'I've decided it's best to be confused’The co-evolution of technological infrastructures & future imaginaries in a West Wales low-impact community

Christopher Groves, Karen Henwood, Catherine Butler, Karen Parkhill, Nick Pidgeon and Fiona Shirani

Energy Biographies Project (http://energybiographies.org)

School of Social SciencesCardiff Universityhttp://cardiff.academia.edu/ChristopherGroves

Future imaginaries• Shared meanings

which produce expectations about the future1

• Practice theory locates such meanings as constitutive components of social practices2

1. Borup, M., et al. (2006). "The sociology of expectations in science and technology." Technology Analysis & Strategic Management 18(3-4): 285-298.

2. Shove, E., et al. (2012). The Dynamics of Social Practice: Everyday Life and how it Changes. London, SAGE Publications.

Practice

Compe-tences

Materials

Shared meaning

s

Practices and ‘local’ meanings

• But practices also matter1

• Individual and group meanings (emotion, attachment, identity) may shape shared meanings2

• How do these interact with (transform/become transformed by) shared meanings?

1. Sayer, A. (2011). Why things matter to people : social science, values and ethical life. Cambridge; New York, Cambridge University Press.

2. Marris, P. (1996). The politics of uncertainty: attachment in private and public life. London; New York, Routledge.

Practice (1)

Compe-tences(1

)

Materials (1)

Shared meaning

s (1)

“Quiet struggle

s”

Changing ‘local’

meanings

transform

The Energy Biographies project (2011 – present)

• QLL biographical interviews

▫ Four sites: Cardiff (Ely, Peterston), Lammas, Royal Free Hospital (RFH, London)

▫ 3 longitudinal interviews (original group of 74 in first round narrowed down to 36 for rounds 2 & 3)

▫ 6 months between interviews

Lammas, West Wales

Royal Free Hospital,

LondonPeterston, Cardiff

Ely, Cardiff

Interview 1Themes: community and context, daily routine, life transitions

Activity 1Participant-generated photos

Interview 2Themes: changes since interview 1, discussion of pictures generated

in activity 1,follow up on emergent themes from interview 1

Activity 2Text-prompted photos

Interview 3Themes: changes since interview 2, discussion of pictures

generated in activity 2discussion of video clips provided by researcher

Structure of

empirical phase

More information on each stage available at http://energybiographies.org/our-project/project-design/

Lammas/Tir-y-Gafel• Set up in 2009 – 9

households, 31 ha.• Made possible by

Welsh Government/ Pembrokeshire local authority policies on Low Impact Development (LID)▫ Relaxing of building

regulations▫ Consciously

experimental governance

▫ “One Planet” development framework

Tir-y-Gafel

“One Planet Developments should initially achieve an ecological footprint of 2.4 global hectares per person or less in terms of consumption and demonstrate clear potential to move towards 1.88 global hectare target over time. They should also be zero carbon in both construction and use”

Welsh Gov., Technical Advice Note 6

“The proposal will make a positive environmental, social and/or economic contribution with public benefit”

Pembroke LID policy

Shared future imaginaries

Shared future imaginaries

• Self-sufficiency▫“Proposals need to be tied to the land and

provide sufficient livelihood for the occupants” (LID framework, p. 5)

• Resilience▫“I remember sitting in my mum’s house one

time and I was thinking this...really isn’t a resilient house...it is just depending on all these systems that are dependent on” (Jada)

▫Being off-grid “cultivates an inner strength and resilience in our lifestyle patterns” (Peter)

Framework for development

• Council LID framework stipulates developments should be 75% self-sustaining within

5 yearsIn addition, residents

chose to make the village

off-grid

Permaculture and connection

“That was the compost bins, so again just the energy of the sun and the heat of the black plastic and all of the vegetable matter that comes out of the tunnels or the garden or the house and they're all at various stages, I've got about twelve I think, I counted up once, twelve different compost bins all going. Like that end one there was right up to the top, mainly with horse-muck and also grass and we use all kinds of things, rock dust and ash and cardboard and manure and everything and it dropped right down and then I used it all to grow my onions and my garlic, so that cycle thing again”

(Vanessa)

Connectedness & energy practices

“For a time I lived in Swansea with my family we had a mains connected washing machine. We did not know (or really care) where the electricity and water came from. We had no awareness of where the waste went. We used the machine indiscriminately. Now that we live at Lammas we not only know where all the resources come from and go, but we have an intimate relationship with them.”

