Urban water crises in the 19th and 20th centuries: A bibliographic essay

Ben Wilkie

This essay surveys the existing historical studies relating to a variety of urban
water crises.1 It focuses the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but its coverage
is not limited by geography. The selection of literature is necessarily confined to
studies written and published in the English language. This review includes
crises related to water scarcity, including water shortages due to droughts,
floods, pollution, and overuse, and water crises caused by decreasing supply
and increasing demand. It covers both physical water scarcity as a result of
inadequate or depleted natural water resources, and economic water scarcity as
a result of poor governance and planning of existing water resources.
This review finds that a great deal of the historical literature on urban
water crises is broadly concerned with systems and infrastructure, including
issues relating water supply and sewerage, and water governance and
planning. Many of these studies, which collectively cover most of the English-
speaking world and beyond, focus upon sanitation and public health in times of
industrialisation and urbanisation. Very few of these studies take into
consideration differing gender, class, or ethnic experiences of water in cities;
they do not always connect water crises with shifting everyday practices and
values (e.g. relating to cleanliness, comfort, and convenience); and only
sometimes consider changing domestic contexts and technologies as they
connect with broader issues of supply, sanitation, and governance. Studies tend
to focus on the wider histories of water systems and infrastructure in cities,
while the cultural and domestic experience of urban water crises is largely
overlooked with the exception of numerous studies that focus on the
intersections between infrastructure development, usage practices, and
changing cultural understandings of health and hygiene. A number of
standalone model studies exist that consider social and cultural aspects of
urban water, and some studies of domestic contexts and technology exist but
are not concerned with water crises beyond pollution and sanitation issues.
This review suggests there is a need for more urban histories that take holistic
socio-technical and cultural approaches to understanding water, and which
consider water crises other than the well-examined issues of pollution and
sanitation.
If we are to understand and document historical processes of domestic
water uses in Australian cities with the outlook of informing future policy and
interventions aimed at achieving water sensitive cities, it is necessary to frame

1 This research was produced for the CRC for Water Sensitive Cities in 2014.
 2

our research ways that focus on patterns and practices of peoples everyday
lives. 2 Although the existing literature largely focuses on systems and
infrastructure, the social and cultural role of water in urban environments, in
addition to domestic water use attitudes and practices, must be given equal
consideration (if not precedence) if a shift towards water sensitive cities and
citizens is to be effected. 3 For urban histories to inform contemporary
understandings of the social and cultural processes of water use, they must also
borrow from present-day frameworks for understanding water practices.
Sian Supski and Jo Lindsay note that the dominate social and cultural
approach to understanding everyday water use is a sociotechnical perspective,
which recognises that human societies co-exist with many non-human entities
(technologies, plants, animals, climate) and these are interwoven in our
everyday lives. The aim of a socio-technical perspective is to identify relations
between users, technologies and large systems.4 Viewed from this perspective,
social change in relation to water use is a co-evolution of interdependent
objects, systems, and practices or habits. Anne Gardiner writes:

Objects themselves and the social circumstances of their use undergo a co-evolutionary
process mediated by a number of factors, including the impact of path dependency, the
degree of coherence between existing habits and expectations of users, and the
conventions inherent in the design of the socio-technical systems and the scripting
practice used to create understanding of the object.5

For urban historians, the socio-technical approach can serve to focus attention
on interrelationships between the physical, institutional, and social/cultural
dimensions (objects, systems and practices) of water use, and noting the
processes of co-evolution between these components can illuminate the causes
for changing water use cultures.
Complementing a socio-technical perspective is a cultural approach to
understanding water in Australia. A holistic understanding of everyday water
in use in Australia should consider, argue Fiona Allon and Zoe Sofoulis, the

2 J. Urry, Climate change and society, Cambridge, Polity, 2011, p. 15.

3See for example , P. Dzidic and M. Green, Outdoing the Joneses: Understanding Community
Acceptance of an Alternative Water Supply Scheme and Sustainable Urban Design, Landscape
and Urban Planning, Vol. 105, 2012.

4Sian Supski and Jo Lindsay, Australian Domestic Water Use Cultures: A Literature Review,
Clayton, CRC for Water Sensitive Cities, 2013, pp. 7-9.

5Anne Gardiner, Do Rainwater Tanks Herald a Cultural Change in Household Water Use?
Australasian Journal of Environmental Management, Vol. 17, No. 2, 2010, p. 102.
 3

minutiae of everyday practices around water use in the domestic home and
garden.6 They note that water use at home is embedded in the meaning-laden
contexts of everyday life, and arising from cultural and social conventions. 7 A
sensitive and nuanced approach to understanding water use should be pitched
between the macro-level of whole populations, and the micro-level of
individual psychology.8
This review suggests historians have paid ample attention to systems
and infrastructure, but have paid less attention to social and cultural contexts
for water use, let alone focusing on the interdependence or co-evolution of
these components over time. While studies of everyday practices, values, and
domestic contexts for Australian water use have appeared in the historical
literature, there are very few of these cultural approaches in the literature on
historical urban water crises. Nevertheless, as Patrick Troy notes, a holistic
approach to water in Australian urban histories is paramount:

Despite the urgency with which Australian cities now face the problem of inadequate
water supplies, and despite the impact of recent patterns of changes in climate on those
supplies, the roots of the water problem are deeply historical and can only be
addressed by accounting for intersecting technological, cultural, economic and political
factors. Together these factors have entrenched a path dependency in the way water
services are supplied and attitudes towards them that must be thoroughly questioned
if the current crisis is to be understood and addressed.

