Reproblematising maintenance, reconsidering infrastructures: The emergence of a more-than-corrective maintenance programme in French water networks management

In an increasing number of countries, mainly but not restrictively in the global North, the combination of infrastructures’ degradation, budgetary constraints and rising environmental issues has gradually shifted professional and public concerns from extension to upkeep. This constitutes the crystallisation of a specific configuration of infrastructure management, which the authors propose to term an “age of infrastructure maintenance” and which contrasts dramatically with the modern infrastructural ideal. Focussing on French water network management, this paper draws on an 18-month in-depth institutional ethnography to investigate what this age of maintenance concretely encompasses. It shows that in France, and in Europe, such an age rests on a reproblematisation of maintenance, whose scope is reframed in a “more-than-corrective” perspective. This leads to a practical and ontological reconsideration of infrastructures, which is illustrated by three main transformations: infrastructures are rediscovered through proximal enquiries, they are carefully monitored as living entities, and they are put at the centre of new valuation processes. This specific moment of infrastructure maintenance appears to be generative, opening up multifaceted transformations that pave the way for a less modernist and industrial vision of infrastructure management.