Lammas Response to Welsh Gov. SustainableLand Management Consultation (2013)

“We are on a loop with the hub and one other person, so we are on a loop. There are 27 kilowatts coming in [...] and that's divided into three loops so its 9 kilowatts per loop and 3 kilowatts per family and that's like when everything is running perfectly. We will have a back-up of solar in the event that the hydro is not working for some reason or another. So it's just a continual awareness around what we've got and what we can use.”

Vanessa (Interview 3)

‘Appropriate technologies’

Solar

Micro-hydropowe

r

Wireless broadband

Permaculture

Advanced batteries

Harmful compromises?

“So Laura is very keen on black plastic on the ground. I'm trying to avoid it. But in the end I just think because we have to make our living from the land by Year 5, if you're spending all your time weeding and you're not making progress with the growing you have got to bite the bullet and put the black plastic down. So it’s things like that that seem wasteful and we're almost forced into a situation of more wastefulness than we might be because of that five-year deadline. ”

Graham (Interview 2)

Networked dependencies“[…] you can forage for wild plants that you can eat and then sell them to restaurants. So the idea is that I would grow the wild plants on the plot so I wouldn't be foraging in the wild, I would be cultivating them as a crop cos we have to do that for our planning, so that's what I 'm doing. But at the moment I am foraging every week, as a normal forager would and selling to like a middle man and then he sells to restaurants, mostly in London.

[…I've just had a very busy two weeks foraging because there was a lot of snow in Kent; this company I supply to are based in Kent and the snow and ice ruined things for them and they couldn't get their own stuff, […]

Graham (Interview 1)

“This week is very exciting because there's a famous chef called René Redzepi whose restaurant is called NOMA or Nordic Food, he's Danish and his restaurant is in Denmark [...] he's come to do his restaurant for ten days in Claridge's in London. But his thing is he relies very heavily on foraged food.”

Graham, Interview 2

“that's a good example of waste, yeah I think that is a waste actually because that could be on the Grid and going back, so my neighbours could use it indirectly cos I'd be putting energy into the bigger system. So there could be an argument that being totally off the Grid and independent in a situation like this could be considered a bit wasteful, maybe?”

(Joseph, Interview 2)

Off-grid: return to heedlessness?

Solar panels (Emmanuelle, Lammas)

Confusion

“[…] sometimes I think, 'Our lives aren't really that much different; they seem to be equally as materialistic as everybody else's lives, what’s the difference? […] He's like the original roundhouse builder and then he'll turn up and he's got a Blackberry and I'm thinking, 'That's a bit weird!' living in a roundhouse hut with a Blackberry and I'm thinking, 'Oh no judging, no judging!' You've got to just do your own thing, so I just don't know[…]”

“So I've decided, 'I've no idea'. I've decided it's best to be confused. I always think there's the 'confused' and then there's the 'deluded' who are confused but they think they're not! ”

Graham (Interview 2)

In conclusion...

• Tension between (1) contending shared meanings of sustainability and (2) between these meanings and local meaning of connectedness

Self-sufficienc

y

Resilience

75% target

Connected-ness

• Difficult compromises• New forms of

‘heedlessness’?• Networked economic

dependencies• Path

dependence/fragility?

‘Self-reliance’?“It is not about self-sufficiency, that's not how I see it, but it's about that kind of local resilience and building up that network of places so that eventually we won't be that interesting anymore and people will go away!”

“I think self-sufficiency is […] that sort of John Seymour, that whole kind of back to the land notion where you have your own pigs and you slaughter them and then you use the leather from the pigs to make your own shoes […] Self-reliance, to me, is more like a, regional is probably not quite, a local, a localised notion so the idea with that is that ourselves here and our immediate neighbours and Glandwr and Hirwan and possibly even Crymych become self-reliant. “

Vanessa, Interview 1

Thanks for your attention

http://energybiographies.orghttp://cardiff.academia.edu/ChristopherGroves