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open sewers and then often covered and
by urbanites in their everyday
life. 26 Rivers, often described through anthropomorphizing discourses, have always
been essential to the life of cities
forgotten
and indeed, most cities are riverine cities. 27 They
could provide drinkable water if there was no available spring and serve the
ideal. 28 They also offered industrial water, as a source of energy or a
component of industrial processes. 29 They were indispensable to boat traf
sanitary city
c, to
oat
timber or to ship merchandise to and from the agglomeration.
After the Middle Ages, the diversi
cation of water use increased. At the same
time, in the Western world, a form of expertise about water management was
developed. In the eighteenth century, the French monarchy created the
rst corps of
engineers partly specialized in waterworks (the
). In cities,
scientists assessed water quality based on physical criteria (taste, odor, appear-
ance
Ponts et Chauss
é
es
). They did not know yet that a great upheaval was about to happen in many
cities, with the huge increase of industries (mining, iron and steel mills, textile
factories
) which materialised the advent of a new age of urban water resources.
In Europe, the purity problem had long been raised (in the Middle Ages, for
instance, some crafts needed clean water for their processes), but only from the
nineteenth century onwards did speci
c sciences devoted to this issue develop. In
part this was due to the cholera epidemics which struck industrialising nations and
their capital cities (like Paris and London) several times: 1832, 1854, 1884, 1892
and 1910. Providing safe water became a public health issue and a duty for public
authorities after different investigations demonstrated the link between bad water
and outbreaks of these diseases. 30
From the early nineteenth century onwards,
the problem of supplying city
dwellers with suf
cient quantities of water to meet their basic needs (drinking,
washing, cooking) and the issue of meeting the contradictory demands from
industrialists (some of them needing pure water, others using rivers as receptacles
of their wastes), became increasingly acute, throughout Europe and North America.
In most cases, the quest for an expanded water supply system arose indeed, mainly
from industry. Urban environmental historians can establish links, in that case, with
business history. The water-supply service became a real industrial venture: eight
companies shared the water market in London, the most populated city in the world
at that time. In 1852, French capitalists created the Compagnie G
rale des Eaux
which took over water-supply of Lyon, the second largest city of the country; a few
years later, it also obtained a contract with the Parisian administration, under the
auspices of its ruler, the Baron Haussmann. This new age of
n
é
é
used sophisticated devices and breakthrough technological innovations: powerful
steam pumps, big reservoirs,
conquest of water
long canals (like the Canal de Provence for
26 Castonguay and Evenden ( 2012 ).
27 Blache ( 1959 ).
28 Melosi ( 2000 ).
29 Steinberg ( 1991 ).
30 Hamlin ( 1990 ).
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