Water and the Urban Metabolism: Essays on the Remaking of Urban Water Regimes since the Eighteenth Century—Introduction

Abstract

This introductory article explores the concept of urban metabolism, through which cities’ need for water transforms inputs into biomass and waste products, and its influence on urban water regimes. It provides a summary of existing literature, and explains how a cross-disciplinary approach, drawing on a range of urban experiences, can add value to current policy debates about the costs of urban water management, and environmental problems in general. The case studies presented here examine urban water regimes in Britain, Europe, Asia, and the United States since the eighteenth century. Using methods from a range of historical disciplinary approaches, this special issue identifies the diverse forces that generate a variety of outcomes, with non-linear improvements in urban water infrastructure shaped by contemporary technology and medical knowledge, social inequality, local politics, and path-dependent impact of previous planning and construction decisions.

This special issue is a collection of case studies in urban water management from Britain, Europe, Asia, and the United States. The unifying theme is the nature of water regimes, which connect the built environment with the natural environment as a whole system, reflecting the interplay of political and social structures through human intervention in the natural environment. The approach follows the lead of Martin V. Melosi, viewing cities as ever-mutating urban ecosystems, rather than static backdrops for human action, which connect them to the rest of the physical world rather than isolates them as inherently artificial. ¹ This requires an extension of the concept of urban metabolism, through which cities’ need for water transforms inputs into biomass and waste products, which has a long history in studies of sustainability. ²

Joel A. Tarr conceptualizes the metabolism of cities as a result of the necessity of water for bodily function—a supply of fresh water is required for domestic and industrial use, street cleaning, and firefighting, which after use must be disposed of without endangering the health of citizens or the surrounding ecosystem. ³ “The city is a parasite on the natural and domesticated environments,” as it does not produce clean air and water itself, it only dirties these inputs. Just as a parasite “does not live for very long if it kills or damages its host,” cities can only survive by forming a sustainable, interactive relationship with their sites and hinterlands through resource creation and remediation of resource overuse. ⁴ Public health crises, nuisances such as pollution, and natural disasters reveal the effects of resources use and misuse, drawing public attention to environmental considerations. With growth and increasing prosperity, cities move from a lack of concern for environmental goods toward a more sustainable ecological footprint, with the pace and effectiveness of remediation affected by changes in knowledge and technology, value preferences, the perception of risk, and the costs of change. Not all human modification of nature reduces the value of land or other environmental resources. With effective governance and design, cities are able to draw on economies of scale to generate and apply resources for environmental improvement.

Conflict and tension over issues of environmental quality and ecological protection is inherent in the process of building on complex natural sites. Cities are generally founded in locations where nature offers benefits for human activity—along coastlines where the natural contours of the land create harbors, where rivers and lakes can be used for transport, water supply, and waste disposal, and where fertile river valleys provide food, timber, and animal resources. ⁵ Whether built on mud, rock, or landfill, cities are marked by proximity to reliable water, at sites where a change from land- to water-based transport or from ocean-going ships to smaller, river-based boats was required. At these low points, gravity creates problems for settlements. At the base of river deltas, the “drainpipe” of their hinterlands, runoff flowing through river systems on its way to the sea creates a maze of waterways and silt, with areas of fertile but muddy, unstable and sometimes unhealthy ground. ⁶ The process of urbanization has seen humans push back against nature, managing the interface between water and land by clearing vegetation, creating land for building by leveling hills, altering watercourses, draining and filling wetlands, or raising street levels above mudflats, and digging the earth for sewer and water systems. ⁷

City-builders may reshape the natural environment of waterways and landforms to meet their needs; at other times, nature’s forces may be out of control, wreaking havoc on the landscape. ⁸ Urbanization slowly alters the natural water cycle of rainfall being absorbed into subsoil, used by plants, or draining into waterways; cleared vegetation and the creation of impervious surfaces such as house roofs and paved streets increase runoff and erosion, exacerbating flood damage, pollution of water sources, and degradation of immediate surrounds. Building on flood plains, landfill, and steep slopes may increase the dangers of natural hazards such as earthquakes and flooding; while the wealthy occupy elevated sites, well served with infrastructure, badly drained and riskier locations are occupied by low-income groups. Water gives life to cities but also presents a potential threat as a carrier of contagious disease; failure to segregate drinking water from wastewater converts the urban advantage of connecting people into a cause of death. ⁹

