Description
Creating places requires a vision of the future that is valuable enough to build for. While recent literature on assetization focuses on the processes and performances through which value is constituted in contemporary markets, there has been little interrogation of how these performances relate historically, between the public rather than the private, or as reproducing categories value over time.
The infrastructural investments that built Brighton’s sewage system were realised in the interests of local commerce, but wrapped up in the possibility of a better collective future. The vision of late Victorian Britain municipalisation began in earnest through local authority applications to the Public Works and Loans Board for sanitation projects. The PWLB bore the organisational structure of the East India Company and many of initial loans were allocated to “company men” to complement their investments as they repatriated wealth generated overseas. Despite audit reforms and new local government powers the financial processes of this maritime and imperial economy reproduced ownership and class relations through the building, of an paying for, water infrastructure of the town: “modern water” valued scientific invention, private and public ownership linked repayment horizons and terms to rateable value and centralised statecraft centralised powers to Commissioners of the Treasury. These performances of lending, valuation and representation all reflected a hydrosocial order recognisable since Tudor times.
Similar patterns are familiar to any water protestor today and inform not only the kind of political economy that governs water politics today but also the opportunities for structuring opposition and the terms on which these are made. The paper reflects on these transhistorical performances of water power with reference to Brighton.
