Living Off-Grid in Wales

Elaine Forde

Description

Living Off-Grid in Wales addresses broad debates about the possibility of planning for a sustainable future, by an examination of rural development off the grid. Contrasting Wales’s policy on One Planet Development – a planning policy that encourages living off-grid – with a more DIY approach to living off-grid, the book presents case studies from eco-villages that imagine off-grid very differently. The text pivots on the problematic question that if planning is about the spatial reproduction of society, then why should it encourage autonomy from societal systems. The ethnographic case studies in the book comprise an ethnography of rural Wales, and the focus on eco-villages brings a fresh perspective to the anthropological literature on community by considering off-grid as a radical form of social assemblage.

List of Illustrations
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgements
0 Introduction
1 Wales
2 Y Mynydd: A Village off the Grid
3 Tir y Gafel: A Model Village
4 More Problems with Community
5 Living Off-grid: Towards a Material Culture
6 OPD: Policy in Practice
7 Concluding Remarks
References
Index

Sujets

• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Rural
• Sociology
• Wales

Informations

• Publié par: University of Wales Press
• Date de parution: 15 octobre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786836595
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 8 Mo

Extrait

LIVING OFF-GRID IN WALES
LoG.indd 1 22/09/2020 14:11:57Writing pages:Layout 1 23/6/09 13:39 Page 291LIVING OFF-GRID IN WALES
Eco-villages in Policy and Practice
Elaine Forde
UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS
2020
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material
form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means
and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this
publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in
accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and P atents Act 1988.
Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part
of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press,
University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cathays Park, Cardiff, CF10 3NS.
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-78683-658-8
eISBN 978-1-78683-659-5
The right of Elaine Forde to be identifed as author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77, 78 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
Typeset by Marie Doherty
Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Melksham
LoG.indd 4 22/09/2020 14:11:57It is not down on any map; true places never are.
(Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or, the Whale)
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List of Illustrations ix
Prefacexi
Acknowledgementsxiii
Introduction1
1 Wales 19
2 Y Mynydd: A Village off the Grid 45
3 Tir y Gafel: A Model Village 69
4 More Problems with Community 95
5 Living Off-grid: Towards a Material Culture 123
6 OPD: Policy in Practice 147
7 Concluding Remarks 167
References 171
Index183
LoG.indd 7 22/09/2020 14:11:57Writing pages:Layout 1 23/6/09 13:39 Page 291List of Illustrations
Figure 1 – Map of west Wales 34
Figure 2 – A reciprocal roof frame 134
Figure 3 – Repairs to a turf roof 136
Figure 4 – The hydro 140
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Off-grid is both terminology and metaphor. As terminology it refers
to the self-provision of utilities and economic means; as metaphor it
refers to self-provision, self-determination and self-reliance. This book
will show that being or going off-grid is nothing particularly new.
Social, technological and environmental changes mean that the
possibility and the concept of going or being off-grid are being looked at
afresh and in exciting new ways, and with a greater sense of urgency.
At the core of this ethnography is a comparison between two modes
of living off-grid in Wales, one that follows an emerging policy oppor -
tunity in Wales called One Planet Development, and another that is
rather more fuid, harder to categorise but primarily concerned with
self-reliance. While other ethnographic accounts of living off-grid are
starting to emerge (e.g. Vannini and Taggart, 2015), space remains
to conceptualise living off-grid as deliberate socio-cultural practice
and a burgeoning, energosocial movement. To address this space, this
book is primarily concerned with the metaphorical use of ‘off-grid’,
and though the materialities of off-grid are explored in detail, this is
done as part of a deeper excursion into the socio-cultural aspects of
being off-grid. A proliferation of technologies to support domestic
microgeneration, from renewable sources of energy in particular, has
made it more conceivable to live off-grid in terms of utilities
without renouncing technologies of convenience. Yet this book seeks a
fuller understanding of what going off-grid and staying off-grid entail
in social and cultural terms in, broadly speaking, a Euro-American
context. It is worth stating clearly at the outset that these versions
of off-grid are not somehow opposed, indeed, in the ethnography
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presented here it will be seen that they overlap and enable each other
to a greater or lesser extent.
LoG.indd 12 22/09/2020 14:11:57Acknowledgements
I wish to express my gratitude to the Economic and Social Research
Council (ESRC) for a doctoral studentship that made this research