The remainder of this paper will consider the international literature on urban
water crises in the nineteenth and twentieth century, and will consider if and
how they achieve an integrated socio-technical and cultural approach to
understanding water use during times of scarcity.

Urban environmental history in Australia is a small area of research and has

frequently been focused on the negative impact of urban development on the
environment. Cities, technology, and modernity have often been situated in
opposition to nature and the environment; the degradation and destruction of

6 Fiona Allon, Dams, Pipes and Flows: from Big Water to Everday Water, Reconstructions:
Studies in Contemporary Culture, Vol. 6, No. 3, 2006, p.10; Fiona Allon and Zoe Sofoulis,
Everyday Water: Cultures in Transition, Australian Geographer, Vol. 37, No. 1, 2006.
7 Sofoulis, Big Water, Everyday Water: A Sociotechnical Perspective, Continuum: Journal Media

& Cultural Studies, Vol. 19, No. 4, 2005, p. 447.

8 Sofoulis, Changing Water Cultures, in E. Probyn, S. Mueke, and A. Shoemnaker (eds),

Creating Value: The Humanities and Their Publics, Canberra, Australian Academy of the
Humanities, 2006, p. 108.
 4

natural environments by urban expansion in Australia is a common theme, and

historians have been interested in water pollution, air pollution, erosion,
bushland destruction, waste management, salinity, and the unsustainable
exploitation of natural resources. 9 This reflects trends in other Anglophone
nations. For example, from the United States there is a great deal of literature
focusing on the impact of the development of urban water systems on the
natural environment and natural water resources, with a particular emphasis
on California and the Great Lakes region.10
Much of the historical literature on urban water crises has focused in
particular upon urbanisation and its impact on urban water ecologies, and the
various planning and infrastructural solutions utilised in cities to deal with
water crises during times of economic growth, industrialisation, and urban
expansion. Simon Szreter categorises the various negative impacts stemming
from economic growth as the four Ds proceeding from the disruption of
physical and biological environments, ideological and cultural values,
institutions and administrative structures, and the political status quo. The
other three Ds deprivation, disease, and death only follow if there is no
adequate response to the challenges of disruption. 11 He notes that the

9 On urban environmental history in Australia, see Libby Robin and Tom Griffiths,
Environmental History in Australasia, Environment and History, Vol. 10, 2004, pp. 453-4.
Examples of histories which focus on the negative impact of cities on the environment are Doug
Benson and Jocelyn Howell, Taken for Granted: The Bushland of Sydney and its Suburbs, Sydney,
Kangaroo Press, 1990; Geoffrey Bolton, Spoils and Spoilers: A History of Australians Shaping their
Environment, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1981; John Birmingham, Leviathan: The Unauthorised
Biography of Sydney, Sydney, Knopff/Random House, 1999; N.G. Butlin (ed.), Sydneys
Environmental Amenity 1970-1975: A Study of the System of Waste Management and Pollution
Control, Canberra, Australian National University Press, 1975; Dan Coward, Out of Sight:
Sydneys Environmental History 1851-1981, Canberra, Australian National University, 1988; Sue
Rosen, Losing Ground: An Environmental History of the Hawkesbury-Nepean Catchment, Sydney,
Hale & Ironmonger, 1995; Patrick Troy (ed.), Serving the City: The Crisis in Australias Urban
Services, Sydney, Pluto Press, 1999; Patrick Troy (ed.), Technological Change and the City, Sydney,
Federation Press, 1995.
10 Norris Hundley Jr., The Great Thirst: Californians and Water: A History, Berkeley, 2001;

Abraham Hoffman, Vision or Villainy: The Owens Valley-Los Angeles Water Controversy, College
Station, 1981; Robert A. Sander, The Lost Frontier: Water Diversion and the Growth and Destruction
of Owens Valley Agriculture, Tucson, 1994; William L. Kahrl, Water and Power: The Conflict over Los
Angeles Water Supply in the Owens Valley, Berkeley, 1982; David Kromm and Stephen White
(eds), Groundwater Exploitation in the Great Plains, Lawrence, 1992; William Ashworthy, The Late,
Great Lakes: An Environmental History, New York, 1986.
11 Simon Szreter, Rapid economic growth and the four Ds of disruption, deprivation, disease,

and death: public health lessons from nineteenth-century Britain for twenty-first century
China?, Tropical Medicine and International Health, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1999, pp. 146-47. See also Simon
Szreter, Economic growth disruption, deprivation, disease and death: on the importance of the
politics of public health for development, Population and Development Review, Vol 23, 1997, pp.
693-728.
 5

relationship between rapid economic growth and human health and welfare
may be most accurately characterised as an antagonistic or, at best, a dialectical
one, which is critically mediated by politics.12
Many studies of urban water broadly reflect the model Szreter has
identified; there is an emphasis on the impacts of economic and urban growth
on water supplies, and the political and infrastructural efforts to manage and
mitigate the disruptions that tend to proceed from urbanisation and their
consequences for public health. Take, for example, Simon Neri Serneris study
of how industrialisation and demographic growth influenced the use and
management of water resources in Italian cities during the late-nineteenth and
early-twentieth centuries. Serneri places particular emphasis on supply crises
related to changing and increasing domestic and industrial water usage,
analyses the development of urban infrastructure in light of both hygiene and
functionality, and considers how urban water infrastructure fundamentally
changed the ecology of Italian cities.13 There are numerous American examples
of these more traditional approaches that focus specifically on urban water
supplies, with a particularly large number of studies of New York City. 14 There
is quite often broader interest in the political and governance dimensions of
urban water supply in North American cities.15
Further abroad, Johannes Haarhoff, Petri Juuti, and Harri Maki have
studied the role of governance and planning in alleviating water crises in
nineteenth and twentieth-century Pretoria, South Africa. These crises relate to
both the pollution and overuse of the artesian water sources on which Pretoria

