District heating as welfare: Rearrangements of public infrastructure ownership

• In Event: Welfare After Digitalisation: Siting values, affordances, and politics

Abstract

District heating and energy are usually not considered welfare services or infrastructures, despite district heating infrastructures mainly thriving within welfare states. This paper explores district heating as an infrastructure in a time of public sector digitalisation and Danish local governments’ increasingly engaging with Big Tech.
Welfare is a crucial contemporary issue to be studied in STS and is both as practice and concept integral to the fields of care and governance. My approach in this is to study an infrastructure considered at the boundary of what is usually considered welfare, namely district heating.
As corporate actors of Big Tech come to influence local, public infrastructures through more or less official partnerships, the boundaries between what is public and private are rearranged. Accordingly, it is time we attend to questions of who accounts for what within and around public infrastructures, and how these partnerships come to matter in the practice of ownership. The partnerships are, for example, effects of the new data centres being built in various places of Denmark. Included in some of these partnerships is an imaginary informed by the level of energy efficiency within the Danish energy system and the utilisation of waste heat for distribution through local district heating infrastructures. In exploring the partnership and infrastructural rearrangements of public and private, I show how digitalisation is more than the increased production of and restructuring around digital data, and that it is also increasingly materialised through the welfare practices embedded in and represented by public infrastructures.

Author

• Caroline Anna Salling, IT University of Copnehagen