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research into infrastructure quality. It aims at understanding the reality of water supply for households with piped water supply, at assessing the consequences of unreliability on household behaviour and at measuring the costs of water supply unreliability. The study was carried out in Delhi. First, the findings present the significance of individual household strategies and what they cost; on the average, private expenditure incurred by households is six times higher than the amount paid to the town. For Delhi, the costs of the unreliability of water supply are estimated at about 3 billion Rs., that is, more than twice the amount of expenditure for water supply in the Delhi Water Supply and Sewage Disposal Undertaking annual budget. Finally, the analysis of water consumption suggests that the level of water supply unreliability has no influence on household water consumption. Therefore, water supply unreliability cannot regulate consumption in a city where the price of water is low and not progressive enough to play this role. This study shows, finally, that the analysis of the social costs of deficient infrastructure for society is a major step towards a better definition of urban policies.

The commercialization of the Namibian Department of Water Affairs is an institutional answer to a double problem: the shortage of both water and public funds in the face of increasing urban demand. This practice aims at bringing the legal statutes and the practices of bulk water supply management into compliance with the commercial principles of this sector of activity. However, in a context characterized by increasing and evolving post-apartheid intra-urban inequalities, in which a small Black elite does not yet possess the technical control of the major urban services, combined with disparities in the implementation process of recent decentralization, this institutional reform seems inadequate to contend with two sizeable challenges: managing water shortage as well as sharing the resource among users in a sustainable and thrifty way; providing the urban poor with an adequate supply for which the technical and financial arrangements remain to be invented.

Conflict may be seen as noise which creates spatial differentation; that is, it establishes a limit in the form of a new, temporarily stable territorial structure. This phenomenon has been observed in Cerdanya following the opening of the borders of the European Community. The boundary-lines which meet in this area make Cerdanya the intersection of a large number of territorial entities. Ceretans were able in the past to take advantage of a certain type of dissymmetry. This situation has now been radically altered. The opening of the boundaries has eliminated one reality, source of what used to be lucrative customs exchanges; at the same time another has been reinforced. Larger numbers of tourists from Barcelona are now free to enter, but Cerdanya is also now open to free enterprise competition on both sides of the border. The message seems contradictory for the inhabitants, who have experienced the opening of their borders as a threat to their economy. This situation has led to the revival of conflicts based on sollicking the diverse types of flow which the Ceretans themselves have created: these respond, internally, to the external disturbance produced by the elimination of the political barriers. Since the boundaries are no longer closed, they are perceived as living beings. Their reconstruction follows ancient cleavage-lines which existed before, tracing new limits and achieving a new equilibrium. Ceretan territory is less a fixed object than a permanent evolutionary process. The conflict, seen as an organizing noise, creates sense; or, at least there is some sense emanating from the conflict, since it forms the basis for the morphogenesis of Ceretan spatial structure.