In settler colonial states like Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, water for the environment and the water rights of Indigenous Peoples often share the common experience of being too little and too late. Water pathways have been constrained and defined by settler colonialism, and as a result, settler state water law has both a legitimacy problem, in failing to acknowledge or implement the rights of Indigenous Peoples, and a sustainability problem, as the health of water systems continues to decline. In both Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, the focus of water law has historically been to facilitate use of the water resource to support economic development, excluding the rights of Indigenous Peoples and poorly protecting water ecosystems. However, in the early 21st century, both countries made significant advances in recognizing the needs of the environment and the rights of Indigenous Peoples. In Aotearoa New Zealand, Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi) provides an important bicultural and bijural framework that is beginning to influence water management. In 2017, as part of a Treaty dispute settlement, Aotearoa New Zealand passed legislation to recognize Te Awa Tupua (the Whanganui River) as a legal person and created a new collaborative governance regime for the river, embedding the interests and values of Māori at the heart of river management. In Australia, water recovery processes to increase environmental flows have been under way since the 1990s, using a combination of water buybacks and water savings through increased efficiency. There has been growing awareness of Indigenous water rights in Australia, although progress to formally return water rights to Indigenous Peoples remains glacially slow. Like Aotearoa New Zealand, in 2017, Australia also passed its first legislation that recognized a river (the Birrarung/Yarra River) as a living entity and, in doing so, formally recognized the responsibilities of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people as Traditional Owners of the river. This trend toward more holistic river management under a relational paradigm, in which the relationships between peoples and places are centered and celebrated, creates a genuine opportunity for water governance in settler states that begins to address both the legitimacy and sustainability flaws in settler state water law. However, these symbolic shifts must be underpinned by relationships of genuine trust between Indigenous Peoples and the state, and they require significant investment from the state in their implementation.
Article
Environmental and Cultural Flows in Aotearoa and Australia
Erin O'Donnell and Elizabeth Macpherson
Article
Urban Landscapes and Green Infrastructure
Stephan Pauleit, Rieke Hansen, Emily Lorance Rall, Teresa Zölch, Erik Andersson, Ana Catarina Luz, Luca Szaraz, Ivan Tosics, and Kati Vierikko
Urban green infrastructure (GI) has been promoted as an approach to respond to major urban environmental and social challenges such as reducing the ecological footprint, improving human health and well-being, and adapting to climate change. Various definitions of GI have been proposed since its emergence more than two decades ago. This article aims to provide an overview of the concept of GI as a strategic planning approach that is based on certain principles.
A variety of green space types exist in urban areas, including remnants of natural areas, farmland on the fringe, designed green spaces, and derelict land where successional vegetation has established itself. These green spaces, and especially components such as trees, can cover significant proportions of urban areas. However, their uneven distribution raises issues of social and environmental justice. Moreover, the diverse range of public, institutional, and private landowners of urban green spaces poses particular challenges to GI planning. Urban GI planning must consider processes of urban change, especially pressures on green spaces from urban sprawl and infill development, while derelict land may offer opportunities for creating new, biodiverse green spaces within densely built areas.
Based on ample evidence from the research literature, it is suggested that urban GI planning can make a major contribution to conserving and enhancing biodiversity, improving environmental quality and reducing the ecological footprint, adapting cities to climate change, and promoting social cohesion. In addition, GI planning may support the shift toward a green economy.
The benefits derived from urban green spaces via the provision of ecosystem services are key to meeting these challenges. The text argues that urban GI planning should build on seven principles to unlock its full potential. Four of these are treated in more detail: green-gray integration, multifunctionality, connectivity, and socially inclusive planning. Considering these principles in concert is what makes GI planning a distinct planning approach. Results from a major European research project indicate that the principles of urban GI planning have been applied to different degrees. In particular, green-gray integration and approaches to socially inclusive planning offer scope for further improvement
In conclusion, urban GI is considered to hold much potential for the transition toward more sustainable and resilient pathways of urban development. While the approach has developed in the context of the Western world, its application to the rapidly developing cities of the Global South should be a priority.
