Urban Water Trajectories

In 1938, the UK’s first purpose-built laboratories for water quality examination were unveiled in central London as part of the Metropolitan Water Board (MWB) estate. Now a block of luxury flats, this chapter explores the building’s conception in the modern, industrial age of urban water production, and its collision with the psyche of water scarcity during natural droughts and the effects of the Second World War on the city. Between 1934 and the post-War era’s propaganda about water use/waste, a shift is traced from a MWB public relations strategy focused solely on the quantity of water that might be wasted to one that employed a more nuanced, scientific perspective on water quality in which the laboratories featured, and therefore drinking water specifically, in such communications. Considering London’s water metabolisms of the mid-1930s to the late 1940s, this chapter proposes that the communication about water by the industry during that period is a continuing trope of urban water systems and the interplay between producers and consumers, which we might do well to examine, and challenge, in the context of water as a general product but also as an essential ingredient of our daily diets.

By examining the transforming geography of water systems through its interactions with everyday life and the governance in Madurai and Bangalore in South India, we argue that making sense of the risks and vulnerabilities associated with the blue infrastructure in these cities needs to be understood as the consequence of transforming political relations of governance rather than from the notion of an indifferent and incapacitated state or the disappearance of traditional community management institutions. It is our contention that governing complex ecological assets demands an equally complex relationship between a wide range of social actors in diverse locations of power and capacity embedded within emerging political relations and realities.

Achieving ‘sustainable urban water management’ (SUWM) is a growing goal for many cities globally, particularly in the face of existing and emerging water threats. Water policy reveals particular ways of framing problems and possible actions. By understanding the components of sustainability, we analyse how key water policies for two major cities frame SUWM. London and Melbourne face significant future water threats, and have tried to address these through strategic water policy. However, they have different approaches to water policy, and different climatic and built-form contexts. Hence, we review the water policy context shaping London and Melbourne, and analyse to what extent their strategic water policy addresses SUWM. Our study shows that the water policy documents analysed do not define SUWM. Despite this, they addressed a number of components of sustainability, strongly focusing on economics and spatial planning, but there were notable gaps such as climate change, uncertainty and complexity. We draw upon the broader water policy context of each city to discuss these differences within the documents. Our results indicate that a broader and more holistic conceptualisation of sustainable urban water management would be beneficial in both policy contexts. Doing so will help achieve this important goal, particularly in light of current and future water threats, including climate change.

Water reuse is an obvious and important response to water scarcity in cities. It takes many forms – potable and non-potable, centralised and decentralised, direct and indirect, and planned and unplanned. How different forms of reuse emerge and stabilise depends on technical, economic, social, environmental and political factors, and specific local conditions. This chapter reviews trends in potable and non-potable reuse, including international examples of urban water reuse. The analysis shows that public acceptance, regulation, proven technology and support for innovation are needed to provide the conditions for water reuse systems to function. The diversity of approaches to water reuse in cities indicates that urban water infrastructure is diverging from the twentieth century ideal of a centralised, universal supply of potable water. The different forms of water reuse present specific challenges for regulating and governing water infrastructure that require reform of existing arrangements and new institutions and management strategies.

This chapter analyses how different discourses influence knowledge-building processes in terms of their main concerns, water sector boundaries, and types of information considered legitimate, in the context of Lima. It shows how these processes are embedded in urban configurations, and how the legitimacy of mapping processes needs to be negotiated across boundaries. We analyse how iterative mapping processes within three concertación (Concertación’ has no proper translation into English. We have discussed the concept elsewhere (Miranda and Hordijk 1998). It refers to the process of reaching agreements for joint action through dialogue and deliberation.) processes in Lima reveal uneven geographies of water-related vulnerabilities and inequalities, and presenting the outcomes of the cross-boundary processes of social construction for generating, analysing, and exchanging knowledge on water vulnerabilities. Three research and policy-building projects in Lima reflect how mappings of ‘water-related vulnerabilities and risks’ are socially constructed. Firstly, maps draw on different discourses and framings, data inputs and classifications at multiple spatial scales. Secondly, they visualise spatial inequalities and link multiple dimensions to one geographic locality, building a more integrated understanding of the dynamics and spatial differentiation of Lima’s ‘waterscape’, combining human and natural processes. As a result, it becomes easier to discuss the legitimacy of different types of knowledge among various actors. Thirdly, maps facilitate ‘exchange on priorities, conflicts and synergies’, providing inputs into negotiation processes between actors in water governance configurations. Although mapping produces new types of knowledge, it is necessary to ensure that the results are incorporated into policy-making and implemented for wider acceptance.

