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Paper short abstract

In the Spreewald’s transforming hydrosocial territory, water crisis meets local agency through minor infrastructures. This paper examines how hand-operated water sluices enable residents to engage materially with drought, contrasting technocratic solutions with embodied practices of water management

Paper long abstract

Water crises and planetary heating are reshaping hydrosocial territories, producing critical junctures that demand renewed attention to how diverse expertise collectively navigates transformation. Following the saying “gewässerreich aber wasserarm” (rich in waterways but poor in water), Berlin-Brandenburg is one of Germany’s driest regions. In the Spreewald region (forest of the Spree), social life, cultural practices, and economic structures are built within an anthropogenic water network. However, the coal mining phase-out reduces the Spree River’s current, and rising temperatures accelerate evaporation, prompting residents’ anxieties about the future of their waterscape. A prolonged dry period between 2018 and 2023 intensified discourses of “losing water.” Increasing scarcity produces friction, uncertainty, and conflicts between everyday water relations and modern water abstraction.

Regional plans often follow an engineering approach, proposing large-scale infrastructural solutions: water transfers from other water bodies and post-mining lakes as water storage. However, residents are growing increasingly skeptical about such large-scale infrastructural thinking. I see minor infrastructure as a new entry point for conversations about addressing water issues at the level of everyday interaction. The Spreewald’s manually operated water sluices function as socio-technical devices that enable learning about human-water relations while bringing global discourses about water scarcity “down to earth.” While regional authorities debate complex engineering solutions, residents meet water scarcity through immediate, sensory encounters, asserting local agency within their changing hydrosocial network.