People who have some attachment to the garden or to other non-human forms outside the home may be very conscious of the role of water as one element within a complete 'life-world' of both living and non-living things. One negative effect of water restrictions, which was observed during the research project, was that reducing gardening activities could undermine the very sense of connectedness with a larger life-world that could motivate peoples' further efforts at conservation (see Sofoulis and Allon 2005). As one participant who had developed a DIY (do-it-yourself) system of recycling water using buckets in the bathroom explained:
So, I shower with two buckets in the shower, so I generate two buckets of water and my wife will generally generate one or one and a half, something like that. So that gets carted out and put round trees and that sort of thing.
<33> Water, therefore, is not only an integral element within a range of practical, tangible activities conventionally understood as constitutive of domestic water consumption, but is simultaneously associated with a range of 'intangible' social, aesthetic and affective values and beliefs. One participant summed up the ordinary everydayness of water in this way:
My family relies on water and in some way takes the ease with which we can obtain this lifeblood for granted. We wash, clean, drink, cook with, run around with water in our bodies everyday without thinking twice about it. We yearn to live with views of it. We save to holiday by it or in it. We drive for hours to picnic or sunbathe near it. We transport ourselves upon and over it with ease. We should be reminded of its value.
<34> In this way, most of the participants described living in an environment in ways that ultimately make it impossible to distinguish or externalise their 'human' behaviour from the wider domestic setting, including both the technological apparatus of the home and the natural world in which it exists. The research suggested, therefore, a complex picture of the kinds of relationships between inside and outside the home and water use patterns. Without appreciating the sensory, experiential, habitual and affective qualities of water experiences, therefore, we cannot understand what water is and what it represents for domestic users, nor what it actually means to consume water as a practice of everyday life. As one participant eloquently put it:
I have learned how the home revolves around water and how water is not only 70% of our body, but perhaps also 70 % of our lives as well. I rediscovered how bad the gardens and the property looks now. Around the home you can see how little of the stuff we drink, but how much we use with our obsession to clean and scrub, which of course are very necessary obsessions.
Conclusion
I think it's a matter of people having a new concept of water. (Bill, resident of Sydney, Australia)
<35> Many of the key ideas about modern industrial nations in the West have been formed around a series of images that emphasise unlimited opportunities and possibilities: unlimited space and endless tracts of land to develop and build upon or to farm, inexhaustible mineral resources and, when mastered by technology, unlimited water. In Australia, as in many countries, these associations have in turn given rise to a set of iconic images that are taken to represent urban culture and identity, and a comfortable, modern lifestyle: the free-standing suburban brick house, the large well-manicured lawn and garden, the swimming pool, and the family car (once, the six cylinder sedan, now the family four-wheel drive).
<36> This version of culture as modernity-and-progress has developed socially and historically. It is also, importantly, not so much a concept that people spend time dwelling on or thinking about, but rather a way of life that people live out and experience, often to the point where it becomes completely 'natural' and part of the taken-for-granted background of daily routine. The approach developed here, therefore, has emphasised water use in the home (for example, in the shower, bathtub, around rituals of bathing and cleanliness, and rituals of laundering and washing clothing), and in the garden (for cultivating nature, growing plants, and general place-making), not simply as the isolated use of a resource or commodity. Rather, it has been regarded as one element within a wider space of ordinary living and being, where values and attitudes towards sensory and aesthetic experiences and conventions are in fact inseparable from a complete understanding of what water is and represents for domestic users, and what it actually means to consume water as a practice of everyday life. In other words, this means focusing on the habitual and affective qualities of experience, and their connection to values, practices, and interactions around water.
<37> The values that people bring to water use and consumption are not formed, and do not exist, in isolation, nor are they transparently or immediately accessible and identifiable. Rather, values are socially and historically produced and collectively shared. They also constantly interact with and are reinforced by the world of things, technologies, and sociotechnical systems in which they exist side-by-side, a process that stabilises, consolidates, and in effect, naturalises values, transforming them into routines and habits. Water, it could be suggested, is rarely meaningful simply in and of itself. The approach advocated here, therefore, is to direct attention precisely to these ways of life and suites of values, for in many cases, these are at the heart of the question of sustainability itself. This also means being interested in how and why values and beliefs develop, and what kinds of dynamics and experiences lead to their formation and, fundamentally, their ability to change. Contemporary water crises can no longer be understood merely as the crisis of an untamed, unpredictable nature (drought), but need to be addressed instead as part of the dynamics of a complex socio-environmental, economic and technological system that has been formed historically.