12 Simon Szreter, Rapid economic growth and the four Ds of disruption, deprivation, disease,
and death: public health lessons from nineteenth-century Britain for twenty-first century
China?, Tropical Medicine and International Health, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1999, p. 146.
13 Simone Neri Serneri, The Construction of the Modern City and the Management of Water

Resources in Italy, 1880-1920, Journal of Urban History, Vol. 33, No. 5, 2007.
14 Kevin Bone and Gina Pollara (eds), Water-Works: The Architecture and Engineering of the New

York City Water Supply, New York, Monacelli Press, 2006; Gerard T. Koeppel, Water for Gotham:
A History, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000; Diane Galusha, Liquid Assets: A History of
New York Citys Water System, Fleischmanns, Purple Mountain Press, 2002; Charles Weidner,
Water for a City: A History of New York Citys Problem from the Beginning to the Delaware River
System, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1974. For a relevant study of San Franciscos
water supply, see Robert Righter, The Battle over Hetch-Hetchy: Americas Most Controversial Dam
and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism, New York, Oxford University Press, 2005.
15 For example see Sarah Elkind, Bay Cities and Water Politics: The Battle for Resources in Boston and

Oakland, Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 1998; Michael Logan, Desert Cities: The
Environmental History of Phoenix and Tucson, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006;
Jared Orsi, Hazardous Metropolis: Flooding and Urban Ecology in Los Angeles, Berkeley, University
of California Press, 2004; Jouni Paavola, Sewage pollution and institution and technological
change in the United States, 1830-1915, Ecological Economics, Vol. 68, 2010; David Soll, City,
Region, and In Between: New York Citys Water Supply and the Insights of Regional History,
Journal of Urban History, Vol. 38, No. 2, 2012.
 6

was founded, the implications of these water supply issues for health and
sanitation in the city, and how effective the responses of governing bodies were
to these problems. 16 Amina Issa has examined the relationships between
changing understandings of public health and government sanitation
programs, and their impact on urban water infrastructure and environments in
Zanzibar in the first half of the twentieth century, while Phillip Curtin has
examined connections between public health and urban planning more
generally in colonial Africa.17 For an example of a more recent water crisis in
Africa, Muchaparara Musemwa has examined Harere, in Zimbabwe, from the
1980s until the present day. Musemwa considers how the city has been unable
to manage the demands of urban growth on water infrastructure, and in
particular the political and governance failures that have caused the city to
become a landscape of disease and crisis.18 Yurina Otako, Masahiro Otaki, and
Osamu Sakura have completed a comparative study of the development of
water supplies and wastewater treatment systems and their relationships to
public health outcomes in twentieth-century Tokyo and Singapore.19
In a similar vein, through with broader historical scope, Steven J. Burian,
Stephan J. Nix, Robert E. Pitt, and S. Rocky Durrans have surveyed wastewater
management strategies and technologies implemented in the United States
since 1800. The authors provide an overview of changing wastewater
management preferences since the nineteenth century, and observe that the
reasons for changing preferences were based on a combination of cost, urban
development patterns, accepted scientific theories, tradition, religious attitudes,

16 Johannes Haarhoff, Petri Juuti, and Harri Maki, A Case for Strong Municipal Governance:
The Water Supply of Pretoria, 1855-1935, South African Historical Journal, Vol. 64, No. 4, 2012,
pp. 769-86. The authors note that Pretorias water supply problems were very similar to almost
all other towns and cities in South Africa. On water supply and municipal governance in South
Africa more broadly, see Harri Maki, Water, Sanitation and Health: The Development of the
Environmental Services in Four South African Cities, 1840-1920, Tampere, Kehra Media Inc., 2008.
17 Amina Issa, Malaria and Public Health Measures in Colonial Urban Zanzibar, 1900-1956,

Hygiea Internationalis, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2011; Phillip Curtin, Medical Knowledge and Urban
Planning in Colonial Tropical Africa, in Steven Feierman and John Janzen (eds), The Social Basis
of Health and Healing in Africa, Oxford, 1992.
18 Muchaparara Musemwa, From Sunshine City to a Landscape of Disaster: The Politics of

Water, Sanitation and Disease in Harer, Zimbabwe, 1980-2009, Journal of Developing Societies,
Vol. 26, No. 2, 2010, p. 165. See also A. Hellum and W. Derman, Negotiating Water Rights in
the Context of a New Political and Legal Landscape in Zimbabwe, in F. Von Benda- Beckmann,
K. Von Benda-Beckmann and A. Griffiths (eds) Mobile People, Mobile Law: Expanding Legal
Relations in a Contracting World, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2005; David Nilsson and Ezekiel Nyangeri
Nyanchaga, Pipes and politics: a century of change and continuity in Kenyan urban water
supply, Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 46, No. 2, 2008.
19 Yurina Otako, Masahiro Otaki, and Osamu Sakura, Water systems and urban sanitation: A

historical comparison of Tokyo and Singapore, Journal of Water and Health, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2007.
 7

