(extract from Social Water issue's introduction - http://voices.uni-koeln.de/2017-3/socialwateranintroduction)
The article contrasts two imaginaries of a river: one as ‘house’, emphasising its physical and measurable dimensions, as economic and scientific approaches would; the other as ‘home’, emphasising its experiential, spiritual and emotional qualities, as the inhabitants of its banks, and sometimes even people living further afield, would. The author suggests using the concept of the ‘milieu’ to understand how people can simultaneously inhabit both a ‘house’ and a ‘home’, and to trace how the perspectives on the river as either one or the other are the product of different relations between river and people, rather than an intrinsic attribute of either the water or the individual.