Many cities in the global south keep on expanding without adequate infrastructure leaving a large number of people to experience varying degrees of water and sanitation poverty. Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, has been subject to numerous interventions aimed at improving service provision across the city with mixed and overall limited results. Most of them are driven by popular definitions of urban water and sanitation poverty that portray the problem in a simplified way. It is often assumed that once people gain access to some form of improved access to basic services, this access is sustained over time. Instead, the urban poor experience differing journeys as they ‘travel’ in and out of water poverty but their trajectories are insufficiently understood. This chapter applies a relational approach to unfold a select number of trajectories from people living in a low-income community in Dar es Salaam. The stories illustrate how and why certain households and individuals are able to move out of urban water and sanitation poverty while others are not and thus offers insights into the dynamic interplay between individual and collective agency. This highlights different and changing degrees of urban water and sanitation poverty in a settlement and reveals the power dynamics that condition inequalities and shape people’s trajectories over time. These narratives offer a nuanced and multi-layered understanding that challenges fixed universal approaches.

Local private entrepreneurs are fairly commonplace in the water and sanitation (WASH) sector – a World Bank study from 2005, covering 49 developing countries estimated there to be more than 10,000 independent water supply providers. Other studies suggest that the private enterprise market share for sanitation is even greater. Many of these providers work in and with poor communities where there are often no other services available. They operate at different scales, levels of formality and fulfil various functions. In the past few years, an increased focus in the WASH sector has helped to understand more about the incentives for engaging smaller-scale providers, the regulatory environment within which they work, and means to further develop entrepreneurial activities; both to increase basic WASH service delivery to the poor and stimulate local labour markets. Supporting emerging entrepreneurs who specifically help the poorest and offering business development services is a more recent approach. With the United Nations General Assembly and the Human Rights Council recognising the Rights to Water and Sanitation in 2010, the activities of all service providers – whether public or private, large or small – have come under scrutiny. This chapter gathers some of the emerging lessons learned about entrepreneurial models being trailed by the INGO WaterAid in Malawi and Tanzania to support service delivery to the poor.

The Bolivian government played a key role in developing and presenting the Human Right to Water to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). However, nationally water policies and institutions designed to realise the right to water have struggled to engage with a highly fragmented and informal water sector. 46 % of the residents in the city of Cochabamba rely on informal water providers. There are around 600 community water providers across the municipality, many of which experience serious practical and institutional challenges. Meanwhile, the poorest households and communities in the city continue to rely on expensive vendors. Drawing on research undertaken between 2010 and 2015, this chapter explores how community water providers in Cochabamba engaged with reforms around the right to water, and have sought to engage with the state and to develop co-production partnerships as a means of improving water services to low-income urban neighbourhoods.