prevailing public opinion on sanitation, [and] the contemporary political

environment.20 Governance of water supplies is thus a common theme. The
political struggle for Londons water supply during industrialisation in the
early-nineteenth century, for example, when the city had up to ten water
companies supplying water to different districts, has been considered by John
Graham-Leigh.21 Showing how private enterprise can shape water use practices
and infrastructural developments, Peter Maw, Terry Wyke, and Alan Kidd
have examined how urban water systems played a key role in determining the
development and spread of factories in nineteenth century Manchester, and
noted how private canals allowed steam power to flourish in absence of reliably
managed municipal water sources.22 Debora Spar and Kyrsztof Bebenek have
compared water supply governance in London, Philadelphia, and New York at
the beginning of the twentieth century, emphasising the different roles of the
market and governments as mediators of water provision and especially noting
how pricing within the water markets in these cities was, and still is, largely
dictated by political demands rather than market forces.23
Outside of the Anglophone world, Liu Haiyan has studied the varying
effects of the introduction of tap water on urban lifestyles, the development of
urban communities, and ideas of health and hygiene in the Chinese city of
Tianjin in the early-twentieth century.24 The water supply systems of Beijing
have been studied by Qiu Zhonglin, while Kerri L. Macpherson and Ruth
Rogaski have explored relationships between urban water infrastructure
development and public health in Shanghai and other treaty port cities of
China.25 Patricia Avila Garcia has explored the relationships between society

Steven J. Burian, Stephan J. Nix, Robert E. Pitt, and S. Rocky Durrans, Urban Wastewater
20

Management in the United States: Past, Present, and Future, Journal of Urban Technology, Vol. 7,
No. 3, p. 33.

21 John Graham-Leigh, Londons Water Wars: The Competition for Londons Water Supply in the
Nineteenth Century (Beijing, 2000), 53.
22 Peter Maw, Terry Wyke, and Alan Kidd, Canals, rivers, and the industrial city: Manchesters

Industrial Waterfront, The Economic History Review, Vol. 65, No. 4, 2012.
23 Debora Spar and Kyrsztof Bebenek, To the Tap: Public versus Private Water Provision at the

Turn of the Twentieth Century, Business History Review, Vol. 83, 2009. On other historical
debates about private versus public service provision, see Robert Millward, Emergence of Gas
and Water Monopolies in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Contested Markets and Public Control,
in James Foreman-Peck (ed.), New Perspectives on the Late Victorian Economy: Essays in
Quantitative Economic History, Cambridge, 1991; Robert Millward, Private and Public Enterprise in
Europe: Energy, Telecommunications, and Transport, 18301990, Cambridge, 2005.
24 Liu Haiyan, Water supply and the reconstruction of urban space in early twentieth-century

Tianjin, Urban History, Vol. 38, No. 3, 2011.

25 Qiu Zhonglin, Water lair Beijings water suppliers and water for the peoples livelihood

(13681937), in Li Xiaoti (ed.), The Urban Life of China, Beijing, 2006,; Kerrie L. Macpherson, A
 8

and water in the Mexician city of Morelia over a period of four centuries,
outlining both technological developments as well as social processes that lead
to different understandings of and approaches to urban water.26 S. E. Chaplin
has examined the intersections of socio-economic status, governance, and water
supply in India, while Michael Gandy has compared Lagos and Mumbai. 27
Awadhendra Sharan has explored cultural understandings of pollution and
cleanliness as they impacted on water technologies in colonial Delhi from the
later-nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, and Colin
McFarlane has theorised the changing role of infrastructure in the conception
and governing of sanitation in colonial and post-colonial Bombay, showing
how discourse analysis may help to understand how water crises have been
represented and governed.28
Insofar as water governance and technologies develop with, and in
response to, evolving attitudes towards sanitation and public health, we can
how see how social and cultural processes tend to intersect with broader water
governance and infrastructural developments in cities. Nevertheless, there has
been a particular emphasis in the literature on public health and sanitation, and
this extends to personal hygiene and changing conceptions of cleanliness. Such
studies often fit into a broader social and cultural history of health and hygiene,
and by virtue of sanitation being intricately linked with water in urban
environments offer examples of the nexus between political, social, and
technological aspects of urban water usage and crises. There are numerous
Australian examples of this literature, in addition to the international studies.29

Wilderness of Marshes: The Origins of Public Health in Shanghai, 18431893, Lanham, 2002; Ruth
Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease
in Treaty-Port China, Berkeley, 2004.
26 Patrica Avila Garcia, Water, society and environment in the history of one Mexican city,

Environment & Urbanization, Vol. 18, No. 1, 2006.

27 S.E. Chaplin, Cities, Sewers and Poverty: Indias Politics of Sanitation, Environment and
Urbanization, Vol. 11, No. 1, 1999; Matthew Gandy, Planning, Anti-planning and the
Infrastructure Crisis Facing Metropolitan Lagos, Urban Studies, Vol. 43, No. 2, 2006; Matthew
Gandy, Water, Sanitation and the Modern City: Colonial and Post-colonial Experiences in
Lagos and Mumbai, United Nations Development Programme: Human Development Report
Occasional Paper 6, 2006; Matthew Gandy, Landscapes of Disaster: Water, Modernity, and
Urban Fragmentation in Mumbai, Environment and Planning A, Vol. 40, No. 1, 2008.
28 Awadhendra Sharan, From source to sink: Official and improved water in Delhi, 1868-1956,

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 48. No. 3, 2011; Colin McFarlane, Governing
the Contaminated City: Infrastructure and Sanitation in Colonial and Post-Colonial Bombay,
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 32, No. 2, 2008.
29 For example, see J. Bailey, Cleansing the Great Unwashed: Melbourne City Baths, in Graeme

Davison and Andrew May (eds), Melbourne Centre Stage: The Corporatisation of Melbourne
1842-1992, Victorian Historical Journal, Iss. 240, 1992; Cleanliness is Next to Godliness: Personal
Hygiene in New South Wales 1788-1901, Sydney, Historic Houses Trust, 1985; A. Corbin, The Foul
 9

