Infrastructures and Utilities

Infrastructures are network-bound large technological systems through which utility services are supplied, distributed, and consumed. Utilities are the providers of these services, which encompass drinking water, electricity, gas supply, waste collection, and sewer services.

Until quite recently, the term consumer, let alone consumer culture, was absent in the vocabulary of utility managers. Utility management has long been the domain of engineers and urban planners who have been actively rolling out huge networks of pipes and wires, with the aim of servicing the public at large. Right at the point where the pipes and wires reached the homes of individual users, utility managers' involvement suddenly ended. This point is physically marked with a meter and rhetorically and legally with the divide between the “public or collective” network on the one hand and the “private” network beyond the meter. Hence, references to consumption and consumers in utility management language are to be found in terms such as beyond the meter, the demand side, and connections.

Viewed from the other side of the meter, much of the consumer culture literature has had a blind spot on how consumers relate to the network-bound systems that are providing them the basic services such as water, energy, or waste disposal. Narratives of identity building, distinction, or conspicuous consumption arguably deal with fashions and commodities, not with mostly invisible networks that supply “universal services” to consumers.

An infrastructural perspective of consumer culture shows that consumption practices have always—at least partly—been shaped and constrained by infra-structural provisions. Even more so, the changes witnessed over the past decades in the organization and outlay of infrastructural provision point to even stronger alignment between consumer culture and infrastructures and utilities.

The scope of this entry is that of water and sewer infrastructures, energy supply, and waste collection services, all networks that have been rolled out over more than a century in at least the Western part of the world. The following section presents an overview of the many ways consumer practices are related in material and sociocultural terms to the provision of network-bound services, followed by a roughly sequential presentation of five modes of network-bound provision with an emphasis on how these modes of provision have reshaped the relations between consumers and utilities. Special emphasis is given in the subsequent section on the present marketized mode of provision illustrating what a “consumerist turn” and a “splintering of network services” may entail for everyday life and consumption. Lastly, some theoretical and methodological implications for the study of consumption in relation to infrastructures are explored.