<38> 'Water cultures', then, are a combination of values, practices, and interactions, involving both human and non-human forms, sociotechnical systems and technologies. The 'nature' around us—our plants, gardens, wildlife, including the water we consume—is also part of this 'culture', to the extent where 'the idea of nature contains an extraordinary amount of human history' (Williams 1980: 67). If we were to take this seriously and view nature not as external to society, or external to our cities, we could also think about water shortages differently: they could be understood as the 'outcome of long periods of interaction between available resources, human labour, and the economics, politics and culture or urbanization and water use' (Kaika 2005: 163). The relationships between nature, technology, and the culture of urban environments are currently in flux and in transition. But, mono-dimensional efforts to simply persuade or 'demand' that people use less water, take fewer, shorter showers, or rip up their lawns and put in native plants are unlikely to succeed on their own. Both our water resources and our water discourses must be revised, recast and reimagined differently.
Works Cited
Allon, F. (1994) 'The Nuclear Dream: Lucas Heights and Everyday Life in the Atomic Age', in Ferber, S., Healy, C. & McAuliffe, C. (eds) Beasts of suburbia: reinterpreting cultures in Australian suburbs. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Allon, F. (2004) 'Big water, little water and the “one-size-fits-all” model of demand management'. Paper presented to the 'Everyday Water' seminar, Department of Gender studies. University of Sydney.
Allon, F. and Sofoulis, Z. (2006) 'Everyday Water: cultures in transition', Australian Geographer, 37(1): 45-55.
Askew, L.E. and McGuirk, P.M. (2004) 'Watering the Suburbs: Distinction, Conformity and the Suburban Garden', Australian Geographer 35: 17-37.
Banks, I. (1984) The Wasp Factory. London: Macmillan.
Bhatti, M. & Church, A. (2004) 'Home, the Culture of Nature and Meanings of Gardens in Late Modernity', Housing Studies 19: 37-51.
Connell, J. (ed.) (2000) Sydney: The Emergence of a World City. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Duruz, J. (1994) 'Suburban Gardens: Cultural Notes', in Ferber, S., Healy, C. & McAuliffe, C. (eds) Beasts of suburbia: reinterpreting cultures in Australian suburbs. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Fiske, J. et al. (eds) Myths of Oz. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Heidegger, M. (1977) The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. W. Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row.
Johnston, G. (1969) Clean Straw for Nothing. Melbourne: Fontana.
Lines, W.J. (1991) Taming the Great South Land. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Macnaghten, P. and Urry, J. (1998) Contested Natures. London: Sage.
Parr, J. (2005) 'Local water diversely known: Walkerton Ontario, 2000 and after', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2005, 23: 251-271.
Kaika, M. (2005) City of Flows: Modernity, Nature, and the City. New York, London: Routledge.
Knight, S. (1991) The Selling of the Australian Mind: From First Fleet to Third Mercedes. Melbourne: Mandarin.
Shove, E. (2003) Comfort, Cleanliness & Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality. Oxford & New York: Berg.
Sofoulis, Z. and Allon, F. (2005) Everyday Water: Values, Practices, Interactions. Final Report. Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney.
Sofoulis, Z. (2005) 'Big Water, Everyday Water: a sociotechnical perspective', Continuum: Journal of Media and Culture, 19(4): 445-463.
Swyngedouw, E. (2004a) 'Water—Circulating Waters, Circulating Moneys, Contested Natures', in Harrison, S., Pile, S., and Thrift, N., (eds) Patterned Ground: Entanglements of Nature and Culture. London: Reaktion Press.
Swyngedouw, E. (2004b) Social Power and the Urbanisation of Water: Flows of Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Williams, R. (1980) 'Ideas of Nature', in his Problems in Materialism and Culture. London & New York: Verso.
Woodford, J. (2004) 'Wake up Sydney—life is only going to get thirstier', Sydney Morning Herald. 19-20 June: 32-33.
Notes
[1] Everyday Water: Values, Practices, Interactions was a research project undertaken in 20042005, in partnership with the developers of a new housing estate in western Sydney . It aimed to benchmark current community attitudes towards domestic water use, including the use of new water conservation technologies. The research involved interviews with 160 local residents, a survey/questionnaire, and a 'Water Diary' completed by 25 residents. The participants used the diary as a written and photographic journal of water use, and it included open-ended exercises and opportunities to record reflections, memories and observations. The research team was based at the University of Western Sydney, and included Zoë Sofoulis and Fiona Allon (Chief Investigators), Marnie Campbell, Roger Attwater, and Selvaraj Velayutham. Acknowledgement is made to the Centre for Cultural Research and the Integrated Catchment and Environmental Management Group at the University of Western Sydney. [^]