World Water Crisis
Last week I attended a seminar discussion titled 'Truth and lies about the world water crisis'. It was an evening event in Reading, sponsored by Thames water as a fund raiser for the charity Water Aid. The (not very impressive) keynote speaker was Dame Anita Roddick (body shop founder and now full-time 'activist') who spoke from her new water book. The other main speaker was Stephen Turner from Water Aid, and they were both joined for a panel discussion by Richard Aylard from Thames Water and a representative from the Environment Agency. Stephen and Richard in particular raised several interesting points about the provision of water and sanitation in different parts of the world, with important implications for engineering technology, culture and practice.
For me the event, particularly Stephen's talk, prompted one of those rare moments of clarity about precisely how inequitably the world's resources are distributed. Stephen discussed water projects in Malawi (I think) which aim (but haven't yet succeeded) to provide one water point for every 250 people. He gave examples of how Water Aid are involved in these kinds of projects, including participative process for deciding where to site water points in villages, the potential grassroots economic activity that arises around women's water co-operatives, and support for government planners by providing data and lobbying for relief from the burden of 'reporting' to donors. Water Aid generally take a decentralised, community based approach to the provision of water and infrastructure technologies. Stephen said they aim to export the British 'passion for sanitation', though not necessarily British sanitation technology.
I got thinking about that passion and technology for sanitation in London. To my horror I realised that while people in Malawi have to negotiate with each other, engineers, donors, governments and businesses to get one water point between 250 neighbours, I just signed an agreement with Thames Water when I moved into my flat and have 6 taps and a flushing toilet all to myself. That's ONE person, SEVEN water points! What's more, I didn't have to attend a community workshop to negotiate with anyone to have them installed or to gain access or keep them maintained. How spoilt am I? How deprived are the people of Malawi, even those who live in communities that meet the government aim for water provision? The best case scenario for water provision in many parts of the world is still an order of magnitude away from the services I have been provided without even thinking about it.
What does this say about the ambitions of sanitation engineering? How is it that access to basic services of water and sanitation are so obscenely inequitable? Clearly 7 water points for one person is excessive, but is 1 water point for 250 people really sufficient? Why have NGOs, governments and even corporations like Thames Water given up on the prospect of universal provision through large scale infrastructure systems such as we enjoy in London? How should the cyborg engineer in the hydropolis respond?
Cyborg Urbanisation
Last Friday we participated in a day long seminar held at UCL titled ‘Cyborg Urbanization’. The seminar was organised by Matthew Gandy and Valerie Viehoff from the geography department, and is part of an interdisciplinary seminar series funded by the ESRC/EPSRC on the theme ‘Rethinking urban metabolism’. A very thought provoking set of presentation explored the potential of the cyborg to provide new ways of knowing cities. Looking from an engineering perspective, I found Donald McNeill’s (King’s College) presentation on ‘The corporeality of the global architect’, and Gerry Kearns (Cambridge) ‘The place of metaphors in conceptualising health entitlements and public health security in the city’, particularly interesting.
Donald’s work on the Aurora Place development in Sydney and its celebrity architect Renzo Piano described the how a building came to exist in Sydney while it’s chief architect sat mostly in Genoa. The global flow of people, ideas, drawing, reputation and creativity, met the pacific sea breeze, Sydney planning regulations, market pragmatics, structural engineering, and project management to create a building which made it into last Saturday’s Guardian travel section’s modern architecture trail.
Donald’s work on global architecture made me wonder whether global engineering might be a worthy topic of research, particularly for cyborg engineers whose work is at once both and neither global and local. I was reminded of my friend who works for the international engineering firm Arup in Cairns, far north Queensland, designing water and sanitation systems for remote Aboriginal communities. I also wonder how these global practices are similar or different those of the other women engineers and scientists I know through the Women and Water Technology Network, who work with community NGOs in India, supported by real and virtual networks of resources and solidarity that stretch around the Earth. What does this mean if we think the world needs more water and sanitation for poor people as well as beautiful buildings housing inner city apartments and offices for the rich?
