The challenge of managing disruption has been amplified by the historical promise of networks to bring smooth flow and universal access to all. We except to have running water on demand, day and night, and have light when we flick a switch. It is useful to recall how recent such expectations are in the developed world, and how unusual they remain elsewhere. In British cities, constant water supply was only introduced from the 1860s, but even then the system was prone to temporary suspensions, as in the shortages of the mid-1890s with which we began our discussion. Victorian engineers and urban reformers had optimistic views of the efficiency and durability of their networks. Yet these gained their true public force in the social-democratic vision of public services, as suggested by the case of London, where water was municipalized in 1902. Public control of public services, so the assumption, would put an end to shortages. There would be a civic contract between citizens and the state. The state agreed to increase the scope and level of consumption – by expanding networks, connecting the countryside and bringing everyone into the realm of a civilized existence. Consumers, in return, were expected to be good citizens and not waste water (Taylor and Trentmann forthcoming).
On the eve of the Second World War, progressive leaders in Britain openly mused that municipalization had made droughts a thing of the past. This was fantasy. There were major shortages in 1921 and 1933–4. But now such disruptions tended to be externalized, blamed on temporary, external variants. They were not part of normality. The association of rising levels of water consumption with civilization and progress made it difficult to acknowledge the pressures internal to the system caused by consumers’ expanding and intensifying practices of bathing, gardening, washing the car and, after the Second World War, using a washing machine. The civic contract inevitably limited the scope of action in response to shortages, favouring the expansion of supply through reservoirs and transfers between networks at the expense of modulating consumption in the long-term. It prioritized appeals to voluntary restraint during serious drought – be a good citizen and do not water your garden, please, drive a dirty car as a sign that you care for the community, and so on. But these were only momentary signals, and with mixed effect. As one critic pointed out during the 1934 drought, appeals to consume less water were of doubtful value when people had for years been encouraged to consume more in the pursuit of cleanliness and civilization (Taylor et al. in press).<sup>3</sup>
Disruption is Normal
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