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Debates on the total or partial privatization of water usually follow the rationale that efficient and rational management is best left to the private sphere. In this paper and using a historical example, we attempt to assess critically this assumption arguing that efficiency and rationality in resource management are and have been an asset of collective management as well. We present the case of the Barcelona Water Company, run by its workers during the Spanish Civil War, to illustrate how in certain cases, gains in economic efficiency and rational management that had been impossible to accomplish under standard private management, were achieved by collective action. Workers management during this period not only improved efficiency and rationality but to a large extent did so also procuring equity and fairness in the provision of water to the citizens of Barcelona despite the harsh conditions brought about by the war.

Potash extraction in the Bages region (Spain) is the cause of historically significant environmental impacts, such as the salinisation of the Cardener and Llobregat rivers. Recently, several projects that will increase the production of brine and salt tailings in the near future have been announced. Following Martínez-Alier, in this paper I characterize the struggle around potash extraction and its socioenvironmental impacts as an ecological distribution conflict and I argue for a historical approach that brings together the analysis of water, potassium and chlorine flows. Despite the relevance of potassium as an irreplaceable plant nutrient together with phosphorus and nitrogen, research about potash extraction related conflicts remains mostly unaddressed. In this case, archival and statistical sources are used to present potash extraction in the Bages in relation to the increase of water salinity in Barcelona during the 20 th century. I devote special attention to the technological infrastructures developed in order to technically fix the problem of water salinisation, such as the brine collector or reverse osmosis filters, while highlighting the power relations behind the choice of such technologies. The historical approach to this case study shows that Martínez-Alier' s definition of externalities as cost-shifting successes applies to the economic burdens related to the environmental remediation, mostly covered by public budgets.

The scientific literature distinguishes between primary or natural and secondary or human-induced salinization. Assessing this distinction is of vital importance to assign liabilities and responsibilities in pollution cases and for designing the best policy and management actions. In this context, actors interested in downplaying the role of certain drivers of human-induced salinization can attempt to neglect its importance by referring to natural salinization, in a similar fashion to other pollution and health-related cases, from tobacco smoke to climate change. Potash mining, which has experienced continued growth during the last decades and is a significant contributor to salinization, is prone to originate such controversies because natural salinization from the saline geological catch can be mixed with salinization produced by mining waste such as brines and mine tailings, thus obscuring the distinction between causes. By reviewing the long-standing social and environmental conflict caused by potash mining in a region of Mediterranean climate—the Llobregat river basin—in this article, we highlight the importance of the impacts of salinization on human health and provide a critical social science perspective on salinization processes.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Salt in freshwaters: causes, ecological consequences and future prospects’.

Abstract. Combining historical climatology and environmental history, this article examines the diverse range of strategies deployed by the city government of Barcelona to confront the recurrent drought episodes experienced between 1626 and 1650. First, our reconstruction of drought episodes for the period 1525–1821, based on pro pluvia rogations as documentary proxy data, identifies the years 1625–1635 and 1640–1650 as the most significative drought events of the period 1521–1825 (highest Drought Frequency Weighted Index of the series). Throughout the article, we focus on human responses to drought and discuss how water scarcity was perceived and confronted by Barcelona city authorities. We present the ambitious water supply projects launched by the city government, together with the construction of windmills as an alternative to watermills in order to mill grain, as attempts to cope with diminishing water flows. The context was aggravated by political instability, related first to the tensions between the centralising efforts of the Spanish King Philip IV and later to the impact of the Thirty Years’ War in the border region between the French and Spanish Crowns (1635–1659). Finally, we interpret the efforts of the city government to codify and appropriate knowledge about urban water supply as an attempt to systematise historical information on infrastructure to improve institutional capacities to cope with water scarcity in the future. These efforts materialised in the elaboration of the Llibre de les Fonts de la Ciutat de Barcelona (“Book of Fountains of the City of Barcelona”), a manual compiling the knowledge of Barcelona’s water supply from source to tap, written by the Barcelona water city officer in 1650, after three decades of experience in his post.

This paper investigates the critical role of workers to enhance the resilience of water supply services in cities at war through analyzing the case of Madrid and the Madrid water company Canales del Lozoya during the Spanish Civil War (1936)(1937)(1938)(1939). We argue that securing the protection of vital urban flows mediated through infrastructures is a key objective of cities under attack. In doing so we contend that examining how those affected by the interruption of these flows cope with the situation represents a valuable but largely neglected form of water management. We illustrate how quotidian knowledge about the urban geography of water flows may have important repercussions for the war effort itself. In a nutshell, the case of Madrid offers an early account of the critical role of water workers in sustaining "urban ecologies under fire" securing the complex urban metabolism while also contributing to the struggle against invading forces.

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