Water infrastructures and the adaptation challenge: diverging and contested metabolic compositions

In this paper, we seek to conceptualise the dilemma of infrastructure providers facing resource scarcity issues, torn between resource-sensitive approaches and new technological fixes. Mainly in the Global North, infrastructures have long been considered as a mere technical mediation ensuring the continuity and security of basic services, consequently rendering largely invisible the relation between services and resources. As such, these infrastructures have framed a certain form of habitability marked by a modernist perspective. Yet, the acceleration of environmental turmoil contributes to major perturbations and highly destabilises this model and puts to the fore the long neglected question of resources and their availability, producing metabolic transformations if not ruptures. Drawing on the portrayal of a water service in an area increasingly affected by major droughts, the Turin province in Italy, we analyse the various strategies implemented to integrate this tension around resource availability and the politics they entail. We conceptualise these variegated strategies as specific socio-material assemblages, mirroring a particular socio-material order we suggest calling metabolic composition.