Community and industry perspectives on future home life with water: Q-methodology workshop overview. Enabling Water Smart Communities Project Report

Water smart communities can contribute to mobilising alternative, potentially more sustainable, ways of living as they reimagine ‘community’, reorganise stakeholder roles and relationships, and alter how residents interact with water, infrastructures and their local environments. This report provides an overview of the University of Manchester research involved in understanding visions of water smart communities, focussing on a series of Q-methodology workshops that investigate community and professional perspectives of water smart communities.
The Q-method workshops are part of a suite of research activities undertaken by the University of Manchester for Enabling Water Smart Communities (EWSC). A social practice lens is applied across this research to extend the more usual focus on technologies and infrastructure and understand the social experience of water smart communities. In these workshops, a broad ‘systems of practices’ approach is adopted to recognise that water-related practices are embedded within broader practices - of both residents (e.g. working, caring, leisure and homemaking) and professionals (e.g. planning, design, construction and policy). In recognition of this, we investigate a range of perspectives on the visions of, and priorities for, water smart communities, aiming to understand similarities and differences in how water smart communities are expected to affect residents’ practices, meanings and values associated with water. Through analysis of the workshop data, opportunities for commonalities in viewpoints across these stakeholders to meaningfully inform the design of new water smart communities that contribute to improved social and environmental outcomes, will be investigated.