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Sustainable development goals are defined at various institutional and organisational levels, and generate numerous 'green' technology projects. Most research concerns successful projects, and good examples are put forward for others to learn from. However, to pave the way for sustainability in practice, more knowledge is needed about the failed projectswhat, or who, obstructs the realisation of ecologically motivated projects? This study explores, from a time-geographical perspective, a failed project concerning the introduction of individual metering and debiting of hot tap water in rented flats in Sweden. The study is based on interviews with key persons, observations and documents. The results underline the importance of acknowledging all project constraints and their interrelationship in an implementation process to explain project failure, being of an economic, political, social, cultural, technical, physical or legislative nature. Put into local contexts, similar 'green technology' will have different connotations and will have to deal with place-specific constraints. The project owner's possibility to control and overcome local constraints will determine if the project will succeed or fail.

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.

The objective of this study is to describe and assess a methodology based on a time geographical approach for studying energy and water use in households. Energy and water resources are often used in routinized activities, and in activities considered as private, normal and ordinary, which makes them difficult to explore in research. In this article, we give an account of a mixed-methods approach using time diaries, metering data, interviews and simple observations, and analyse and discuss its methodological and empirical implications from two Swedish case studies. We conclude that the suggested combination of methods, despite some complications, provides a comprehensive account of household energy and water use to which various theoretical perspectives could apply. Energy and water using activities are defined in terms of time, place, quantity, material and social context, and are related to user perspectives on resource use and usage data. Such knowledge provides important input for information campaigns, technological retrofitting and other systemic changes in striving towards sustainability.

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