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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how water infrastructures shape competing urgencies around climate and sustainability. By organizing time, attention, and pressure, they determine what feels urgent, inevitable, or deferrable in everyday urban life.

Paper long abstract

Water infrastructures do more than manage flows, levels, and quality. In concrete ways, they organize time, concentrate attention, and make specific issues feel pressing or unavoidable. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in and around Klagenfurt and the renowned Wörthersee, this contribution explores how urgencies emerge through water infrastructures and their maintenance.

The study focuses on lakeshores, canals, treatment facilities, and flood protection systems, showing how infrastructures are embedded within overlapping temporalities, including administrative schedules, seasonal change, and climatic uncertainty. For the time being, rather abstract climate and sustainability objectives become tangible through concrete demands that are intricately intertwined with projections, transitions, and anticipatory measures. In this process, the pursuit of climate neutrality emerges as one concern among many, articulated through expectations regarding timing, preparedness, and future risk, and sometimes framed as an ethical necessity with ‘no alternative’.

Routine practices of construction, upkeep, repair, and care translate these demands into material interventions, directing attention toward certain risks while sidelining others and producing uneven experiences of urgency and participation. In this sense, infrastructures are kept not only intact, but in tact, maintaining established modes of operation, knowledge, and response under pressure. Such recurrent interactions with water form expectations, distribute care and responsibility unevenly, and generate affectively charged senses of urgency that are experienced, negotiated, and contested in urban life. In doing so, they condense pressure into specific infrastructural sites and practices, foregrounding water infrastructures as key locations where competing urgencies are organized.