Affordable Housing Institute : US

As you know, with my work for Slum Dwellers International, and more broadly on affordable housing in the global south, I’ve been progressively more interested in the finance of basic urban infrastructure, particularly water and sanitation, because if housing is what makes cities, water and sanitation is what makes housing habitable, and hence what controls city scaling.

Everybody needs clean water

 

As Duke law professor Jim Salzman puts it, in his terrific law article Thirst: A Short History of Drinking Water, from which this multipart post will quote extensively:

 

We will find that something as seemingly simple as drinking water washes clear a society’s views toward the role of government, norms, and the market.

 

How’d it get there?  Who built the bubbler?

 

How we think of water, whether as a sacred gift or a good for sale, both influences and is influenced by how we manage access to drinking water. 

 

Water is a surprisingly difficult resource to manage. 

 

Salzman is thirsty for knowledge

 

Water’s physical characteristics confound easy management. 

 

Water is heavy – it is difficult to move uphill. 

Water is unwieldy – it cannot be packed or contained easily. 

 

Indeed, containing water requires both structural strength and a leak-proof seal, so there are very few natural containers that are also remotely portable. 

 

Drinking water is fragile – it easily becomes contaminated and unfit for consumption. 

 

Water is also uncompressable, even as it is infinitely malleable.

 

All these features mean that management of water presupposes technology.  Moving water thus involves securing a technological construct – a bucket, a can, a bottle – and bringing it to the water source. 

 

Got to fill it up!

 

Storing water requires large physical constructs.  Protecting water requires legal and social constructs. 

 

Constantine’s cisterns, under the old city of Istanbul

 

Thus:

 

From earliest times, human societies have faced the challenge of supplying adequate quality and quantities of drinking water.  Whether limited by arid environments or urbanization, provision of clean drinking water is a prerequisite of any enduring society, but it is a multi-faceted task. 

 

1.      Drinking water is most obviously a physical resource, one of the few truly essential requirements for life.  Regardless of the god you worship or the color of your skin, if you go without water for three days in an arid environment your life is in danger. 

2.      Drinking water is also a cultural resource, of religious significance in many societies. 

3.      A social resource, access to water reveals much about membership in society. 

4.      A political resource, the provision of water to citizens can serve important communication purposes. 

5.      When scarce [To be more precise, whenever not freely available in infinite quantity – Ed.], water can become an economic resource. 

 

Throughout history, water sellers have prospered.

 

Velazquez, The Water Seller of Seville, 1620

 

Indian water seller

 

Water seller, Oaxaca, Mexico

 

What then is the relationship between water management, urbanization, housing, technology, and economics or finance?

 

In many parts of the world and for much of human history, however, drinking water quality has been only one of the basic challenges in managing this vital resource.  While not an obvious issue to us in 21st century America, management of drinking water as a resource – who gets it, when they get it, and how much they get – matters a great deal.

 

It’s also critical for the global south.  The most valuable invention imaginable would be a low-tech, low-cost renewable desalinization technology. 

 

Given the critical importance of drinking water to survival, it should come as no surprise that, throughout history, human society and economies have been predicated on ready access to sources of drinking water. Archaeological excavations find early human settlements located at sites with reliable sources of drinking water nearby. 

 

Cities always spring up near reliable fresh-water supplies, such as large rivers.

 

The availability of water for drinking from springs, streams or lakes often meant that plants, animals and other critical goods would have been nearby, as well.  Excavations from the Neolithic time have also found a striking correspondence between settlements and wells.  As societies developed from hunter/gatherer economies to more advanced grazing, the need for secure, abundant supplies of water became even more important. 

 

Water infrastructure predates capitalism:

 

Management of drinking water was central to urban planning in early settlements, as well.  Thus one can find examples of sophisticated water management in virtually every archaeological excavation of ancient civilizations.  Water storage basins with minimum storage capacities of 10,000-25,000 gallons of water have been excavated in the Mesa Verde region of the American Southwest. 