Matthew Gandy observes that water crosses visible and invisible domains of urban space. ¹⁰ In contemporary cities of the global South, water tends to be visible, as it was in premodern cities, in a jumble of tanks and buckets, and open sewers, often lying undrained. In the “plumbed” city of the global North, water forms part of the material culture of modernity, ranging from the private spaces of the home that permit “modern” experiences of bathing and hygiene, to largely unseen distribution and disposal networks that allow cities to function more effectively, with positive public health outcomes. Infrastructure underpins the functioning of complex urban societies through technological systems that provide greater control over the flow of clean water into the system, and the flow of dirty water out of it. Human action to capture, distribute and dispose of ever greater volumes of water to facilitate urban growth has unintended consequences that may create issues of environmental justice, as the distribution of assets and risks of water systems within particular urban contexts segregates social classes. “Water is a brutal delineator of social power,” Gandy writes, “which has at various times worked to either foster great urban cohesion or generate new forms of political conflict.” ¹¹

Gandy frames the expansion of urban water systems “since the chaos of the nineteenth-century industrial city” as the emergence of a “bacteriological city,” with fragmented, laissez-faire urban governance being replaced by central authorities taking on roles the private sectors were unwilling or lacked resources to do. Gandy sees a fundamental move since the 1970s from the bacteriological city “to a more diffuse, disconnected and differentiated urban form,” with declining investment, neglect of maintenance, and privatization of systems creating zones of deprivation and uneven quality of provision. ¹² In Gandy’s framework, there is no linear path to improvement in urban water infrastructure, to which all cities can be expected to conform. The relationship between urban spatial and social change on the one hand and scientific and technological change on the other is often asynchronous. ¹³ The governance and technological directions that cities adopt are path-dependent, highly sensitive to initial conditions and early land use and infrastructure choices that shape and constrain options as new challenges emerge. ¹⁴ As lumps of durable capital, cities resist prompt, flexible responses to changing economic conditions and environmental challenges, as both socially and economically, the costs of removing and replacing buildings and pipes act as frictions to urban development. Water management regimes evolve differently depending on historical context and a region’s economic development, with the quality of built environments varying as people maximize utility from housing markets within household budget constraints in different institutional and cultural settings. For prosperous cities with rising tax bases and industrial demand for water, investment in public health was a normal good, but this was not uniformly true, and in several cases only applied to certain groups.

Originating in Britain in the 1840s, the sanitary reform movement was spearheaded by Edwin Chadwick’s demonstration of the failure of private markets to protect residents from disease, especially cholera. Drawing on the prevailing miasma theory, which attributed diseases to vapors from rotting material and damp areas, sanitary reformers correctly identified a correlation between disease, crowding, and poor sanitation, and advocated public investment in integrated sewerage and water systems to remove miasmas from the urban environment by channeling wastes out of the city and clearing of areas of crowded housing. ¹⁵ These were helpful prescriptions for sanitary reform, but the miasma theory was counterproductive when wastes were drained into waterways that provided drinking water. Chadwick and other reformers were aware of the impact of domestic conditions on health, through childcare and household hygiene, but considered the public domain of streets, backyards, rivers, and sewers to be the most pressing area of concern. ¹⁶

Top-down improvements to water regimes in areas of poor sanitation, directed and controlled by middle-class reformers that entailed increased costs were initially resisted—both by high-income citizens able to remove themselves from the areas of worst exposure, and by low-income households who feared rising costs and clung to the use of private wells, cisterns, and cesspools. ¹⁷ The rise of germ theory from the late 1870s and its broad acceptance by the 1890s shifted the emphasis of disease prevention from water-related public goods to advocacy of measures that affected conditions inside the home. The emphasis of sanitary reform was now on changing the “private side” of public health, with individual actions such as improved ventilation, more rigorous bathing and housecleaning, boiling and filtering drinking water, isolating sick members of the household, and the use of chemical disinfectants advocated to address domestic sources of infection. The acquisition and exchange of information amongst private citizens then influenced the public sector. “When households acquired the information about what made them sick and what kept them healthy, they often exerted pressure on the authorities to initiate reforms to produce goods that they could not produce for themselves and that the market would not supply.” ¹⁸

Throughout the British Empire, London was the city the colonies sought to emulate. The creation of the London Metropolitan Board of Works in 1855 to coordinate public works across municipal boundaries and the construction of engineer Joseph Bazalgette’s underground sewerage system in 1865 raised sanitary aspirations for the provision of public amenities around the world. As Graeme Davison observes, “Australians, like Britons and Americans, would come to regard the water closet and the flush cistern as indispensable markers of civilization.” ¹⁹

