Week 5 Lecture I Flashcards
From another point of view, disorder and order may seem to fuse into one another.
Although droughts may have intensified, people have become acclimatised to severe conditions: dryness has become ‘normal’
Viewing disruption (4)
How disruption is perceived has profound socio-political and material consequences, for it shapes how resilience is understood and how responsibilities are assigned between providers and users.
Disruption can be viewed as a temporary intrusion into normal life to be mitigated and overcome as quickly as possible.
Alternatively, it can be treated, even welcomed, as part of a continuous reordering of daily life.
Viewing disruption as part of a continuing story rather than an exceptional occurrence requires a more historical approach
The very interconnectivity of current networks
The very interconnectivity of current networks has arguably made urban industrialised societies more vulnerable
While interconnected grids may be more efficient when working, when they go wrong, they go completely wrong.
The average American electricity consumer has to cope with 30 times as many service interruptions each year as their Japanese counterpart (CRO Forum, 2011)
Our historical analysis follows disruption in four directions:
(1) what people actually did in times of disruption,
(2) how what they do is shaped by particular socio-technical regimes,
(3) how disruption and normality intersect across time and what legacy this leaves for future reactions and
(4) the impact of networks on resilience and responsiveness.
In 2006, water use restrictions did prompt changes in daily practices, but to become permanent, a favourable mix of practical knowledge and technologies within a household was required.
Several other households had kept rainwater tanks in the garden for years, but developed additional routines as the drought intensified.
In England and Wales, water provision evolved
first from locally fragmented to mixed public-private arrangements in the mid twentieth century, then to national centralisation coordinated through regional water authorities in the 1970s, and finally, since the late 1980s, to privatisation overseen by a national regulator (Taylor et al., 2008).
These regimes placed radically different expectations on consumers and providers.
supply had become the responsibility of private water companies and was regarded as a customer service that should maintained
The ability to cope was weakest
where the lack of alternative fuels was greatest
By boosting new energy systems and infrastructures (hydropower)
disruption helped bring about a new ‘normality’ that was premised on rising electrical dependency
new levels of vulnerability
The recent conversions of these rural homes and farms to all-electric provision had introduced new levels of vulnerability: no power here also meant no water, since pumps were electric.
It illustrates how vulnerability continues to vary, depending on a region’s particular trajectory of electrification (Bonikowsky, 2012)
called into question
it also called into question the legacy of the socio-technical regime that had established the conditions for the monopolisation, nationalisation and over-centralisation of Quebec’s power system.
It triggered a discussion about the decentralisation of grids and power structures as a means of ensuring future resilience.
resilience
For them, resilience was no longer something to entrust to distant network managers, but a task to be taken into their own hands and homes
People’s personal life histories
interact with collective experiences to frame how a particular disruption is received, what counts as ‘normal’ and how people respond
Sociological studies of disruption have tended to focus on
interpersonal relations, social skills and social networks. These matter but not at the expense or to the exclusion of politics
Responsiveness to disruption varies
in relation to past decisions about network development and the relative ease with which people can switch to substitute fuels and materials
future of centralised infrastructures is called into question
As the future of centralised infrastructures is called into question by climate change and the need to bring basic services to poor and developing societies by less costly and less centralised means, there is a lot that can be learned from viewing disruption and normality as members of the same family rather than as enemies or opposites.