 

A city carved into and under the Colorado sandstone

 

Nancy and I have been to Mesa Verde; a visit is highly recommended.  The cliff dwellings were abandoned in roughly 1400 AD, and while no one knows why, the most plausible theory is a twenty-year drought that drove the Anasazi out, probably southwest where they became the Navajo.

 

All they left were cryptic petroglyphs

 

Large collection and storage structures have been uncovered throughout the Maya Lowlands. 

 

The Yucatan peninsula, home to the Mayan civilization, is a bedrock of limestone that means almost no rivers are above-ground; instead water flows through cenotes (natural cylindrical wells with water of astonishing clarity) and underground rivers.

 

Carved straight down, to join underground rivers

 

Though half a world away, cisterns and wells carved from the rock have been found in excavations at Ebla, in Syria, dating from 2350 BC.  Even earlier water storage sites have been found at Jawa, in north-eastern Jordan, dating from the fourth millennium B.C.  Archaeologists suspect that such reservoirs were important features of town defenses, providing a secure supply of water in case of siege. 

 

Jawa water supply pond

 

Everywhere you turn, secure water supply defines urban viability.  Control and management of water was a strategic military resource:

 

The massive cisterns at Masada, high above the arid Dead Sea, proved critical to the multi-year resistance against the Romans.

 

Enough water to hold out for years

 

James Michener’s mammoth doorstep of a multi-generational novel, The Source, is all about one such spring, in Palestine.

 

 

Water management also defined civilization’s comforts:

 

The Minoan civilization in Crete had flushing toilets and domestic water as early as 1700 B.C., while tunnels directing water from reservoirs and plumbing have been identified from ancient sites in Iran, Palestine and Greece. 

 

Clay pipes, nearly 4,000 years old

 

It defined the limits of civilization: for people to live in a place, they had to obtain and store water:

 

Perhaps the most impressive ancient water engineering in the Americas was constructed by the Incas at Machu Picchu, who faced the challenge of moving water from a distant spring to their capital, located at over 7,000 feet.  Sloping canals delivered water through agricultural terraces to the Emperor’s residence and then, through a series of 16 fountains, down the mountain slope to the city’s residents.

 

Channels at Machu Picchu

 

Meanwhile, because human beings are basically mobile bags through which we pour in water at the top and out at the bottom, management of water also meant management of its byproducts:

 

Water goes in, and … other stuff comes out

 

Developments in water supply technologies have marched hand in hand with developments in sanitation and water treatment.  Any time a community contains enough people to justify public works for drinking water supply, sanitation and water treatment necessarily become important urban issues, as well, to ensure source quality. 

 

Any individual can void in a wilderness, and the wilderness will recover.  Void in an urban setting, and your fellow human beings will become grumpy, even if they do not see you do it, because they will see that you have done it.

 

Sanskrit writings from approximately 2,000 B.C., for example, recommend water purification methods.   Pictures of water treatment devices have even been found in the tombs of the Egyptian pharaohs Amenophis II and Rameses II.

 

You need irrigation to grow grapes in Egypt

 

As a scarce resource, it should come as no surprise that access to drinking water has been governed by rules from the earliest times.  Indeed, rules establishing access to water in arid regions may very well have predated property regimes for land. 

 

Unlike land, which never moves and is thus easy to define and secure, water is fluid (it is often deified with a spirit), so rules and security surrounding water are harder to agree and enforce than for land. 

 

Particularly for nomadic peoples, ensuring available water was a precondition for grazing, not an afterthought. 

 

We thus see very direct links: urbanization requires water, water requires technology, technology requires law and enforcement, and it will also come to require finance (as I previously explored a bit in Meta-finance, Part 1 and Part 2).  With their fourfold advance – water, technology, law, and finance – humanity has advanced all over the globe. 

 

How did this happen, and what does it mean for the world’s rapidly expanding cities and the spontaneous communities that represent their slums?

 

Let’s go back to pre-urban times, when water was free but finite.

 

Palm trees in the desert mean water

 

[Continued in Part 2.]

Send post as PDF to