Large Technical Systems in transition: rescaling of their management and production of new geographies. Insights from a German case
Résumé
Over the last past twenty years, most of the cities of the Eastern part of Germany have seen an accumulation of transitions in their urban and energy systems. They have experienced the various effects of the post-socialist transition (Bontje, 2004). This turn is characterised by the transformation of the urban fabric through increasing numbers of vacant houses and brownfields, processes of intense depopulation and deindustrialisation (Bernt, 2009). This has had tremendous repercussions on urban technical systems such as water networks or district heating systems, as consumption levels in both sectors drastically dropped by up to two thirds within twenty years. Such a transformation elicited new geographies of urban technical networks that have been limned as “cold spots” (Moss, 2008), which encompass areas of declining demand and oversized networks. This alteration of the traditional evolution of large technical systems that is usually led by growing demand consequently requires an important transformation of the whole sociotechnical system and forces water and heating operators to adapt their networks to this new context. Our paper wants to report on the strategies that have been developed by operators to adapt their system. We detail the analysis of a typical case of this turn, scrutinizing a multi-utility (Stadtwerk) where we carried out a six month internship in a middle-sized city of Germany, Magdeburg, particularly focusing on the transformation of water and central district heating networks. Our study reveals not only a technical and economic change of the business model integral to this type of actor, but also a territorial transformation resting on the iterative integration of other networks and a gradual rescaling of the supplied area to compensate the declining demand.