What do we talk about when we talk about the state of drinking water networks? A study of the asset management data

Abstract

While drinking water distribution systems are often defined by their invisibility, they increasingly raise questions about how they are known. This knowledge is all the more critical as, in recent decades, the management of these infrastructures has turned to data processing, which produces certain representations of them and guides investment decisions. This is particularly true for drinking water distribution networks, where growing pressure on water resources has heightened concerns about the condition of pipes, some of which leak. Drawing on a corpus of documents related to asset management and a field study involving drinking water network managers who work to produce and use data to guide their network renewal decisions, I examine how their data is constructed and processed. I suggest in this paper shifting the focus from their search for optimizing renewal decisions ("the right euro, in the right place, at the right time") to emphasize the diversity of other operations concerns opened up by their work on these data.