ABSTRACT
This chapter explores changing approaches to managing water in its quantitative aspect, that is to say we address the problem of planning for optimal allocation of increasingly scarce water resources. With ever-increasing water demand amongst an ever-increasing diversity of uses, and in a world of ever-increasing water scarcity, many countries in Europe and the world have reached the point of needing nothing less than revolutionary thinking. In other words, if we are to meet the quantitative challenges of water management in the 21st century we must first unthink the central ideologies and paradigms that led us to this impasse in the first place and then begin to construct their replacement. My argument is that the first evolutionary and then systematic approaches to water management which have dominated the past two centuries have been themselves dominated by what I call the “engineering paradigm” – the central preconception that any given problem can be solved with more and better technology. Thus we have moved from living in domestic premises which relied on perhaps 10-20 litres of water per person per day in 1900 to households that that require 140-150 litres/p/day in 2008. Of course part of this process has involved integrating better personal and public hygiene into our ways of living (Shove, 2003), but similarly we have developed a “natural” demand for more machines doing more things with more water along the way (Shove et al., 2007). And an ironic result may be that we are now becoming less healthy as a society. The same engineering paradigm that has populated our homes with all manner of washing and cleaning machines has also risen to the challenge of providing the increased volumes of water necessary to serve them. More demand means more supply, that is, reservoirs, treatment plants, pipelines, computerised control systems, etc.
