An illustration depicting plumbing poverty, showing pipes and a sink drain

About the project

Water is vital for thriving lives and healthy communities. A major assumption is that household water access is no longer a problem in the global North. Yet growing evidence points to insecure and unaffordable access to running water in high-income countries, especially for low-income, urban, and racialized households, raising serious questions about the state of our social infrastructures and commitment to ‘universal’ water provision.

Why does household water insecurity arise and persist in wealthy cities and countries?

The Plumbing Poverty project is a €1.99 million-funded project committed to explaining insecure water access (and water service shutoffs)—some of our most vital social infrastructures—in relation to the changing political economy of public service provision and housing. Coupling statistical analysis of census microdata with policy and ethnographic evidence, we use our expertise to provide scalable and comparable insights into common trends and divergences in household water access, to challenge hegemonic narratives about social infrastructures, and to supply evidence of environmental injustices in the places we may least expect.

This project uses household water access as a lens to examine the conditions that produce social and spatial inequality. Plumbing poverty is made of three parts:

A material and infrastructural condition produced by social relations that vary through space.

A mixed methodology that operationalizes the spatial exploration of social inequality.

And a mission to plumb new relations and infrastructural worlds.

Directed by Dr Katie Meehan, a geographer and co-Director of King’s Water Centre, the Plumbing Poverty project (2023-2028) will advance the frontiers of knowledge and practice in urban and environmental studies. We provide a robust and comparative understanding of the hidden geographies of water insecurity—and our potential water futures—in high-income countries, with a focus on transformative knowledge to change policy and practice. The Plumbing Poverty project was awarded a prestigious Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council and is funded by the UKRI Horizon Europe Guarantee scheme.