Towards sustainable communities: Socioeconomic determinants of domestic water consumption in Surakarta City, Indonesia

Abstract

The gap in water consumption among urban households remains obvious in most cities in Indonesia. It is particularly the case for high-density urban areas. Dense urban areas and limited availability of water resource position water as a contested resource. Regarding water as a contested resource, this paper aims to identify the socioeconomic determinants influencing levels of water consumption in the urbanized medium-sized city, using the case of Surakarta City. Data were collected by using proportional random sampling. Valid respondents are 356 households out of 400 respondents. Respondents were proportioned according to served and not served by networked water PDAM. The data are analyzed by using multiple regression. The result shows that, with 95 percent significance level, overall, age of head of household, total monthly income, housing type, the number of water source utilized by every household, total number of people in every household, and total person work in every household have simultaneously become factors determining water consumption of households in Surakarta. The socioeconomic variables are able to explain 16 percent of the whole factors determining household water consumption in Surakarta City. Even though many factors remain unexplained, this study reveals several important factors that often cause the marginalization of certain urban communities from appropriate domestic water in a rapidly growing secondary city.

Estimating domestic water usage in a tropical environment: exploring socio-demographic perspectives

“…Also, the significance of climate and weather variables has been observed to have a significant impact on daily water use in tropical homes (Some researchers have mentioned that more water is used for varying domestic purposes during the daytime, attributed to the high diurnal temperature and usually single-digit daily temperature range in tropical environments ( Slavikova et al 2013, Paramita and Rini, 2019, Bergel and Młyńska 2021. Further supporting this viewpoint, Bergel and Młyńska (2021) and Dimkić (2020) revealed that more water is utilized for drinking when the weather is hot than when it is cold.…”