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Short abstract

Post-Coal “Coal to AI” transitions foreground digital infrastructures while overlooking water as unruly natural infrastructure. Using the lens of infrastructuring, we show how new resource depletions replace old ones and tensions emerge as socio-material arrangements are established and legitimized.

Long abstract

Post-coal regional transformations are often narrated through the rise of new digital and energy infrastructures, jobs, and funding schemes, leaving aside subsequent infrastructural ramifications such as the decline of groundwater levels caused by the flooding of former open-cast mining sites. Many post-coal regions claim to make a transition from “Coal to AI” and built-up digital infrastructures, such as hyperscale data centers. We argue that water is a contested and often overlooked element in the collective processes through which communities negotiate the infrastructural change in post-coal regions. In this paper, we want to investigate empirically, how the expansion of new digital infrastructures is related to struggles over water, which also raises questions of justice and recognition of affected local communities (Rohde et al. 2026).

We refer to infrastructuring, i.e. the ongoing work of building, maintaining, and adapting infrastructures through social practices and relations (Star 1999) as a lens to show how the socio-material production of visibility influences questions of procedural justice in cooperation and conflict between local interest groups (Lüder et al. 2026). Water as an unruly natural infrastructure (Hodzic 2026, Carse 2012) is seen as active agent in local techno-politics that aim for digital futures. Based on case studies in Lusatia, Germany (Kulke 2023), and Western Macedonia, Greece (Farmaki et al. 2021), we aim to show how new forms of resource depletion replace old forms and what contestations emerge over who gets heard and whose needs are acknowledged when new socio-material arrangements are established, stabilized, and legitimized.