Human-Infrastructure Interactions during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Understanding Water and Electricity Demand Profiles at the Building Level.

When engineers design and manage a building's water and electricity utilities, they must make assumptions about resource use. These assumptions are often challenged when unexpected changes in demand occur, such as the spatial and temporal changes observed during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Social distancing policies (SDPs) enacted led many universities to close their campuses and implement remote learning, impacting utility consumption patterns. Yet, little is known about how consumption changed at the building level. Here, we aim to understand how water and electricity consumption changed during the pandemic by identifying characteristic weekly demand profiles and understanding how these changes were related to regulatory and social systems. We performed k-means clustering on utility demand data measured before and as the pandemic evolved from five buildings of different types at the University of Texas at Austin. As expected, after SDPs were enacted both water and electricity use shifted, with most buildings seeing a sharp initial decline that remained low until the university partially reopened. In contrast to electricity use, we found that water use was tightly coupled with SDPs. Our study provides actionable information for managers to mitigate negative impacts (e.g., water stagnation) and capitalize on opportunities to minimize resource use.

Implications of Social Distancing Policies on Drinking Water Infrastructure: An Overview of the Challenges to and Responses of U.S. Utilities during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Social distancing policies (SDPs) implemented throughout the United States in response to COVID-19 have led to spatial and temporal shifts in drinking water demand and, for water utilities, created sociotechnical challenges. During this unique period, many water utilities have been forced to operate outside of design conditions with reduced workforce and financial capacities. Few studies have examined how water utilities respond to a pandemic; such methods are even absent from many emergency response plans. Here, we documented how utilities have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. We conducted a qualitative analysis of 30 interviews with 53 practitioners spanning 28 U.S. water utilities. Our aim was to, first, understand the challenges experienced by utilities and changes to operations (e.g., demand and deficit accounts) and, second, to document utilities' responses. Results showed that to maintain service continuity and implement SDPs, utilities had to overcome various challenges. These include supply chain issues, spatiotemporal changes in demand, and financial losses, and these challenges were largely dependent on the type of customers served (e.g., commercial or residential). Examples of utilities' responses include proactively ordering extra supplies and postponing capital projects. Although utilities' adaptations ensured the immediate provision of water services, their responses might have negative repercussions in the future (e.g., delayed projects contributing to aging infrastructure).

Culturally appropriate organization of water and sewerage projects built through public private partnerships.

This paper contributes to the pursuit of socially sustainable water and sanitation infrastructure for all people by discovering statistically robust relationships between Hofstede's dimensions of cross-cultural comparison and the choice of contract award types, project type, and primary revenue sources. This analysis, which represents 973 projects distributed across 24 low- and middle-income nations, uses a World Bank dataset describing high capital cost water and sewerage projects funded through private investment. The results show that cultural dimensions explain variation in the choice of contract award types, project type, and primary revenue sources. These results provide empirical evidence that strategies for water and sewerage project organization are not culturally neutral. The data show, for example, that highly individualistic contexts are more likely to select competitive contract award types and to depend on user fees to provide the primary project revenue stream post-construction. By selecting more locally appropriate ways to organize projects, project stakeholders will be better able to pursue the construction of socially sustainable water and sewerage infrastructure.

Transitioning from a Human Right to an Infrastructure Service: Water, Wastewater, and Displaced Persons in Germany.

Water and sanitation utilities across Europe have recently been challenged to provide services to asylum seekers and refugees fleeing complex humanitarian disasters. We explore public perceptions regarding how secondary disaster impacts (mass migration into an undamaged area) has impacted the utilities. We show that the hosting population is typically willing to provide water and sanitation services to displaced persons for a set period of time, even if the displaced persons are unable to pay (water and sanitation as human rights). However, as time passes, displaced persons are eventually expected to pay for access (water and sanitation as infrastructure services). Drawing from statistical modeling of survey data from German residents, we find the average length of time for this transition in 2016 Germany was 2.9 years. The data also show statistically significant demographic and locational attributes that influence this time frame, indicating the normative length of the transition from a right to a service is contextually dependent. Regardless, this is a significant period of time that the public expects utilities to provide services to unexpected displaced persons. To be able to meet this kind of demand, utilities, engineers, and policy makers must consider the potential for displaced populations in their regular, long-range utility planning.

Cultured Construction: Global Evidence of the Impact of National Values on Piped-to-Premises Water Infrastructure Development.

