Explaining Showering: a Discussion of the Material, Conventional, and Temporal Dimensions of Practice

This article considers the increasing popularity of showering in the UK. We use this case as a means of exploring some of the dimensions and dynamics of everyday practice. Drawing upon a range of documentary evidence, we begin by sketching three possible explanations for the current constitution of showering as a private, increasingly resource-intensive routine. We begin by reviewing the changing infrastructural, technological, rhetorical and moral positioning of showering. We then consider how the multiple and contingent constituents of showering are arranged and re-arranged in and through the practice itself. In taking this approach, we address a number of more abstract questions about the relation between practices, technologies and infrastructures and about what these relationships mean for the fixity and fluidity of ordinary routines and for associated patterns of consumption. The result is a method that allows us to analyze the ways in which material cultures and conventions are reproduced and transformed. This has practical implications for those seeking to contain the environmental consequences of resource-intensive practices.Xx

Categories, Concepts and Units : Representing energy demand in and through time

Preprin

Conceptualising urban density, energy demand and social practice

In urban studies and in energy policy there is much debate about the relationship between energy demand and the density of residential areas, measured in units like those of population per hectare, or per Km2. In this paper we take a different approach. Rather than evaluating the relative merits of compact or sprawling urban forms we focus on the spatial configuration of the infrastructures, appliances and systems of provision on which city life depends. An interview based study of households living in the same extremely ‘dense’ neighbourhood in Hanoi allows us to show how practices of cooling, laundering and cooking (and the energy demands associated with them) are shaped by material arrangements that exist within the home and that stretch far beyond it as well. The conclusion that supply and demand are constituted across multiple spatial scales has practical implications for urban design, and for how the relation between energy demand and density is defined and understood.Peer reviewe

Conceptualising Flexibility:Challenging Representations of Time and Society in the Energy Sector

There is broad agreement that the need to decarbonise and make better use of renewable and more intermittent sources of power will require increased flexibility in energy systems. However, organisations involved in the energy sector work with very different interpretations of what this might involve. In describing how the notion of flexibility is reified, commodified, and operationalised in sometimes disparate and sometimes connected ways, we show that matters of time and timing are routinely abstracted from the social practices and forms of provision on which the rhythms of supply and demand depend. We argue that these forms of abstraction have the ironic effect of stabilising interpretations of need and demand, and of limiting rather than enabling the emergence of new practices and patterns of demand alongside, and as part of, a radically decarbonised energy system. One way out of this impasse is to conceptualise flexibility as an emergent outcome of the sequencing and synchronisation of social practices. To do so requires a more integrated and historical account of how supply and demand constitute each other and how both are implicated in the temporal organisation of everyday life. It follows that efforts to promote flexibility in the energy sector need to look beyond systems of provision, price, technology, and demand-side management narrowly defined, and instead focus on the social rhythms and the timing of what people do