Over the course of the twentieth century, the United States has also produced a
significant body of literature on both public health and urban reform. 30 In
Australia, Anna Wong has examined planning, sanitation, and social reform
movements from European settlement until the middle of the nineteenth
century. She notes how social reformers blamed poor sanitation for social
evils, and shows how the government in New South Wales was undertaking
novel town planning measures before similar technological developments were
commonplace in Britain.31
Sometimes water crises relating to sanitation both physical health
issues (e.g. disease) and constructions of cleanliness intersect with other,
seemingly unrelated social and cultural processes. For example, while differing
experiences of urban water that are grounded in ethnic, gender, or class do not
form a significant part of the broader literature, they are important nonetheless.
Haarhoff, Juuti, and Maki note, in passing, Pretorias strategy of relocating non-
white groups away from the city centre in response to poor sanitary
conditions. 32 Elmore Bartows study of the relationship between water and
residential segregation in nineteenth-century Atlanta is a more detailed
example. Investigating suburban development projects, the development of the
citys sewer system, and construction of municipal waterworks, Bartow
illustrates how the patterns of racial segregation in mid-nineteenth century

and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, Leamington Spa, Berg, 1986; M. Douglas,
Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London, Routledge, 1984; D.
Dunstan, Rules of Simple Cleanliness: The Australasian Health Society, Victorian Historical
Journal, Vol. 74, No. 1, 2003; A. Mayne, Fever, Squalor, and Vice: Sanitation and Social Policy in
Victorian Sydney, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1982; S. Petrow, Sanatorium of the
South?: Public Health and Politics in Hobart and Launceston 1875-1914, Hobart, Tasmanian
Historical Research Association, 1995; E. Shove, Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: the social
organization of normality, Oxford, Berg, 2003.
30 R. L. Bushman and C. L. Bushman, The Early History of Cleanliness in America, Journal of

American History, Vol. 74, No. 4, 1988; John Duffy, The Sanitarians: A History of American Public
Health, Urbana, 1990; Richard H. Shryock, The Origins and Significance of the Public Health
Movement in the United States, Annals of Medical History 1, new series, 1929; Howard D.
Kramer, The Beginnings of the Public Health Movement in the United States, Bulletin of the
History of Medicine, Vol. 21, 1947; Alan Marcus, The Strange Career of Municipal Health
Initiatives: Cincinnati and City Government in the Early Nineteenth Century, Journal of Urban
History, Vol. 7, 1980; Jon A. Peterson, The Impact of Sanitary Reform Upon American Urban
Planning, 1840-1890, Journal of Social History, Vol. 13, 1979.
31 Anna Wong, Colonial Sanitation, Urban Planning and Social Reform in Sydney, New South

Wales 1788-1857, Australasian Historical Archaeology, Vol. 17, 1999. See also Anna Wong, An
archaeological and historical study of colonial drainage systems 1788-1857, Master of Heritage
Conservation thesis, University of Sydney, 1997.
32 Johannes Haarhoff, Petri Juuti, and Harri Maki, A Case for Strong Municipal Governance:

The Water Supply of Pretoria, 1855-1935, South African Historical Journal, Vol. 64, No. 4, 2012,
pp. 775-76.
 10

Atlanta were shaped by urban developers manipulation of hydrological

resources. He also notes how water crises in black communities of the city
(which also effected white neighbourhoods) were often left unresolved due to
the unchallenged notion that disease and pollution in these areas were not the
result of poor infrastructure, but the fault of the blacks themselves. Bartow
writes:

Preserving the purity of the precious water supply became a paramount concern for
Jim Crow architects in postwar Atlanta. They had to find ways to control natural
resources that flowed indiscriminately across racial boundaries. They had to make
nature mirror the constructed reality they sought to create. Building closed concrete
sewer channels and complex waterworks pipelines, southern whites believed that they
could make nature bow to the demands of their segregationist order. When the
environmental problems of the urban core proved too much to bear, white Atlantans
fled to suburban oases where they could enjoy fresh water, untainted by urban filth.33

The water pollution crisis in mid-nineteenth century Atlanta was, to a

significant extent, the result of predominant ideas about race and segregation in
the postwar American South. What Bartow demonstrates is that considering the
impact of seemingly unrelated cultural and social processes on urban water
supply can therefore augment cultural understandings of water. In particular,
understanding the relationship between political responses to water crises and
other, social urban planning issues, such as racial segregation, can nuance our
understandings how and why governing bodies respond to water scarcity in
the ways that they do. In the above example, the ability of planners and
developers to mitigate the pollution crisis in Atlanta was severely undermined
by ongoing racial tensions and ideologies; it was insufficient political response
to a disruption that, following Szreters four Ds, lead to deprivation, disease,
and death. Werner Troesker has also examined the experience of water and
disease among African-Americans in the early twentieth century.34 In a similar
vein, Kate Foss-Molan has examined the politics of water in Milwaukee from
1870 to 1995, and also examines developments in public health that are often
neglected (including the problematic use of lead pipes to distribute water), in
addition to exploring ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in access to public
services such as water. Her study of this aspect focuses specifically, and

