Renewing urban foundational infrastructures | Julie FROUD

            The 2024-2025 StadsSalonsUrbains Lecture Series explores the evolving role of urban welfare infrastructures in contemporary cities. It examines how access to social spaces and community resources—beyond basic services like education, healthcare, and utilities—shapes people's ability to live fulfilling lives. With the pressures of privatization, austerity, and shrinking public spaces, traditional welfare systems are increasingly under strain. However, cities also serve as hubs for innovative solutions, where community-based initiatives, new models of governance, and collaborations across civic, public, and private sectors are creating alternative social infrastructures. These spaces not only address practical needs but also foster collective well-being, progressive politics, and social justice. The lecture series delves into these dynamic and critical issues from diverse theoretical perspectives.
          

Renewing urban foundational infrastructures: access, coordination and citizenship in the water system

Liveability depends partly on access to foundational services provided by infrastructural systems which are shaped by specific spatial, historical and political contexts. This lecture will take a specific example of the water industry in England and Wales to explore how urban access to a service – water and sewerage – is embedded in physical, financial and organisational structures that extend well beyond the city and the control of any one governance system. English and Welsh water infrastructure is unusual in that it is privately owned and operated. But in many respects the emerging acute problems about system renewal raise questions that are relevant for other asset intensive foundational systems, as well as for water and sewerage under other forms of ownership in Europe where all face new challenges about water management and the costs of adaptation to climate change. To explore these wider issues, the lecture will focus on several foundational questions about: household charging and the affordability of infrastructure upgrades; co-ordination of planning for adequate supply as well as excess water and flooding; and the potential role of citizen movements based on science, campaigning and legal action to develop new kinds of foundational politics and citizenship.

Julie FROUD

University of Manchester

Julie Froud is a professor at Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester UK. After a period of research focused on financialisation, for the last ten years she has worked on the foundational economy, as part of a UK-based research group and a wider network across Europe. Key books here are the 2018 Foundational Economy: the Infrastructure of Everyday Life, by the Foundational Economy Collective, and the 2023 book When Nothing Works: From Cost of Living to Foundational Liveabiity by Luca Calafati et al (both published by Manchester University Press). Ongoing work includes a book on the water industry What to do about Water? For a fairer, sustainable future, which will be published in 2025.