Giacomo Parrinello, “Water as Infrastructure and the Scalar Mismatch”, Environment and Infrastructure, 2023

Nous vous signalons la parution d’un chapitre de Giacomo Parrinello intitulé “Water as Infrastructure and the Scalar Mismatch” dans l’ouvrage Environment and Infrastructure paru chez De Gruyter Oldenbourg en 2023.

Extrait

In 2003, during a heat wave that killed tens of thousands across Europe, the basin of the Po River experienced a major drought. The discharge of the Po reached record lows, with cascading effects for agriculture and energy production. Distress was particularly acute in the delta, where seawater penetrated far inland with resulting contamination of groundwater and irrigation intakes. Thermoelectric power plants located along the Po River lacked cooling water and had to cut energy distribution to customers. The water shortage led to a call for hydroelectric energy producers to release water from hydroelectric reservoirs, ironically at the very same time that energy consumption was peaking as a result of the heatwave increasing use of air conditioning. It was the worst possible moment to re-lease stored water.

The 2003 episode (like many that followed) starkly revealed something easily overlooked: how much the physical infrastructure of social and economic life depends on predictable water flows. Water itself is an indispensable infrastructural component for agricultural production, energy generation, and urban water supplies, just as much as pipes, cables, and concrete. Without water, the existing agri-cultural, energy, and urban infrastructure could not exist or operate. In a very practical sense, and for the multiple economic and social activities that depend on it, water is infrastructure. But it is also much more, it is also part of natural processes operating on multiple scales, from river systems to the global climate.The multiple existence of water is the focus of the present essay.