Abstract
The size and complexity of large cities creates the ‘urban water’ sustainability issue: where water transport and treatment technologies, public water services, including public water supply, sewage collection and treatment, and storm water control, had become the object of specific policies, separate from water resource allocation. Today, large metropolitan areas cannot take natural abundance for granted any more, and they need to protect and to manage water resources, if only to reduce the long term cost of transporting and treating water. In this chapter, we describe the historical development of water services in European metropolitan areas, placing the technological developments in their geographic, socio-economic, and political contexts. Our framework follows the successive contributions of three paradigms: civil engineering, sanitary engineering, and environmental engineering. Civil engineering has to do with the ‘quantity of water’, and it allows water to be moved in and out of cities, up hills, and under floors. Sanitary engineering has to do with ‘water quality’, and water treatment has given cities more freedom to take water from nearby rivers and to reduce impacts of sewer discharge. Lastly, environmental engineering has the potential to overcome supply-side shortcomings: it can use demand-side management, water conservation, water allocation flexibility; it can also provide an integrated approach to water services, water resources management, and land use policies.
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Turning to private status does not mean privatisation: in many countries, municipalities or water districts are allowed to set up private companies which they fully own. In France this only became possible in 2010, and it is one of the reasons why cities often keep a private operator under various delegation formulas.
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See Chap. 7 by Rinaudo et al., this volume, on the development of domestic boreholes in France and Australia.
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Full cost recovery includes operation and maintenance costs, plus a fair share of depreciation of invested capital, plus environmental costs (environmental impacts which are not internalised), and even users’ costs including the impacts of resource scarcity and opportunity cost on water value.
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Initially, four small reservoirs were constructed: Crescent (in 1931), Chaumençon (1934), Champaubert-aux-Bois (1938), and Pannecière-Chaumard (1949), but they were not sufficient to mitigate Seine floods and droughts. The largest, Pannecière-Chaumard, stored only 80 million m3; so three additional larger reservoirs were constructed: Lac d’Orient (1966), Lac du Der (1974), Reservoir Aube (1990).
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Which means it was decided on the basis of floods and funded with government grants, while it was needed mainly for scarcity reasons. The next ones were rightly funded by the Agence de l’eau, on the basis of water needs, not floods.
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The additional reservoir was planned by mayor J. Chirac and his experts, but was abandoned because of cost (in addition, the water supply companies said they had to purify the water anyway and the probability of having a major drought was very low). Furthermore, Paris water demand went down by 16 % between 1990 and 1998 (Cambon-Grau 2000). Following a brief pause, demand has again started to decline; today consumption is almost 30 % less than in 1991.
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France has created the option of SPANC (service public de l’assainissement non collectif) in areas that, under the EU Urban Wastewater Directive, are specifically designed with no sewers.
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Barraqué, B. (2015). Three Engineering Paradigms in the Historical Development of Water Services: More, Better and Cheaper Water to European Cities. In: Grafton, Q., Daniell, K., Nauges, C., Rinaudo, JD., Chan, N. (eds) Understanding and Managing Urban Water in Transition. Global Issues in Water Policy, vol 15. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9801-3_9
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