Infrastructures in Practice ― The Dynamics of Demand in Networked Societies

Infrastructures in Practice shows how infrastructures and daily life shape each other. Power grids, roads and broadband make modern lifestyles possible – at the same time, their design and day-to-day operation depends on what people do at home and at work. This volume investigates the entanglement of supply and demand. It explains how standards and 'normal' ways of living have changed over time and how infrastructures have changed with them. Studies of grid expansion and disruption, heating systems, the internet, urban planning and office standards, smart meters and demand management reveal this dynamic interdependence.

This is the first book to examine the interdependence between infrastructures and the practices of daily life. It offers an analysis of how new technologies, lifestyles and standards become normalised and fall out of use. It brings together diverse disciplines – history, sociology, science studies – to develop social theories and accounts of how infrastructures and practices constitute each other at different scales and over time. It shows how networks and demands are steered and shaped, and how social and political visions are woven into infrastructures, past, present and future.

Original, wide-ranging and theoretically informed, this book puts the many practices of daily life back into the study of infrastructures. The result is a fresh understanding of how resource-intensive forms of consumption and energy demand have come about and what is needed to move towards a more sustainable lower carbon future.

Elizabeth Shove is Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University and Principal Investigator of the DEMAND Centre (Dynamics of Energy, Mobility and Demand), funded by the Research Councils UK. She has written about the dynamics of social practice, infrastructures, material culture and consumption including The Dynamics of Social Practice: everyday life and how it changes with Mika Pantzar and Matt Watson (Sage, 2012) and The Nexus of practices: connections, constellations and practitioners, edited with Allison Hui and Theodore Schatzki (Routledge, 2017).

Frank Trentmann is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London, and also at the Consumer Society Research Centre, University of Helsinki. He was the Principal Investigator (PI) of the 'Material Cultures of Energy' project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK and is also a member of the research centre DEMAND. His latest book is Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First (Penguin, 2016) with several foreign translations.