Gerry’s presentation used the Victorian sanitary reformer Edwin Chadwick to show that the cyborg predates Haraway’s attention to the information society and genetic engineering. In discussions there was some talk of cyborgs going back even further, but Gerry’s paper made me wonder if cyborgs become most visible during particular historical moments that are crucial to the formation of professional engineering identities. The cybernetics, systems science, internet, information ‘revolution’ that gave rise to Haraway’s cyborg was a crucial historical moment in the emergence of professional ‘software engineering’ and ‘systems engineering’. She has also written extensively about the material semiotics of ‘genetic engineering’, again a crucial moment in defining a new technological profession. Provision of sanitation in Victorian London and elsewhere was a defining moment for ‘civil engineering’, the very origins of the modern ‘engineering profession’, so it seems no co-incidence that Gerry found the cyborg city there.
His paper made me wonder if it is possible to have cyborgs without engineers, or engineers without cyborgs? Is the ‘taming of cyborgs’ tied up with the professionalisation of engineering practice? Can radical cyborgs like Haraway’s survive without radical engineers?
Cyborg cities seem likely workplaces for cyborg engineers, as they traverse real and virtual, metropolitan and remote, rich and poor, local and global in configuring the technologies that are, as Bruno Latour says, ‘society made durable’.
The carbon plant, anode former and my old office are in the corner of the smelter in the top middle of the photo (can you see the three white coke silos?).
Formation
The opening pages of Sarah's PhD thesis...
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From: Bell, Sarah J
Sent: Wednesday, 14 July 1999 12:55
To: ‘Sigley, Gavin’
Subject: RE: mmm
I have got to get out of this place. Today I hate it and all it stands for and the people here are behaving as they always do but for some reason this week they are really starting to annoy me. It is increasingly difficult to remain positive about something I just don’t believe in and in many ways am actively opposed to. The focus on costs at all costs is really bugging me – the Carbon monthly cost review meeting takes longer than the monthly safety meeting. There also seems to be an awful lot of managing going on at the moment – the quality ‘system’ still means SFA to the process techs in Green Carbon yet Peter is wandering around finding out about the maintenance ‘system’ because some GM in head office has a full time job working out how to fit all the ‘systems’ together, ie create a ‘systems system’. The similar story of most of the time the big stuff doesn’t worry me but sometimes I just can’t ignore it any more. I know all the politics will probably be worse in academia but I believe in the basic purpose of universities more than I believe in the purposes of this smelter and its owners. The thing is we go through all this crap and all I keep thinking is “Who cares? It’s not our money. It’s just a lump of carbon that’s going to be burned to make the planet hotter to make metal for coke cans to be sold to kids somewhere in the Philippines.” I just don’t think the world needs any more aluminium… The other thing I keep remembering about your brother Ross and your Dad after I showed them around here was their response to the environment – I am really becoming aware of what a horrible place this is especially when I think of the tenacious bush around Murdoch and the flat, endless open paddocks of the wheatbelt that change colour from lively emerald green to shimmering gold and finally gentle grey, all under the wide blue sky that cares nothing for profit margins…
PPS The excavation of the foundations for the former retrofit is also probably playing on my nerves a bit – you thought the former was noisy, you should try working while they are jack-hammering out the concrete that it stood on!
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The old anode former at the aluminium smelter where I worked needed to be upgraded to enable the one tonne carbon anodes to be formed at higher temperatures under vacuum, making them stronger, denser, and better at carrying the current of electrons needed to turn aluminium ions into metal and carbon atoms into carbon dioxide. The old former clunked away less than 20 metres from the dark office where I wiped black dust from my desk top and computer screen before starting work each morning. If I could not hear and feel the vibration of the former belting out an anode every minute or so, I knew the plant was down, and if I was feeling particularly diligent this might prompt me to investigate unplanned stoppages, much to the annoyance of the technicians. My friend Gavin worked as a database consultant occasionally stationed in the office next door to me. The former drove him crazy. The upgrade jack-hammering drove me crazy. The pressure of the noise, my Dilbertine frustration with management, my ethical stance on greenhouse emissions all culminated in an electronic outburst that strengthened my resolve to move from the dark, dirty, dangerous Carbon plant to the clean but politicised air of the university, with dreams of the blue sky and open space of home.
Nature, culture and technology all merged in my defection from the techno-industrial network of aluminium production to the university and the landscape of my childhood. The local experience of carbon dust on my desk and in my belly button, global concerns about mass extinction and the impact of consumer culture in developing countries, and personal memories of the cultural landscape of wheat changing with the seasons, met in my decision to take off my blackened hard hat and sign up for a library card.
