Infrastructures of Consumption
Infrastructures of Consumption

Author: Elizabeth Shove

Publisher: Earthscan

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 140

ISBN-13: 1849771723

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For many years, a uniform and uncontested picture of utility system organization has endured across Europe. Provider and consumer roles have been largely taken for granted, and consumers have had little choice but to use the infrastructure of the only network provider available. Recent transformations have challenged this model. This book examines the ongoing environmental restructuring of consumption and provision in energy, water and waste systems. In accounting for the distinctive environmental qualities, technical features, and institutional dynamics of utility systems this book challenges contemporary conceptualizations of consumers as the autonomous drivers of environmental change. Instead, utilities and users are positioned as the 'co-managers' of utility systems, and processes of environmental innovation are seen to depend on the systemic restructuring of demand.

Sustainable Consumption
Sustainable Consumption

Author: Dale Southerton

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2004-01-01

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9781781958025

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This text empirically examines key theoretical debates underpinning the social sciences at the beginning of the 21st century. These include: the relations between production and consumption; and the escalation of choice and the emergence of differentiation in service provision and lifestyle orientation.

Infrastructures of Consumption
Infrastructures of Consumption

Author: Bas van Vliet

Publisher:

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 130

ISBN-13: 9786000002817

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For many years, a uniform and uncontested picture of utility system organization has endured across Europe. Provider and consumer roles have been largely taken for granted, and consumers have had little choice but to use the infrastructure of the only network provider available. Recent transformations have challenged this model. This book examines the ongoing environmental restructuring of consumption and provision in energy, water and waste systems. In accounting for the distinctive environmental qualities, technical features, and institutional dynamics of utility systems this book challenges.

Infrastructures in Practice
Infrastructures in Practice

Author: Elizabeth Shove

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-09-17

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 1351106155

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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.

Infrastructures of Consumption: Restructuring the Utility Industries
Infrastructures of Consumption: Restructuring the Utility Industries

Author: Bas Van Vliet

Publisher:

Published: 2005

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781853839955

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Annotation * Shows how utilities are being restructured for resource efficiency, to improve environmental performance and for cost savings through consumer, or 'demand side', drivers * Includes coverage of energy, water and waste utilities, providing core information for industry, researchers, students and consumer groups * Draws on case studies from the UK and The Netherlands as examples of the ongoing worldwide environmental transformation of utilities For many years a uniform and uncontested picture of utility system organization has endured across Europe. Provider and consumer roles have been largely taken for granted, and consumers have had little choice but to use the infrastructure of the only network provider available. Yet recent transformations have challenged this model. This book examines the ongoing environmental restructuring of consumption and provision in energy, water and waste systems. In accounting for the distinctive environmental qualities, technical features and institutional dynamics of utility systems this book challenges contemporary conceptualizations of consumers as the autonomous drivers of environmental change. Instead, utilities and users are positioned as the 'co-managers' of utility systems, and processes of environmental innovation are seen to depend on creating contexts for the systemic restructuring of demand.

Sustainable Infrastructure for Cities and Societies
Sustainable Infrastructure for Cities and Societies

Author: Michael Neuman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-31

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1000513688

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The central role of infrastructure to cities, and in particular their sustainability, is essential for proper planning and design since most energy and materials are themselves consumed by or through infrastructures. Moreover, infrastructures of all types affect matters of economic and social equity, due to access that they provide or prevent. Sustainable Infrastructure for Cities and Societies shows how fundamental planning, design, finance, and governance principles can be adapted for sustainable infrastructure to provide solutions to make cities significantly more sustainable. By providing a contemporary overview on infrastructure, cities, planning, economies, and sustainability, the book addresses how to plan, design, finance, and manage infrastructure in ways that reduce consumption and harmful impacts while maintaining and improving life quality. It considers the interrelationships between the economic, political, societal, and institutional frameworks, providing an integrative approach including livability and sustainability, principles and practice, and planning and design. It further translates these approaches that professionals, policymakers, and leaders can use. This approach gives the book wide appeal for students, researchers, and practitioners hoping to build a more sustainable world.

Infrastructure
Infrastructure

Author: Brett M. Frischmann

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2013-01-01

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 0199333750

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Infrastructure resources are the subject of many contentious public policy debates, including what to do about crumbling roads and bridges, whether and how to protect our natural environment, energy policy, even patent law reform, universal health care, network neutrality regulation and the future of the Internet. Each of these involves a battle to control infrastructure resources, to establish the terms and conditions under which the public receives access, and to determine how the infrastructure and various dependent systems evolve over time. Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources devotes much needed attention to understanding how society benefits from infrastructure resources and how management decisions affect a wide variety of interests. The book links infrastructure, a particular set of resources defined in terms of the manner in which they create value, with commons, a resource management principle by which a resource is shared within a community. The infrastructure commons ideas have broad implications for scholarship and public policy across many fields ranging from traditional infrastructure like roads to environmental economics to intellectual property to Internet policy. Economics has become the methodology of choice for many scholars and policymakers in these areas. The book offers a rigorous economic challenge to the prevailing wisdom, which focuses primarily on problems associated with ensuring adequate supply. The author explores a set of questions that, once asked, seem obvious: what drives the demand side of the equation, and how should demand-side drivers affect public policy? Demand for infrastructure resources involves a range of important considerations that bear on the optimal design of a regime for infrastructure management. The book identifies resource valuation and attendant management problems that recur across many different fields and many different resource types, and it develops a functional economic approach to understanding and analyzing these problems and potential solutions.

Public Infrastructures, Public Consumption, and Welfare in a New-Open-Economy-Macro Model
Public Infrastructures, Public Consumption, and Welfare in a New-Open-Economy-Macro Model

Author: Giovanni Ganelli

Publisher: International Monetary Fund

Published: 2007-03

Total Pages: 30

ISBN-13:

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This paper focuses on the trade-off faced by governments in deciding the allocation of public expenditures between productivity-enhancing public infrastructures and utility-enhancing public consumption. From the modeling point of view, the paper augments a standard New Open Economy Macroeconomics (NOEM) model by introducing productive public infrastructures. The results show that a temporary increase in the domestic stock of public capital financed by a reduction in public consumption reduces domestic welfare in the short run because the temporary gains from higher productivity do not compensate domestic residents for the utility loss due to lower public consumption. If the policy shift is permanent domestic utility is likely to increase, while foreign residents suffer short-run welfare losses but benefit from welfare gains in the long run. This analysis implies that a permanent domestic reallocation of public spending might result in a virtuous global technological cycle.

Social, Health, and Environmental Infrastructures for Economic Growth
Social, Health, and Environmental Infrastructures for Economic Growth

Author: Das, Ramesh Chandra

Publisher: IGI Global

Published: 2017-03-01

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 1522523650

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The development of any contemporary economy is affected by numerous factors. By creating stable infrastructures, countries can more easily thrive in competitive international markets. Social, Health, and Environmental Infrastructures for Economic Growth is a comprehensive source of academic material that examines the impact of infrastructure development on modern economies. Highlighting relevant perspectives on topics such as employment, rural development, and energy production, this is an ideal reference source for researchers, students, professionals, practitioners, and policy makers interested in the social, health, and environmental infrastructures in contemporary economies.