Article
Use of Experimental Economics in Policy Design and Evaluation: An Application to Water Resources and Other Environmental Domains
Simanti Banerjee
Economics conceptualizes harmful effects to the environment as negative externalities that can be internalized through implementation of policies involving regulatory and market-based mechanisms, and behavioral economic interventions. However, effective policy will require knowledge and understanding of intended and unintended stakeholder behaviors and consequences and the context in which the policy will be implemented. This mandate is nontrivial since policies once implemented can be hard to reverse and often have irreversible consequences in the short and/or long run, leading to high social costs. Experimental economics (often in combination with other empirical evaluation methods) can help by testing policies and their impacts prior to modification of current policies, and design and implementation of new ones. Such experimental evaluation can include lab and field experiments, and choice experiments. Additionally, experimental policy evaluation should pay attention to scaling up problems and the ethical ramifications of the treatment. This would ensure that the experimental findings will remain relevant when rolled out to bigger populations (hence retaining policy makers’ interest in the method and evidence generated by it), and the treatment to internalize the externality will not create or exacerbate societal disparities and ethical challenges.
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U.S. Water Policy and Planning With Respect to Climate Change
Caitlin Dyckman
The concept of a uniform U.S. water policy is a fallacy, instead resembling a mythological hydra with three primary necks that broadly encapsulate the following topics: (a) water usage patterns and demands, (b) governance structures (legal and economic), and (c) evolving scientific information and analysis (projection, planning, etc.). The body, feet, and tail of the policy and planning hydra are the physical hydrologic reality of natural and built systems, responding to the heads’ decisions. During the 20th and early 21st centuries, the hydra was governed by concepts of stationarity maintenance in each of the necks, with devolved and pragmatic fragmentation in the governance and scientific information and analysis necks, as follows. Water supply achieves stationarity through physical storage and centralized infrastructure; federal engineers altered hydrologic systems for flood control, more consistent water supply, and transportation/commerce. Water governance increasingly fragmented from the heterogeneity of water users’ interests, authority, and separation between water quality and quantity. Water law and economics coevolved to buffer demand’s nonstationarity. Planning responsibility shifted from federal agencies to states, with guidance from the country’s closest effort to manifest a unified national water policy through the National Water Commission’s 1973 report recommendations, despite its lack of official enactment. Stationarity negatively impacted aquatic ecosystems through dam flow alteration, omission in water use accounting, lack of legal protection in state allocation structures, lack of a market value, and only early 21st century inclusion in federal, state, and local water planning. Climate change further stresses these existing flaws in social and physical water management systems and processes. Its extremity in the body of the hydra reverberates through each of the necks and heads in variable ways, upending stationarity and challenging already fragmentated governance capacity. Policy and planning face greater uncertainty by geographic area, necessitating adaptive water management. Water managers must ubiquitously realize greater efficiency through innovative demand reduction mechanisms and decentralized infrastructure that can withstand significant hydrological cycle alterations, including changes to peak flow and more substantial reservoir evaporation outside the stationarity envelope. Climate adaptation in water law will require additional sacrifice concurrent with the early 21st century legal allocation and acknowledgement of historically marginalized water rights. Planning approaches must increase their flexibility, relying more heavily on water governance that embraces a cooperative, holistic perspective, recognizing interreliance and connectivity to increase resilience. The federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 may be the first step toward a unified national water policy since the 1973 report. Climate change forces the question of whether to cede full water management authority to the federal government or to sustain the creative and localized solutions fomented by pragmatic federalism.
Article
Virtual Water
Francesca Greco, Martin Keulertz, and David Dent
Virtual water is the water contained in food, understood not only as the physical amount within the product but also as the amount of water required to generate it over time, from planting to final harvest. Despite Tony Allan defined virtual water in the context of the water needed to produce agricultural commodities, the concept has been subsequently expanded to include the water needed to produce non-agricultural commodities and industrial goods by Arjen Hoekstra, the creator of the water footprint indicator. Virtual water is a revolutionary concept because it describes something never conceptualized before: the water “embedded” in a product. Allan used virtual water “food water” and “embedded water” as interchangeable terms. Virtual water “trade” is the result of food trade: where agricultural goods are traded across countries, the water needed to produce that product in country A is, in fact, consumed in country B. Country B is therefore not consuming its own local resources when consuming imported food. Allan believed that this mechanism could alleviate irrigation water needs in water-scarce areas when food imports are in place. The virtual water content of a product (measured in liters per kilo) is provided not only by the sum of the irrigation water that has been withdrawn from surface and underground sources in order to grow crops—called “blue water.” Virtual water is also composed of the rainwater consumed by plants and persisting in agricultural soil moisture, which does not percolate down to the aquifers or go back to rivers and lakes. This second component is called “green water.” The green- and blue-water components form the total amount of water embedded in crops, and they are the two components of virtual water. Allan borrowed the concepts of green and blue water from the work of Malin Falkenmark. Virtual water and virtual water “trade” have been largely explored and studied at both local and global levels, becoming the subjects of thousands of papers between 1993 and 2022, which helped uncover global appropriation of a local resource that is unevenly distributed by nature and very often unequally “traded” by humans: water.
