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Marseilles), water towers (like in Chicago). Infrastructure which modi
ed the urban
environment and its peripheries had counterparts in the cultural domain (see below).
In the case of London, social and political factors accounted in the late establish-
ment of a publicly operation of water supply. Broich argues that politics and
environment intertwined to drive the physical reorganization of the environment
of resource collection and delivery
and the changes in the administration of the
environment: in London, at the turn of the twentieth century, the eight companies
competing on the water market were bought by the new Metropolitan Water
Board. 31 Studying history of the provision of safe water to urban dwellers from the
end of the nineteenth century also highlights environmental inequities on various
scales, between the haves and have-nots. People receiving puri
ed water and
bene
ting from sanitation
above all, people who are able to pay for these services
suffer less from waterborne diseases than people lacking connections to the
public water supply and sewer system. In 1995, this was the case of more than 80 %
of the residents of important Asian capitals (Manila, Dhaka, Karachi).
4.4 Floodings, Pollution, Depletion: The Dark Side
of Water Resources History
History of water resources during the Industrial Era can neither be reduced to a
series of failures, nor to substantives like
. The
setting up of safe water supply systems allowed for the urban expansion and even a
part of the demographic growth of the twentieth century. From the middle of the
nineteenth century onwards, especially in Great Britain where worked a national
Rivers Pollution Commission, riverine dwellers and users became aware of the
damages produced by the rapid expansion of industrialization and urbanization.
British streams experienced
pollution
and
deterioration
rst the tremendous increase of chemical waste dis-
posal and pollution by textile industry, and were severely affected because of their
relatively low
ow rates. Different responses could be proposed to the challenge of
pollution: legislative answers were not suf
cient and had to be completed by more
practical and technical solutions. These technological
xes were offered by the
rapid progress made in microbiological theory and in bacteriological analysis,
which means by the urban science and technology.
Nevertheless, efforts of public health of
cials and sanitary engineers proved
inef
cient to prevent what became the major source of water alteration: industrial
discharges, whose chemical compounds and effects on living organisms remained
hardly known for a long time. In almost every part of the Earth, from the Columbia
River (USA) to the Danube River (Europe), since the late 18th century and
increasingly from around 1850, rivers have been the receptacle for toxic loads from
mining, chemical production or the food-processing industry. For a long time, the
31 Broich ( 2013 ).
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