Water becomes a usable resource thanks to multiple processes and infrastructures operating at different geographical and political scales: pipes, treatment plants, reservoirs, dykes and embankments.

According to Susan Leigh Star, infrastructures can be considered as relational technical objects that integrate values, regulate access and use, and reshape the relationship between humans and the environment. When they function as intended, they often render invisible the labour required to build and maintain them, as well as the narratives that inspired their design. Yet they structure and control water flows, resources and information, raising questions of governance: who decides what should be controlled, how far that control should extend, and whether these systems should be preserved.

While infrastructure shapes the future, landscapes and water-related practices, it also reduces the range of conceivable alternatives by stabilising certain ways of life. What are the imagineering processes involved in the work of the engineers who design them? What alternatives are emerging? Researches in social sciences are emerging on the imaginaries linked to the materiality of water infrastructure. This workshop will be an opportunity to bring together authors of submitted contributions to a special issue to be published in the journal Futures.