possible. I am also grateful to colleagues in the Anthropology
Department at Goldsmiths, University of London for providing such
a rewarding intellectual home for this research. Similar thanks to my
colleagues at Swansea University for providing the time and space,
and the University of Wales Press for the opportunity, to complete this
book-writing project.
Thanks are due to all those who offered advice on research, this
book and academic life more generally. While the list of people to
express my gratitude to continues to grow, tragically it also dwindles.
Professors Mike Sullivan and Steve Nugent are both remembered
for their willingness to advise, their wisdom and, at times,
muchneeded straight talking. Special thanks also go to Krzysztof Bierski,
Frances Pine, Catherine Alexander, Simone Abram, Pat Caplan and
David Graeber.
My heartfelt thanks go to my friends and family, especially
during the latter stages of research and writing. My most sincere thanks
are due to all of my research participants, without whose generosity,
openness and willingness to contribute, this research would not have
happened.
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LoG.indd 15 22/09/2020 14:11:57Writing pages:Layout 1 23/6/09 13:39 Page 291Introduction
0.1 Beginnings
The notion of ‘the grid’ is becoming more and more ubiquitous. In
everyday interactions and mainstream media portrayals, the idea of
the grid is invoked with increasing normativity, although usually
with recourse to its counterpart, ‘off the grid’. But when people speak
of grid – and off-grid – what exactly do they mean? Central to this
book’s argument is the notion of multiple and overlapping grids. The
examples that will illustrate this thinking show different approaches
to going off-grid, very few of which entail either the complete or
simultaneous rejection of all kinds of grid-logic. In spite of this diversity
and partiality of approach, the premise of this book is to illustrate and
examine, and, it is hoped, go some way towards answering why, how,
and why now, we should be seeing an increasing acceptance that there
is both a grid and the opportunity to leave it. Since the ethnographic
research that is presented later in this book comes from research in
rural Wales (UK), it must be stated clearly that the following theor -
ising is only representative of the societies that produced it and to
some extent will read it. This book is a product of Welsh society as
an ethnography of west Wales eco-villages. But as an ethnography,
this is also a discursive product of academia. The political, social and
economic conditions for going off-grid in contemporary Wales can
hardly be said to be universal, yet it is intended that a more
generalising theory of off-grid might emerge from this specifc account. This
book begins then, by staking its claim to defning what is meant when
people speak of the grid.
LoG.indd 1 22/09/2020 14:11:572 LIVING OFF-GRID
Grids and the interplay of power, with power
This book puts forward a conceptualisation of multiple grids, which
hinge on the notion of ‘power’. This conception contains the literal
sense of the power grid, the physical infrastructure that connects
people to electricity – the embodiment of grids parexc ellence. Of course
other material infrastructures connect people to utilities such as water
and gas, as well as connecting people to other people and places via
roads and mass transit systems, and through communication grids.
The siting, location and availability of such grids closely overlaps
with that other grid (power again), something which is refected and
acknowledged by concepts such as Dominic Boyer’s ‘energopower’
(Boyer, 2014). This other power grid, the socio-economic and
institutional network of coercion and possibility that shapes and drives
connection to all other grids, is both conceptual and very real. It exerts
what are perhaps the most tangible effects of all other grids here
outlined, it mediates and coordinates access to grids, and it produces and
reproduces infrastructural inequalities.
Going off the grid (or sometimes, simply being off the grid, an idea
that contains more complexities) is the rejection of the effcacy, author -
ity and morality of one or other of these grids in favour of autonomy.
Off-grid therefore means the autonomous provisioning of
everything that grids have promised, and perhaps more. The ethnographic
examples given here explore alternatives to exchange: self-reliance
from the physical infrastructures that connect us to others, and
conceptual and actual autonomy from a pervasive state of governance.
Precursors
This conceptualisation of the grid is not uniquely mine, and as alluded
to, there is certainly more than one angle of approach. Anthropologists
have long looked for grids; how else to explain a preoccupation with
kinship, kinship diagrams and the acquisition of languages,
taxonomies and terminologies? Electricity grids have been interpreted by
anthropologists as much more than a purely technical arrangement.
Howe uses sociobiotic terms to describe grids as conduits for
‘electric social life’ (Howe, 2014). If the grid, as conduit, represents the
fow and movement of power, does that imply that off the grid is
LoG.indd 2 22/09/2020 14:11:57INtRODuctION 3
somehow a point of stasis? The conceptualisation of off-grid that this
book takes forward is neither rooted entirely in natural, social or
discursive categorisation. I suggest a broader interpretation of ‘off-grid’
which describes a struct