Water, Sanitation and the Modern City

The technological and political arrangements for the provision of water and sanitation that emerged out of the chaos of the nineteenth-century industrial city can be characterized as the “bacteriological city”. This ideal type, which reflected the design principles of leading engineers, involved the development of centralized, universal and public water supply and sanitation systems in preference to chaotic, expensive and unaccountable private sector provision. Although this universal model became the norm throughout the developed world in much of what is now referred to as the global South the bacteriological city was never fully implemented for a mix of political and fiscal reasons. Most colonial cities only provided adequate water supplies to elite enclaves or to predominantly middle class districts. With respect to sewerage and drainage infrastructure these disparities in service provision were even worse leading in many cases to severe and repeated outbreaks of infectious disease. With rapid urban growth in the post-colonial era many of these inequalities in access to water and sanitation infrastructure have substantially deteriorated, a situation exacerbated by poor public finances, economic instability and deficiencies in metropolitan government.