Everyday practices and technologies of household water consumption: evidence from Shanghai

Abstract

A social practice approach to household consumption examines socially produced patterns of practice, and understands these to be composed of technology, knowledge and meaning. This approach challenges many of the assumptions made about how consumers who are supposedly economically rational behave in large-scale municipal water supply systems. Yet for an emerging body of scholarship that is sensitive to the effects of context, research on social practices is notably short of studies beyond wealthy liberal democracies. In this paper we examine the key practices of daily water consumption for households in Shanghai, China. We identify boiling water, filtering water, and buying water as the three key practices associated with daily water consumption in the home, and explain the way each is the result of combinations of knowledge, meaning and technology. We also consider short-term and longer-term shifts in practices, and explain the influence of the materiality of pollution, information and trust on these changing practices. KEywordS China / Shanghai / social practice / urban water supply / water consumption / water pollution I. IntroductIon China is a particularly compelling place to study the social practices of water consumption. It has a rapidly growing urban middle class with changing consumption patterns, it has built mega water supply and storage projects to ensure the water security of cities like Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai, and it has widespread pollution problems. While there is a growing body of social science research that asks questions about how water is supplied and managed in China, this literature is largely framed by questions of power, institutional change, and techno-natures. (1) Specific to Shanghai, there are many studies that consider drinking water contamination and treatment (2) or risks to water security, (3) but very little discussion of how individuals or groups of people actually use drinking water. Beyond Shanghai, studies that consider Tibetan ceremonial uses of water, (4) the work of local bureaucrats in trying to secure drinking water for rural communities, (5) and the hydrosocial relations of premium supply networks (6) only incidentally touch on some of the questions raised by practice theory. In this paper we draw on the idea of embodied, materially interwoven practices, organized around shared practical understanding, (7) to examine nahui Zhen (corresponding author) is a human geographer who completed her Phd in Geography at the university of Melbourne in 2017. Her research focuses on the governance of natural resources and human-environment relations in china.

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