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Wastewater Reclamation and Recycling
Soyoon Kum and Lewis S. Rowles
Across the globe, freshwater scarcity is increasing due to overuse, climate change, and population growth. Increasing water security requires sufficient water from diverse water resources. Wastewater can be used as a valuable water resource to improve water security because it is ever-present and usually available throughout the year. However, wastewater is a convoluted solution because the sources of wastewater can vary greatly (e.g., domestic sewage, agricultural runoff, waste from livestock activity, and industrial effluent). Different sources of wastewater can have vastly different pollutants, and mainly times, it is a complex mixture. Therefore, wastewater treatment, unlike drinking water treatment, requires a different treatment strategy. Various wastewater sources can be reused through wastewater reclamation and recycling, and the required water quality varies depending on the targeted purpose (e.g., groundwater recharge, potable water usage, irrigation). One potential solution is employing tailored treatment schemes to fit the purpose. Assorted physical, chemical, and biological treatment technologies have been established or developed for wastewater reclamation and recycle. The advancement of wastewater reclamation technologies has focused on the reduction of energy consumption and the targeted removal of emerging contaminants. Beyond technological challenges, context can be important to consider for reuse due to public perception and local water rights. Since the early 1990s, several global wastewater reclamation examples have overcome challenges and proved the applicability of wastewater reclamation systems. These examples showed that wastewater reclamation can be a promising solution to alleviate water shortages. As water scarcity becomes more widespread, strong global initiatives are needed to make substantial progress for water reclamation and reuse.
Article
Water and Development: A Gender Perspective
Yoshika S. Crider and Isha Ray
The large and multidisciplinary literature on water for domestic use and gender has two primary foci: (1) the negative health and well-being impacts of inadequate access to safe water, and (2) the effects of women’s participation in water allocation and management decisions. These foci are reflected in both the research and policy literatures. Smaller bodies of work exist on water and social power, and on nonmaterial values and meanings of water. The term “gender” refers to the socially constructed roles and identities of girls, women, boys, men, and nonbinary people, but the literature on water and gender to date is mainly concerned with women and girls, on whom inadequate water access places a disproportionate burden.
The water and health literature during the Millennium Development Goals era focused overwhelmingly on the consequences of unsafe drinking water for child health, while paying less attention to the health of the water carriers and managers. Studies on women’s participation in water-related decisions in the household or community were (and to some extent remain) mixed with respect to their effects on equity, access, and empowerment. Both the health and participation strands often assumed, implicitly or explicitly, that water work was women’s work. Yet data on access was mainly collected and presented by household or community, with little effort to disaggregate access and use by gender.
In keeping with the spirit of the Sustainable Development Goals, the post-2015 literature has gone beyond a focus on infectious diseases to include the psychosocial stresses of coping with unreliable or inadequate water supplies. These stresses are acknowledged to fall disproportionately on women. A relatively small literature exists on the health impacts of carrying heavy loads of water and on the hard choices to be made when safe water is scarce. The negative impacts of inadequate domestic water access on girls’ education opportunities, on the safety of those who walk long distances to collect water, and on family conflicts have also been studied. Access is being defined beyond the household to prioritize safe water availability in schools and in healthcare facilities, both of which serve vulnerable populations. Both are institutional settings with a majority-female workforce. The definition of domestic water post-2015 has also broadened beyond drinking water to include water for cooking, sanitation, and basic hygiene, all of which particularly concern women’s well-being.
Intersectionality with respect to gender, class, ability, and ethnicity has started to inform research, in particular research influenced by feminist political ecology and/or indigenous values of water. Political ecology has drawn attention to structural inequalities and their consequences for water access, a perspective that is upstream of public health’s concerns with health impacts. Research on participation is being augmented with studies of leadership and decision-making, both within communities as well as within the water sector. Critical studies of gender, water, and participation have argued that development agencies can limit modes of participation to those that “fit” their larger goals, e.g., efficiency and cost-recovery in drinking water systems. Studies have also analyzed the gendered burden of paying for safe water, especially as the pressure for cost recovery has grown within urban water policy.
