Integrating what and for whom? Financialisation and the Thames Tideway Tunnel

Abstract

The Thames Tideway Tunnel (TTT), often referred to as the Thames super sewer, is currently one of the largest infrastructure projects underway in any European city. Costing an estimated £4.2 billion, the sewer connects London's Victorian sewerage network with the Thames Wastewater Treatment Works at Beckton. The latter facility has been described as the UK's Water-Energy-Food nexus poster child, for its combination of desalination facilities, green energy generation and wastewater treatment. While physically connected to the Beckton plant, the TTT is, paradoxically, designed with an apparent disregard for the water-energy nexus. If the Beckton plant represents a nexus-based vision of integration -what Macrorie and Marvin (2016) refer to as Mode 2 Urban Integration -the TTT harks back to a view of urban integration carried from the Victorian era through to the present moment. What unites the two projects, and what undergirds the transformation of the hydrosocial cycle, is a financial model more focused on the extraction of rents from Thames Water's consumers. Thames Water's dismissal of genuinely integrated alternatives appears guided more by the financialisation of the urban integrated ideal than by what is needed to respond to London's broader environmental needs. Contesting the project, therefore, will involve slicing through the various claims to integration, going beyond the many proposals for evidence-based alternatives, and capturing the transformations being wrought by finance's entry into infrastructure provision.

Value–rent–finance

“…A stark example of this process is the new £4.2 billion Super Sewer (the Thames Tideway Tunnel), eulogized as an engineering marvel akin to the finest achievements of Bazalgette in the Victorian era. As Loftus and March (2017) show, the super sewer can be read as a debt based incentive to charge customers excessive prices. Following the forensic financial investigation conducted by Pryke and Allen (2017), there are also clear parallels with the Carlsbad Desalination plant; a form of infrastructure geared towards bondholders in which financialisation has transformed a fixed infrastructure into liquid assets.…”

Managing flooding: from a problem to an opportunity

“…Traditional responses to the problems that these arrangements bring are to add capacity to the piped networks to prevent overflows and reduce pollution from urban runoff. This is the principle for the new Thames Tideway Tunnel now under construction in London [25,37]; i.e. deal with the symptom as a problem, rather than using the opportunities the drivers (rainfall) provide.…”

“…The various outputs from the Australian Water Sensitive Cities (WSC) programme demonstrate clearly the need to challenge the prevailing traditional water management culture [21,42] as potentially unaffordable (e.g. [14]) and also wasteful of opportunity [15,37]. It has also demonstrated that there is no single water management system that is invariably the most sustainable.…”

“…The complexity and difficulty of detailed sustainability assessment, requiring significant resources in the application, has devalued the approach in the views of decision-makers. Taken together with the current climate of materialism, or financialization [37], the 'economic' leg of sustainability assessment dominates environment and society [60]. Paying scant regard to other factors, decision-makers typically preference the single bottom line of financial cost, despite standards, policies and guidance supposedly aimed at attaining sustainability or development that is sustainable (e.g.…”

“…[88]), and new shared myths like resilience now prevail, influencing how water is seen and managed, still as a commodity provided to 'customers' rather than a public right in England [89]. This is as part of a financialized system aimed at maximizing 'rental income' from the use of the assets provided and operated by the privatized water utilities [37].…”