The cities that gained from the rise of the “Atlantic economy” of the late-eighteenth and the nineteenth, and were closely linked to the industrial revolution, were also influenced by the development of water infrastructure in London. Some premodern Europe cities had underground drains, but these did not flow effectively. Stormwater and seepage from cesspits ran along open drains and street gutters to waterways, which were stagnant in dry weather. The first covered sewer in Paris was built in 1370; three centuries later a network of 24 blocked or dilapidated sewers existed, most of them uncovered. ²⁰ By the mid-nineteenth century, much of the city was unconnected to this drainage system, with stagnant water flooding the streets and alleys, and the contents of cesspools below houses carted away periodically or drained into streets and alleys. ²¹ Sewerage networks typically discharged untreated sewage into waterways and low-lying areas, especially where combined sewage and storm sewers made the cost of treatment prohibitive. In rainy weather, discharge from sewers on city slopes blocked or damaged older sewers on flat ground, flooding the surrounding areas. English cities had more effective sanitation infrastructure, with advances in street paving, drainage, and public water supplies made in the eighteenth century. ²²

In the mid-eighteenth century, London’s merchant and professional elite began to move from city townhouses into new suburban villas in open countryside at the edge of the city. ²³ These suburbs offered fresh air and privacy, shielding families from crowded, dirty, and poorly drained cities, while being close enough to commute to a city workplace. As public transport became more affordable and efficient, opportunities to live in a suburban setting were available to the middle and skilled working class. This preference for suburban living spread to cities in England and Wales, North America, and Australasia. Residential segregation, embodied in a social divide between low-lying districts close to industrial areas and more affluent suburban retreats, created what Dan Coward, in his environmental history of Sydney calls “a queuing device” that determined access to urban infrastructure and services. ²⁴ In geographically expanding cities, those municipalities where ratepayers could mobilize political power saw councils resist the encroachment of manufacturing and noxious trades and the nearby siting of waste disposal outlets into waterways. Pollution from open drains, sewer outlets, and gasometers impacted inner suburban and dockside areas, where transport hubs, factories, warehouses, and worker housing were in close proximity. The division of political authority between local councils across metropolitan areas continued to shape government responses to water management challenges, as metropolitan expansion increased the costs of network infrastructure and the inequitable distribution of services and hazards presented obstacles to improved living standards.

The main variation from this spatial pattern derived from the redevelopment of Paris. “Striking for its filth, stench and congestion,” mid-nineteenth century central Paris was “in many ways still a medieval city.” ²⁵ Baron Eugène-Georges Haussman’s plan for wide, straight boulevards resulted in the demolition of some of the city’s alleys and worst slums; main collector sewers replaced open street drains, and the water supply increased. Demand for worker housing resulted in the conversion of existing buildings and courtyards into smaller, darker apartments, with the poor forced to shanties in outlying areas, where water supply and sanitation were inadequate.

In Latin America, cities replicated the Paris model of grand houses and multifamily tenement buildings close to city centers, with streetcar suburbs providing opportunities for self-building homeowners. ²⁶ In European cities where there was less space for greenfield expansion, industrialization was often accompanied by multiple-story, uniform housing forms sometimes provided by the private sector, sometimes by the state. In major Asian cities on important trade routes, where as an 1851 visitor to Hankow noted, “an inch of land is worth an inch of gold,” economic activity was concentrated around key sites such as market-place or docks. ²⁷ From there, typically unplanned narrow streets linked houses and workshops in other parts of the city. Proximity of residence, production, and point of sale made it easier for people to go about their business. In cities such as Hong Kong and Shanghai, Europeans lived in exclusive enclaves, isolated from the Chinese majority. While the result of this urban form was ultimately reduced urban sprawl, intensification of activities within constrained sites increased the need for functioning, networked infrastructure.

The Articles in This Collection

In “Managing Flow: Drainage and Flood Control in Eighteenth-century London,” Carry van Lieshout shows that eighteenth-century London’s prosperity was contingent on the development of institutional and technological structures to supply water for everyday use, as well as control flooding. As local authorities lacked powers to borrow and faced resistance to increased rates to finance modernized waterworks, in the first half of the nineteenth century the British Parliament authorized the creation of profit-seeking joint-stock water companies, able to raise capital by issuing shares. ²⁸ The only source of piped water in Manchester, a joint stock company created in 1809, supplied less than one-fourth of the city’s houses and businesses in the 1840s. ²⁹ In “Living Within the Watershed,” Nicola Tynan observes that nineteenth-century London’s rapid population growth led to further demands for more accessible and higher quality water. After the 1860s, calls for municipal acquisition of London’s eight water companies and the development of alternative, higher quality water supplies beyond the Thames watershed dominated civic debates. Tynan examines the strategic response of London’s water companies, which was to work together to resist acquisition.