33 Elmore Bartow, Hydrology and Residential Segregation in the Postwar South: An

Environmental History of Atlanta, 1865-1895, Georgia Historical Quarterly, Vol. 94, Issue 1,
Spring 2010, pp. 30-61.
34 Werner Troesken, Water, Race, and Disease, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2004.
 11

notably, on Milwaukees Polish community and their active though unheeded

petitions for better public services.35
Considering socio-economic dimensions of water crises and urban water
systems, Joseph Hillier has explored how the provision of constant water (i.e. as
opposed to intermittent water supply) was a political and technological
response to poverty in nineteenth-century London.36 Hilliers study is situated
within a larger body of literature on the development of urban water systems in
nineteenth century Britain. There has been a particular focus on London, and
the intersections of health, planning, and politics in the case of the citys water
supply and infrastructure. While there has been a thematic emphasis on public
health, more broadly historians have paid particular attention to the social and
political contexts for technological developments in London, including the
growth of various urban networks. 37 Such studies connect with wider
considerations of the politics of urban metabolism and urban ecologies and the
governance of water in urban environments.38

35 Kate Foss-Molan, Hard Water: Politics and Water Supply in Milwaukee, 1870-1995, Lafayette,
Purdue University Press, 2000. On the broader topic of environmental inequalities, see
A.Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution, Gary, Indiana, 1945
1980, Chapel Hill, 1995.
36 Joseph Hillier, The Rise of Constant Water in Nineteenth-Century London, The London

Journal, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2011.

37 A. Hardy, Water and the Search for Public Health in London in the Eighteen and Nineteenth
Centuries, Medical History, Vol. 28, 1984; A. Hardy, Parish Pump to Private Pipes: Londons
Water Supply in the Nineteenth Century, in W. F. Bynum and R. Porter (eds), Living and
Dying in London, Medical History, supplement no. 11, 1991; A. Hardy, The Epidemic Streets:
Infectious Disease and the Rise of Preventative Medicine 1856-1900, Oxford, 1993; J. Hassan, The
Growth and Impact of the British Water Industry in the Nineteenth Century, Economic History
Review, Vol. 38, 1985; C. Hamlin, Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain, 1800
1854, Cambridge, 1998; B. Luckin, Pollution and Control: a Social History of the Thames, Oxford,
1986; D. Sunderland, Disgusting to the Imagination and Destructive of Health? The
Metropolitan Supply of Water, 182052, Urban History, Vol. 30, No. 3, 2003; F. Trentmann and
V. Taylor, From Users to Consumers: Water Politics in Nineteenth-century London, in F.
Trentmann (ed.), The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World,
Oxford, 2005.
38 M. Barlow, Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water,

New York, 2008; M. Barlow and M. Kaika, The Political Ecology of Water Scarcity: The 1989
1991 Athenian Drought, in N. Heynen, M. Kaika and E. Swyngedouw (eds), In the Nature of
Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism, London, 2006. On the politics of
urban water systems, see M. Gandy, Rethinking Urban Metabolism: Water, Space and the
Modern City, City, Vol. 8, No. 3, 2004; E. Swyngedouw, Social Power and the Urbanization of
Water: Flows of Power, Oxford, 2004; M. Kaika and E. Swyngedouw, Fetishizing Urban
Technological Networks, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 24, No. 1,
2000. For an example of a study which analysis the metabolic integration between a city and its
 12

While focus has been on the various political and technological

approaches to water crises in cities, less focus has been placed on the domestic
and personal experience of these broader movements. There are exceptions,
including Maureen Ogles examination of supply, waste disposal, and cultural
attitudes towards cleanliness in mid-nineteenth century American cities. 39
Graeme Davison exemplifies an approach that focuses on everyday water
practices and values in addition to domestic contexts and technologies for water
in Australia. He considers Sofoulis minutiae of everyday practices around
water use in the domestic home and garden.40 Davison is primarily concerned
with water consumption and usage habits over time as they relate to domestic
technologies and changing values and cultural understandings of water. He
relates evolving attitudes towards cleanliness and public health to the
planning of urban water systems in Australian cities, especially the adoption of
underground sewers between 1880 and 1910, and, concurrently, the
introduction of water closets to Australian homes. Davison also considers the
relationship between social constructions of cleanliness to gradually changing
shower and bathing habits, the introduction of hot water systems, the rise of the
backyard garden, and overall rising domestic water consumption over the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What is neglected, however, is
consideration of how these domestic contexts and changing everyday values
intersected with water crises beyond issues of sanitation; water scarcity related
to drought, overuse, and demand-and-supply disparities has also been relevant
in the Australian context since at least the nineteenth century. This much is
evident in Luke Godwin and Scott LOste-Browns examination of drought-
proofing attempts in central Queensland during the 1880s, although they are
interested more in rural contexts than urban experiences of drought.41
Davison, however, provides a model for how future studies in Australia
might connect domestic contexts and technologies with changing everyday
values and water use habits. This is important in light of Martin Melosis call
for urban environmental histories to move beyond a focus on growth,
infrastructure, and pollution to subtly consider the cultural and especially

water, see S. Barles, Urban metabolism and river systems: an historical perspective Paris and
the Seine, 17901970, Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, Vol. 11, 2007.
39 Maureen Ogle, Water Supply, Waste Disposal, and the Culture of Privatism in the Mid-

Nineteenth-Century American City, Journal of Urban History, Vol. 25, No. 3, 1999.
40 Fiona Allon, Dams, Pipes and Flows: from Big Water to Everday Water, Reconstructions:

Studies in Contemporary Culture, Vol. 6, No. 3, 2006, p.10; Fiona Allon and Zoe Sofoulis,
Everyday Water: Cultures in Transition, Australian Geographer, Vol. 37, No. 1, 2006.

