Urban Water Systems—A Conceptual Framework

We will here show how a focus on water/urban relationships can further our knowledge of city developments, and how urban studies can deepen our understanding of the role of water in societies. The basic premises for this proposal are two facts of huge importance for understanding the history and development of the city; the universal needs of water and the actual, physical waterscape at a given place. All urban dwellers1—from the first few people who settled around a natural spring in a desert in Jericho and built a wall around it almost 10,000 years ago, to the Incas living in the royal city Machu Picchu on a mountain top in the Andes, to stock traders relaxing in spacious apartments in a skyscraper on Manhattan, and to the party officials assembled for one of their meetings in a grand conference hall in Beijing—share the need for one resource: water. The theoretical and empirical importance of this state of affairs can hardly be overestimated: these people all need water to survive, and as long as they live in cities, it has to be provided in one way or another. Water is the only universal urban resource that in this sense is a must and that can be controlled in this strict understanding of the word.