In nineteenth-century Paris, the evolution of networked water infrastructure was non-linear and marked by social differentiation, as Lionel Kesztenbaum demonstrates in “Distributing a Sane Beverage?” The city’s most populated arrondissements were the last to access piped water; households living on the upper floors of buildings drew water from communal taps or public fountains. Building owners resisted making water connections to apartments and paying for sewerage. Private companies that sold nightsoil for fertilizer opposed public investment in waste disposal. Although the city government made the connection of buildings to the drainage system compulsory in 1894, progress was slow. As late as 1975, one-third of Paris apartments were without a private shower, bath, or toilet. This was the legacy of a system of networked infrastructure that was not designed to deliver clean water to all citizens.

In “Did cholera ‘force’ the reform of urban water infrastructure?” Kalle Kappner examines the common perception that cholera epidemics acted as a catalyst for reform of urban water infrastructure, through a case study of Berlin. The relationship between the disease and the search for networked solutions was complex. Experiments had unintended consequences; over time, solutions turned into new problems. Drawing on traditional miasma theory, Berliners initially disposed of sewage manually, discharging it in waterways. The provision of piped water in the 1850s, at a time of rapid population growth, exacerbated the problem by contaminating groundwater and waterways. Until the 1880s, fear of miasmas prompted resistance to sewers; subsequent debates revealed divisions over whether sewers should combine sewage and stormwater, or whether separate sewers should drain waste to sewage farms, for treatment and use as fertilizer. For Kappner, the road to sanitary reform in Berlin was “was long and fraught with missteps,” prolonging the imposition of the urban penalty.

In “Water, politics and disease,” Daniel Gallardo-Albarrán notes that in European cities, the diffusion of waterworks lagged behind that of English and Welsh cities. In Germany, municipal investment in safe water was driven (rather than resisted, as in Paris) by a rising industrial class, and not by an expanded electoral franchise, as in England and Wales. Here inequality in income distribution was not an obstacle to sanitary reform; the elite valued safe water as a precondition for a healthy workforce, and for domestic convenience. Larger cities, especially those with a growing middle class, could offset high initial costs. Safe water had the greatest impact on reductions in death and infant mortality rates in textile towns, where the female workforce was large and breastfeeding was impractical while mothers were at work.

In “Public Health in a Transnational Context,” Phoebe Tang and co-authors focus on the triggering effect of the Third Bubonic Plague Pandemic for the British elite in Hong Kong, who fearing the disease would fester and spread from the poorer districts initially attempted to isolate their enclaves from the densely populated, substandard Chinese areas. Despite identifying the need for a sewerage system, lower density housing, and rat control, large-scale urban redevelopment was not undertaken due to high costs. Ultimately the city’s water infrastructure would prove to be ineffective in the face of twentieth-century population growth.

In “Open and shut,” Peter J. Carroll considers the dual role of canals, as a means of transport and flood control, and a source of pollution, in the history of Suzhou. Throughout the Maoist period (1949-1976), the regime considered canals to be anachronistic impediments to urban renewal, filling urban waterways to create industrial land, and using the remaining canals as drains for industrial pollutants. In the Reform Era, from 1978 onwards, environmental protection mandates, fines for polluting paper mills and chemical plants, and the diversion of industrial and population growth to new sites, restored Suzhou’s canals and public gardens as tourism and recreation assets. For Suzhou, the transition to a networked city came very late—until the early twenty-first century, residents continued to draw drinking water from the canals, with nightsoil collected manually.

In “Water and Waste: A History of Reluctant Policymaking in US Cities,” Brian Beach notes that the rate at which U.S. towns built waterworks accelerated in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, but this occurred before effective waste water treatment was available. Without self-flushing sewers, increased use of piped water and water closets dirtied the environment of low-lying areas, where poor people tended to live. In large cities, water intakes were often close to sewer outlets. While investment in water infrastructure had a positive impact on economic development, the process of improvement was reactive and generally lagging behind advances in scientific knowledge. This late-nineteenth century investment had lasting consequences, with infrastructure systems today vulnerable to failure, operating at their designed maximum capacity and end of their usable life. In some cities, inferior technology such as lead water mains remains in place.

The aim of this special issue is to widen the debate about water management that does not fit within any single scholarly discipline. There are benefits of knowing about the past as we embark on the future. Integrating the work of economic, urban, and environmental historians through international comparisons helps to illuminate the ways in which cities have coped with water scarcity, flooding, and degraded waterways and reveal which lessons from the past can inform effective environmental management in the future.

What these historical examples also show is that humans have always responded to the challenges they have faced regarding the creation of safe, living spaces and the basic need to access clean, fresh water and to dispose of it safely. These case studies should be of comfort today, given that many cities again face significant environmental and climate-based challenges that will ultimately demand their residents adopt clever, sustainable, and just responses to the problem of accessing a basic human need—water.