41Luke Godwin and Scott LOste-Brown, Water, Water, Everywhere: Attempts at Drought-
Proofing Properties Using Surfacing Water Infrastructure in Central Western Queensland in the
Earyl 1880s, Australian Archaeology, No. 74, 2012.
 13

urban context for human encounters with the environment. That is, to integrate
urban and environmental histories in such a way that moves beyond the simple
dichotomy between humans and nature.42
The benefit of integrating environmental and urban histories with a
focus on the human environmental experience within cities has been
demonstrated in North American literature. A great number of urban
environmental historians have illustrated the importance of viewing the city
and its hinterland as a whole ecological system, with numerous studies of
various cities in the United States.43 Gilles Billen, Josette Garnier, and Sabine
Barles have examined Paris, London, Brussels, Vienna, Barcelona, Athens, New
York, and Providence in light of this awareness of the relationship between
cities and their surrounding territories. Of relevance here, they note how water
remains a localised issue for cities in comparison with food and energy
requirements. 44 Dennis P. Swaney, Renee L. Santoro, Robert W. Howarth,
Bongghi Hong, and Kieran P. Donaghy have explored food and water in New
York City has been related to both regional and metropolitan developments in
transport, infrastructure, and governance. 45 There are also edited collections
that aim to place American cities in particular in an even wider geographic
context.46 Furthermore, there are specific examples of studies that recognise the
intersection of various crises; Mike Davis considers the potential impacts of a
nexus of social and ecological crises in Los Angeles, while Jared Orsi has

42 Martin Melosi, The Place of the City in Environmental History, Environmental History Review,
Vol. 17, No. 1, 1993, p. 23.
43 Kathleen A. Brosnan, Uniting Mountain and Plain: Cities, Law, and Environmental Change along

the Front Range, Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 2002; William Cronon, Natures
Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, New York, W.W. Norton, 1992; Sarah Elkind, Bay Cities
and Water Politics: The Battle for Resources in Boston and Oakland, Lawrence, University Press of
Kansas, 1998; Matthew Gandy, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City,
Cambridge, MIT Press, 2002; Michael Logan, Desert Cities: The Environmental History of Phoenix
and Tucson, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006; Edward E. Soja, Postmetropolis:
Critical Studies of Cities and Regions, Malden, Blackwell, 2000; David Soll, City, Region, and In
Between: New York Citys Water Supply and the Insights of Regional History, Journal of Urban
History, Vol. 38, No. 2, 2012; Richard Walker, Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco
Bay Area, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2002.

44 Gilles Billen, Josette Garnier, and Sabine Barles, History of the urban environmental imprint:
introduction to a multidisciplinary approach to the longer-term relationships between Western
cities and their hinterland, Regional Environmental Change, Vol. 12, 2012.
45 Dennis P. Swaney, Renee L. Santoro, Robert W. Howarth, Bongghi Hong, and Kieran P.

Donaghy, Historical changes in food and water supply systems of the New York City
metropolitan Area, Regional Environmental Change, Vol. 12, 2012.
46 Andrew Isenberg (ed.), The Nature of Cities: Culture, Landscape, and Urban Space, Rochester,

University of Rochester Press, 2006; Jeffry M. Diefendorf and Kurk Dorsey (eds), City, Country,
Empire: Landscapes in Environmental History, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005.
 14

examined the often hazardous combinations of engineering, politics, and

environment in the case of Los Angeles twentieth-century floods.47 In Europe,
Timothy Moss has explored the intersection of electricity, gas, water, and
wastewater vulnerabilities in the wake of the division of Berlins technical
infrastructure in 1948-49 (after the blockade), noting attempts to reduce the
prospects for crises by focusing on territorial cohesion and the recording of each
sides technical infrastructure.48 Moss study demonstrates how cities deal with
social and political disruptions to path dependencies of urban infrastructure
systems (i.e. beyond resource depletion or pollution and natural disasters).49 He
has also explored how Berlin has redeveloped its urban infrastructure after 1990
and reunification.50 For another German city, Hamburg, Charles E. Closmann
has examined the effects of economic change and upheaval on water quality in
the river Elve and the Hamburg region in the early-1920s; he also notes how
understandings of pollution in Hamburg focused on waterborne pathogens,
ignoring equally hazardous industrial and agricultural waste.51 Simon Gingrich,
Gertrud Haidvogel, and Fridolin Krausmann have considered intersections of
land use, energy, and water in a socio-technical study of Vienna and the
Danube river from 1800 to 1910.52

47 Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, New Rok, Vintage, 1990; Jared
Orsi, Hazardous Metropolis: Flooding and Urban Ecology in Los Angeles, Berkeley, University of
California Press, 2004
48 Timothy Moss, Divided City, Divided Infrastructure: Securing Energy and Water Services in

Postwar Berlin, Journal of Urban History, Vol. 35, No. 7, 2009.

49 On the development and path dependency of urban infrastructure systems, see Joel Tarr and

G. Dupuy, Technology and the Rise of the Networked City in Europe and North America,
Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1988; Thomas Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification
in Western Society 18801930, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983; Thomas Hughes,
The Evolution of Large Technological Systems, in W. E. Bijker, T. P. Hughes, and T. Pinch
(eds), The Social Construction of Technological Systems, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1987; Olivier
Coutard (ed.), The Governance of Large Technical Systems, London, Routledge, 1999; Anique
Hommels, Studying Obduracy in the City: Toward a Productive Fusion between Technology
Studies and Urban Studies, Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 30, No. 3, 2005.