This chapter considers whether remunicipalisation – the return of water services to public ownership and management following the termination of private operating contracts – has a role to play in the future of the urban water sector. It does so by looking at the process of remunicipalisation in Berlin, Germany and Buenos Aires, Argentina. Attention is paid to the interplay of: (1) pendulum swings between competing paradigms of water service management; (2) the paradigm advocacy resulting in the dominance and emergence of paradigms at local level; and, (3) the conceptual tensions between communitarian and privatist paradigms of urban water management. In both cases, the rigidity of the privatist paradigm has led to the emergence of the communitarian paradigm. Two different processes of remunicipalisation are observed: explicit paradigm advocacy in Berlin, and tacit paradigm advocacy in Buenos Aires. In neither case has the passage from private to public ownership automatically led to the dominance of the communitarian paradigm. Indeed, the causal relationship between remunicipalisation and progressive change is not one of necessity but rather of possibility. Nonetheless, the emergence of water remunicipalisation as a global trend in the last 15 years has profoundly reconfigured institutional trajectories in the urban water sector. The dominance of the privatist paradigm is now challenged in the global North and South and will continue to be in future. This is due to persistent demands by communities for water to be treated as a social good, and the shortcomings of water privatisation as a community development tool.

Alternative visions of cities that treat water more sustainably are becoming more compelling as understanding increases of current impacts and future pressures. Here, an alternative relationship between water, space and citizens is commonly advocated that represents a significant shift from the techno-rational supply-oriented emphasis of the twentieth century. In discussions connected to any transition to a more beneficial urban water trajectory, aspects such as land use change, new technologies or innovative policies are frequently held up as being critical elements. Rather than focus on any notional Water Sensitive City as an outcome to be achieved, this chapter complements this literature by critically examining the processes that may help or hinder transitions of this nature. It firstly explores the historical states of urban water management and links to the wider socio-political context within which change must occur. It then analyses issues related to the speed and scale of land use change, emphasising how every urban area has differing flows of finance, regeneration opportunities or free development space. The argument then turns to path dependence and how institutional, cultural and technological norms may resist attempts at change, before focusing on the difficulties in enabling effective policy transfer across what are distinct territories and contexts. It ends with a discussion on how water is just one of an increasing number of competing urban visions – from the Smart City to the Resilient City – all of which are fighting for attention, resources and action.

The reform of urban water services, and the related reorganisation of environmental conservation, has been influenced by novel approaches focused on flexibility, adaptability and partnership that are commonly described as the agenda of water governance. This new agenda, widely accepted worldwide in the last three decades, entails a convergence of de-regulation and re-regulation policies, including incentives for decentralisation and market-based solutions. The chapter specifically examines the influence of urban water governance reforming public services and environmental conservation in Glasgow (UK) and in Lima (Peru). These two case studies, despite their idiosyncratic complexities, are highly emblematic of the controversies surrounding water governance. Glasgow is an intriguing example of a post-industrial European conurbation and Lima is a paradigmatic case of an emerging megacity at the intersection of post-colonial legacies and market globalisation. In both metropolitan areas, recent projects and policy adjustments reveal the achievements, but also the shortcomings of water governance. One main problem is that public participation has been appropriated by the same agencies that in the past promoted highly centralised, disjointed and politically asymmetric administration. Furthermore, positive results from increased investments and rationalisation of water services have been undermined by the discriminatory and short-term basis of the discourse and practice of urban water governance.

Establishing a modern domestic water management system in Batavia, colonial Jakarta, involved struggles over territories between different actors. The multifaceted territorial character of managing water and land reveals the highly contested notion of citizenship as there were continuous processes of service inclusion and exclusion within complex interactions among different state institutions, the private sector and communities. While the twentieth century colonial government addressed water and sanitation issues as part of modernity projects, urban kampung communities simultaneously used diverse socio-ecological networks to meet their water and sanitation needs. However, their strategies did not always comply with the modern sanitation standards idealised by the colonial state. The existence of Batavia’s kampungs preceding and following the inception of modern planning system reflects their capability of undergoing socio-spatial transformations within the contexts of limited state intervention on the provision of basic services and under the condition of unequal spatial development processes. The kampung dynamics seem to call into question the existing form of state-led management systems in providing water and sanitation services. The systems pretty much favour the marketisation agenda at the operational level, while keep idealising universal access to services at the discursive level despite the exclusionary nature of infrastructure planning. The persistence of kampungs has likely proven their socio-ecological relevance, and potentially forms the foundation of an alternative paradigm of citizenship for an improved governance system in the urban water sector.