Summary:
This project is about changing current patterns of resource and energy use, as shaped by urban utility services for water, sewage, electricity and solid waste. In the past, strategies for minimizing resource use and its environmental impact have focused on technological efficiency and innovation, state regulation, market incentives and information campaigns for consumers. The project acknowledges the significant progress already achieved by these strategies, but argues - on the basis of empirical analysis of obstacles and opportunities to achieving environmental policy objectives - how the ability to tap the huge potential of infrastructure networks to improve environmental quality will depend in future on understanding how infrastructure management is shaped by local context, actor logics and decision-making processes. This is particularly important today, when utility services across Europe are having to adapt to concurrent - yet often divergent - pressures of liberalization, new government funding and growing public concern for service quality and costs.