These are significant and growing new directions that acknowledge the breadth and complexities of the gender and water world; they do not simply call for gender-disaggregated data but attempt, albeit imperfectly, to take water research towards the recognition of gender justice as a foundation for water justice for all.
Article
Water and Spatial Planning in the Netherlands: The Latent Potential of Spatial Planning for Flood Resilience
Nikki Brand and Wil Zonneveld
In February 1953, an extremely powerful northwest storm surge combined with spring tide led to serious floods in a number of countries around the North Sea. No country was hit as badly as the Netherlands. In the southwest of the country, dozens of dikes were breached, leading to over 1,800 casualties. At the time of the 1953 disaster, a government-appointed committee was working on an advisory report about the desired future spatial development of the most urbanized western part of the country, a region largely below sea level. Responding to the 1953 disaster, the committee discussed whether urban development in deep polders should be avoided. The conclusion was that what is best in terms of the desired urban morphology should prevail. This is indeed what happened when the government had to make a choice about where to develop new towns (1960s–1980s) and, in the next stage, where to locate new housing estates in and around cities (1990s–2000s). Near floods along the main rivers of the country in 1992 and 1995 opened a window of opportunity for a series of major changes in flood risk management and in spatial planning and design, respectively. A massive program called Room for the River was carried out, which included more than 30 projects designed by multidisciplinary teams of civil engineers, planners, and spatial designers. Parallel and follow-up programs were carried out in which spatial design again played a role. The concept of risk was redefined in law, leading to more stringent protection norms for densely populated areas—again, a spatial turn in flood risk management. When flood risk management started to take a decisive spatial turn in the 1990s, spatial planning began to change as well, becoming more sensitive to issues related to water management and flood risks. One of these changes involved the mandatory use of a water test in (local) plan making. The continuation of the trend to give greater weight to flood risks became interrupted as the multilevel arrangement of planning in the Netherlands started to change from 2010 onward. This was largely the result of the neoliberal ambition to decentralize and deregulate planning. One main effect was that the government no longer took a leading role in locational choices regarding where to build new housing estates outside cities and towns. By the end of 2021, the government-appointed Delta commissioner issued a stark warning that over 80% of the houses that will be built by 2030 are situated in less desirable locations. This and other effects of the downscaling of planning competencies made the government decide to start a trajectory to partly recentralize planning. There are two contradictory objectives, however, claimed by different government departments: the production of new homes as quickly as possible and the ambition to make water and soil leading in future choices. Bringing flood risk management and spatial planning together means that locational choices and the spatial design of localities have to move in tandem.
Article
Water Resources Planning Under (Deep) Uncertainty
Riddhi Singh
Public investments in water infrastructure continue to grow where developed countries prioritize investments in operation and maintenance while developing countries focus on infrastructure expansion. The returns from these investments are contingent on carefully assessed designs and operating strategies that consider the complexities inherent in water management problems. These complexities arise due to several factors, including, but not limited to, the presence of multiple stakeholders with potentially conflicting preferences, lack of knowledge about appropriate systems models or parameterizations, and large uncertainties regarding the evolution of future conditions that will confront these projects. The water resources planning literature has therefore developed a variety of approaches for a quantitative treatment of planning problems. Beginning in the mid-20th century, quantitative design evaluations were based on a stochastic treatment of uncertainty using probability distributions to determine expected costs or risk of failure. Several simulation–optimization frameworks were developed to identify optimal designs with techniques such as linear programming, dynamic programming, stochastic dynamic programming, and evolutionary algorithms. Uncertainty was incorporated within existing frameworks using probability theory, using fuzzy theory to represent ambiguity, or via scenario analysis to represent discrete possibilities for the future.
As the effects of climate change became palpable and rapid socioeconomic transformations emerged as the norm, it became evident that existing techniques were not likely to yield reliable designs. The conditions under which an optimal design is developed and tested may differ significantly from those that it will face during its lifetime. These uncertainties, wherein the analyst cannot identify the distributional forms of parameters or the models and forcing variables, are termed “deep uncertainties.” The concept of “robustness” was introduced around the 1980s to identify designs that trade off optimality with reduced sensitivity to such assumptions. However, it was not until the 21st century that robustness analysis became mainstream in water resource planning literature and robustness definitions were expanded to include preferences of multiple actors and sectors as well as their risk attitudes. Decision analytical frameworks that focused on robustness evaluations included robust decision-making, decision scaling, multi-objective robust decision-making, info-gap theory, and so forth. A complementary set of approaches focused on dynamic planning that allowed designs to respond to new information over time. Examples included adaptive policymaking, dynamic adaptive policy pathways, and engineering options analysis, among others. These novel frameworks provide a posteriori decision support to planners aiding in the design of water resources projects under deep uncertainties.