50 Timothy Moss, Utilities, Land-Use Change and Urban Development: Brownfield Sites as
Cold-Spots of Infrastructure Networks in Berlin, Environment and Planning A, Vol. 35, 2003;
Timothy Moss, Unearthing Water Flows, Uncovering Social Relations: Introducing New Waste
Water Technologies in Berlin, Journal of Urban Technology, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2000; Timothy Moss,
Institutional Restructuring, Entrenched Infrastructures and the Dilemma of Over-capacity, in
Dale Southerton, Heather Chappells, and Bas van Vliet (eds), Sustainable Consumption: The
Implications of Changing Infrastructures of Provision, London, Edward Elgar, 2004.
51 Charles E. Closmann, Chaos and Contamination: Water Pollution and Economic Upheaval in

Hamburg, 1919-1923, Journal of Urban History, Vol. 33, No. 5, 2007.

52 Simon Gingrich, Gertrud Haidvogel, and Fridolin Krausmann, The Danube and Vienna:

urban resource use, transport and land use 1800-1910, Regional Environmental Change, Vol. 12,
2012.
 15

Andrew Hurley, Martin Melosi, and Joel Tarr have also provided further
nuance to understandings of the human environmental experience of cities, and
have examined further political and social processes relating to sanitary
infrastructure and various forms of urban pollution in American cities.53 Like
those discussed above, the works of Hurley, Melosi, and Tarr all demonstrate
sensitivity to the social and cultural context of urban ecologies, including urban
water, and consider a nexus of social and ecological issues. In a similar vein,
though not focused on water, Mark Rose has explored the development of gas
and electricity in Denver and Kansas, while Harold Platt has focused on
electricity in Chicago, and both emphasise that these various urban networks
were linked to broader social, cultural, economic, and political factors. In like
manner, Charles Jacobson borrows from economics and political science in Ties
That Bind in order to explain the evolution of regulations and laws governing
urban gas, electricity, and water infrastructure.54
The ongoing importance and contemporary relevance of such a nexus
approach was on display at the March 2014 conference, Nexus 2014: Water, Food,
Climate and Energy, which aimed to promote the view that water, energy, and
food crises are interlinked and so must be their solutions. 55 Indeed, to focus
purely on waters relationship to pollution and sanitation in urban
environments, and the impact of urban development on natural water
resources, is a somewhat outdated approach. One major theme of a 2007
conference of the International Water History Association, Pasts and Futures of
Water, was water and the city. The presentations, while demonstrating the
ongoing centrality of technological history for many historians of urban water,
also showed how wider contexts have become common in the frameworks for
studying urban water crises.56 Most new histories of urban water systems are
framed by some broader context all of, or a combination of, social, cultural,

53 Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race and Industrial Pollution in Gary Indiana,
1945-1996, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1995; Joel A. Tarr, The Search for the
Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective, Akron, University of Akron Press, 1996;
Martin Melosi, Effluent America: Cities, Industry, Energy, and the Environment, Pittsburgh,
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001.
54 Mark H. Rose, Cities of Light and Heat: Domesticating Gas and Electricity in Urban America,

University Park, 1995; Harold L. Platt, The Electric City: Energy and the Growth of the Chicago Area,
18801930, Chicago, 1991; Charles David Jacobson, Ties That Bind: Economic and Political
Dilemmas of Urban Utility Networks, 18001990, Pittsburgh, 2000.

55 University of North Carolina Water Institute, Whats the Nexus?, Nexus 2014: Water, Food,
Climate and Energy Conference, <http://nexusconference.web.unc.edu/whats-the-nexus/>,
accessed March 15, 2014.
56 T. S. Katko, P. S. Juuti, J. Tempelhoff, Water and the City, Environment and History, Vol. 16,

2010.
 16

economic, and political variables. In the modern field of urban environmental

history, Stephane Frioux notes

urban history necessarily crosses with environmental history, but also with the
history of technology and social and cultural history; whilst its scholars not only
emanate from a traditional historical background, but also from geography, science
and engineering. Urban environmental historians have duly established the
importance of studying the relationships between nature (including non-humans)
and humans in and around cities.57

This is the nature of the new, mature urban environmental history. While
Friouxs overview of recent PhD theses in urban environmental history hints at
the continuation of a traditional focus on urban developments impact on
natural environments, as well as a preoccupation of urban historians with
technology, pollution and public health, the cultural, political, and social
dimensions of urban water systems have come into greater prominence in
recent years.
Even though urban histories of water have frequently focused on
technology, water supply is not only a technological issue; political and social
factors are equally as important in understanding water crises. If historians are
to understand and document historical processes of domestic water uses in
Australian cities with the outlook of helping to achieve water sensitive cities, it
is necessary to frame research in ways that focus on patterns and practices of
peoples everyday lives. Therefore, understanding water cultures and demand-
side, user behaviours in historical contexts will be more beneficial to effecting
behavioural change in the future than a narrow focus on supply-side
management and technological developments. While urban water networks
and the historical development of path dependencies will continue to be a
fruitful area of research, understanding individual and group interactions with
these broader systems will be more useful in informing strategies for the future.
The international literature provides numerous examples on which
future studies of urban water in Australia could be modelled or could extend.
With regard to broadening the existing literature, historians in Australia could
begin to move away from the overwhelming focus on health and sanitation in
cities, and instead consider water scarcity in other forms, including overuse,
floods, and drought. These kinds of water crises have received very little
attention, with many urban water histories focusing on the development of
systems and infrastructure as they relate to pollution and sanitation. Further,

Stephane Frioux, At a Green Crossroads: Recent Theses in Urban Environmental History in

57

Europe and North America, Urban History, Vol. 39, No. 3, 2012.
 17

examining intersections of cultural, social, and political contexts with domestic

uses and technologies, as well as changing everyday values, would extend the
literature insofar as very few studies of domestic behaviours and technologies
currently exist.