Hydroworks and Underflows : On the Workings and Ruptures of Water and Sanitation Infrastructures

Jennie Olofsson introduces the concept of the sanitary water regime, an umbrella concept for the social and political institutions that help determine technical and hygienic standards of water and waste water production, circulation, and transformation. Drawing on interviews with actors engaged in water and waste-water management in Sweden and Slovenia, Olofsson shows how her concept also helps to describe the relations between such actors, the policies and regulations surrounding their activities, and the unremitting movement of different water bodies. She finds that extensive, active effort not only creates, but also sustains the regime: that is, the daily social and political management of sanitary infrastructures serves to help portray them as natural and eternal. In this comprehensive account, Olofsson explains how our aging drinking and waste-water systems relate to our sense of our civilization and elucidates different aspects of the regime—including the material compositions of relevant infrastructure, standards and regulations, and macrostructures such as capital logics—before finally showing how Norbert Elias’s famous definition of civilization-as-interdependency can be reconceptualized in terms of civilization-as-infrastructures, with water infrastructures providing an ideal exemplar.