Article
Water Federalism in the United States of America
Rebecca F.A. Bernat and Sharon B. Megdal
Water governance in the United States has followed a water federalism system, in which government functions are shared between federal and state authorities. Water federalism is the sharing of governance across different levels of government over freshwater quantity (water quantity federalism) and quality (water quality federalism). These terms have evolved throughout different eras of U.S. history. Initially, water federalism involved water quantity federalism only, and both state and federal governments had management prerogatives. The 1922 Colorado River Compact and the 1944 U.S. and Mexico Treaty are examples of a combination of horizontal and vertical federalisms. Then, the 1970s marked significant changes in water federalism. First, states regained control over water resources management. Second, water quality federalism arose as a subset of, and at the same time as, environmental federalism. The 1972 Clean Water Act is an example of cooperative federalism, which was commonly used to refer to environmental federalism. In the 21st century, a variety of environmental federalism frameworks have been offered to address the negative effects of climate change on water resources as well as other environmental issues. The contemporary literature on environmental federalism encompasses water quantity and water quality federalism. Throughout history, the role of American Indian tribal primacy has been overlooked in the water federalism literature. Another layer of government, the American Indian tribal government, should be included in discussing states versus federal water management prerogatives. Overall, new water quality and water quantity federalisms must be developed using institutional, sociocultural, and economic principles of good governance that foster a more inclusive, participatory, democratic, and engaged form of federalism.
Article
Water Risks and Rural Development in Coastal Bangladesh
Sonia Hoque and Mohammad Shamsudduha
Rural populations in river deltas experience multiple water risks, emerging from intersecting anthropogenic and hydroclimatic drivers of change. For more than 20 million inhabitants of coastal Bangladesh—living on the lower reaches of the Ganges–Brahmaputra–Meghna mega-delta—these water risks relate to access to safe drinking water, management of water resources for farm-based livelihoods, and protection from water-related hazards. To address these risks, water policies in the 20th century emphasized infrastructure development, ranging from embankments for flood protection to handpumps for rural water supply. However, interventions designed to promote aggregate economic growth often resulted in sociospatial inequalities in risk distribution, particularly when policy-makers and practitioners failed to recognize the complex dynamics of human–environment interactions in the world’s most hydromorphologically active delta.
In Bangladesh’s southwestern region, construction of the polder system (embanked islands interlaced with tidal rivers) since the late 1960s has augmented agricultural production by protecting low-lying land from diurnal tidal action and frequent storm surges. However, anthropogenic modification of the natural hydrology, emulating the Dutch dyke system, has altered the sedimentation patterns and resulted in severe waterlogging since the 1980s. Contrary to their intended purpose of keeping saline water out, the polders also facilitated growth of export-oriented brackish water shrimp aquaculture, resulting in widespread environmental degradation and social inequalities from shifting power dynamics between large and small landholding farmers.
Throughout the 1990s, there were several incidences of violent conflicts between the local communities and government authorities, as well as between different farmer groups. Waterlogged communities demanded to revert to indigenous practices of controlled flooding. Despite being formally adopted as a policy response, the implementation of tidal river management by the government has only been partially successful owing to bureaucratic delays, unfair compensation, and design flaws. Similarly, antishrimp movements gained momentum in several polders to ban the deliberate flooding of cropland with saline water. These narratives of conflict and cooperation demonstrate the complexities of policy outcomes, the unequal distribution of water risks, and the need to integrate local knowledge in decision-making.
Social and spatial inequalities are also prevalent in access to safe drinking water owing to heterogeneity in groundwater salinity and infrastructure investments. Public investments are skewed toward low-salinity areas where tubewells are feasible, while high-salinity areas are often served by uncoordinated donor investments in alternative technologies, such as small piped schemes, reverse osmosis plants, and pond sand filters, and household self-supply through shallow tubewells and rainwater harvesting. These struggles to meet daily water needs from multiple sources pose uncertain and unequal water quality and affordability risks to coastal populations.
The path-dependent sequences of infrastructure and institutional interventions that shaped the development trajectory of coastal Bangladesh exemplify the complexities of managing water risks and varied responses by public and private actors. While structural solutions still dominate the global water policy discourse, there is increased recognition of the nonlinearity of risks and responses, as well as the need to incorporate adaptive decision-making processes with room for social learning and uncertainties.