In 2016, the global community undertook the Sustainable Development Goals. One of these goals seeks to achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all people by the year 2030. In support of this undertaking, this paper seeks to discover the cultural work done by piped water infrastructure across 33 nations with developed and developing economies that have experienced change in the percentage of population served by piped-to-premises water infrastructure at the national level of analysis. To do so, I regressed the 1990-2012 change in piped-to-premises water infrastructure coverage against Hofstede's cultural dimensions, controlling for per capita GDP, the 1990 baseline level of coverage, percent urban population, overall 1990-2012 change in improved sanitation (all technologies), and per capita freshwater resources. Separate analyses were carried out for the urban, rural, and aggregate national contexts. Hofstede's dimensions provide a measure of cross-cultural difference; high or low scores are not in any way intended to represent better or worse but rather serve as a quantitative way to compare aggregate preferences for ways of being and doing. High scores in the cultural dimensions of Power Distance, Individualism-Collectivism, and Uncertainty Avoidance explain increased access to piped-to-premises water infrastructure in the rural context. Higher Power Distance and Uncertainty Avoidance scores are also statistically significant for increased coverage in the urban and national aggregate contexts. These results indicate that, as presently conceived, piped-to-premises water infrastructure fits best with spatial contexts that prefer hierarchy and centralized control. Furthermore, water infrastructure is understood to reduce uncertainty regarding the provision of individually valued benefits. The results of this analysis identify global trends that enable engineers and policy makers to design and manage more culturally appropriate and socially sustainable water infrastructure by better fitting technologies to user preferences.

Cultured Construction: Global Evidence of the Impact of National Values on Renewable Electricity Infrastructure Choice.

Renewable electricity is an important tool in the fight against climate change, but globally these technologies are still in the early stages of diffusion. To contribute to our understanding of the factors driving this diffusion, I study relationships between national values (measured by Hofstede's cultural dimensions) and renewable electricity adoption at the national level. Existing data for 66 nations (representing an equal number of developed and developing economies) are used to fuel the analysis. Somewhat dependent on limited available data on controls for grid reliability and the cost of electricity, I discover that three of Hofstede's dimensions (high uncertainty avoidance, low masculinity-femininity, and high individualism-collectivism) have significant exponential relationships with renewable electricity adoption. The dimension of uncertainty avoidance appears particularly appropriate for practical application. Projects or organizations implementing renewable electricity policy, designs, or construction should particularly attend to this cultural dimension. In particular, as the data imply that renewable technologies are being used to manage risk in electricity supply, geographies with unreliable grids are particularly likely to be open to renewable electricity technologies.

Cultured construction: global evidence of the impact of national values on sanitation infrastructure choice.

Case study research often claims culture-variously defined-impacts infrastructure development. I test this claim using Hofstede's cultural dimensions and newly available data representing change in national coverage of sewer connections, sewerage treatment, and onsite sanitation between 1990 and 2010 for 21 developing nations. The results show that the cultural dimensions of uncertainty avoidance, masculinity-femininity, and individualism-collectivism have statistically significant relationships to sanitation technology choice. These data prove the global impact of culture on infrastructure choice, and reemphasize that local cultural preferences must be considered when constructing sanitation infrastructure.

The internal social sustainability of sanitation infrastructure.

While the construction of sanitation infrastructure is one of humankind's greatest public health and environmental engineering achievements, its benefits are not yet enjoyed by all. In addition to the billions of people not yet reached by sanitation infrastructure, at least half of systems constructed in developing contexts are abandoned in the years following initial construction. In this research, we target the problem of postconstruction onsite sanitation infrastructure abandonment in rural Guatemala using legitimacy and status theory. Legitimacy and status are established theoretical concepts from organizational theory that reflect cultural alignment and normative support. Crisp set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (csQCA), which uses Boolean algebra to discover combinations of theoretical conditions that produce an outcome of interest, allowed us to describe the various pathways that have caused socially sustainable uptake. We find that three combinations of legitimacy and status theory explain 85% of household cases at a consistency of 0.97. The most practically useful pathway covers 50% of household cases and shows that the combination of consequential legitimacy (a moral understanding of outcomes) and comprehensibility legitimacy (a cognitive model connecting outcomes to processes) is a powerful way to achieve socially sustainable sanitation infrastructure.