Article
Water User Associations and Collective Action in Irrigation and Drainage
Bryan Bruns
If there is too little or too much water, farmers may be able to work together to control water and grow more food. Even before the rise of cities and states, people living in ancient settlements cooperated to create better growing conditions for useful plants and animals by diverting, retaining, or draining water. Local collective action by farmers continued to play a major role in managing water for agriculture, including in later times and places when rulers sometimes also organized construction of dams, dikes, and canals.
Comparative research on long-lasting irrigation communities and local governance of natural resources has found immense diversity in management rules tailored to the variety of local conditions. Within this diversity, Elinor Ostrom identified shared principles of institutional design: clear social and physical boundaries; fit between rules and local conditions, including proportionality in sharing costs and benefits; user participation in modifying rules; monitoring by users or those accountable to them; graduated sanctions to enforce rules; low-cost conflict resolution; government tolerance or support for self-governance; and nested organizations.
During the 19th and 20th centuries, centralized bureaucracies constructed many large irrigation schemes. Farmers were typically expected to handle local operation and maintenance and comply with centralized management. Postcolonial international development finance for irrigation and drainage systems usually flowed through national bureaucracies, strengthening top-down control of infrastructure and water management.
Pilot projects in the 1970s in the Philippines and Sri Lanka inspired internationally funded efforts to promote participatory irrigation management in many countries. More ambitious reforms for transfer of irrigation management to water user associations (WUAs) drew on examples in Colombia, Mexico, Turkey, and elsewhere. These reforms have shown the feasibility in some cases of changing policies and practices to involve irrigators more closely in decisions about design, construction, and some aspects of operation and maintenance, including cooperation in scheme-level co-management. However, WUAs and associated institutional reforms are clearly not panaceas and have diverse results depending on context and on contingencies of implementation. Areas of mixed or limited impact and for potential improvement include performance in delivering water; maintaining infrastructure; mobilizing local resources; sustaining organizations after project interventions; and enhancing social inclusion and equity in terms of multiple uses of water, gender, age, ethnicity, poverty, land tenure, and other social differences.
Cooperation in managing water for agriculture can contribute to coping with present and future challenges, including growing more food to meet rising demand; competition for water between agriculture, industry, cities, and the environment; increasing drought, flood, and temperatures due to climate change; social and economic shifts in rural areas, including outmigration and diversification of livelihoods; and the pursuit of environmental sustainability.
Article
What Is Public and What Is Private in Water Provision: Insights from 19th-Century Philadelphia, Boston, and New York
Gwynneth C. Malin
Water became the first public utility in the United States. Before public transportation and public regulation of utilities like electricity and gas, North American cities adopted public water, but this transition is a relatively recent phenomenon. Until the 1830s, both water supply and sewerage were seen as private entities to be managed by private companies and private individuals with nominal assistance from local governments. Water provision was often a blend of public and private efforts, and if residents wanted a well or a sewer built in their neighborhood, they had to help pay for it. Until the mid-19th century, residents of Northeast U.S. cities drew water for domestic uses from local ponds, rivers, and groundwater sources. At this time, procuring water was a daily activity for residents that was linked to economic class.
The 19th century was a key period in the redefinition of water as a public-sector responsibility in the United States. The cities of Philadelphia, Boston, and New York illustrate this change. City officials made the gradual transition from relying on private water companies to implementing public management of the water supply. As increasing urbanization and growing immigrant populations rendered local and privately managed water sources undersupplied, elected officials began to search for new sources of water located beyond city limits. Philadelphia was the first to transition to public water management in 1801, followed by New York in 1842, and Boston in 1848. While each city’s history is unique, city officials took similar approaches to defining public and private with regard to water provision by gradually eliminating private water companies and by increasing funding for public works. Common themes included water pollution, the need to tap new water supplies further from the city centers, disease prevention, fire protection, and financial corruption, within both private water companies and municipal efforts to supply water. While most cities of the Northeast United States transitioned to municipal operation of water supply during the 19th century, the shift was not without its challenges and complexities. Funding shortages often prevented change, but crises, such as fire, drought, and infectious disease outbreaks, forced the hands of municipal officials. Timelines to public water varied. While Boston and Philadelphia achieved permanent public water in the early 19th century, New York experienced a longer trajectory. In each case, public management of water definitively triumphed over private. By the early 20th century, urban Americans conceptualized public and private differently than they had during the 19th century. Water management was at the center of this profound shift.
