Water and ancient cities: Urban supply systems

Abstract

Water supply is widely recognized as one of the greatest challenges to urban living today. Whether negotiating shortage or excess, securing and sustaining a reliable supply of water for human consumption, health and sanitation, processing and manufacturing of goods, and all other aspects of life is a complex undertaking in urban contexts. To complicate provision even further, sources and resources of water are diverse, change over time, and interact with and are influenced by complex biophysical and cultural processes. People have been living in cities for millennia and across very different environments: from the earliest urban centers of the Near Eastern arid lands to the market towns growing along waterways and wetlands of northern Europe to mention but two profoundly different cases. How did ancient cities obtain water? What was water needed for? To inform these questions, we have curated a collection of articles that address how ancient urban societies have dealt with water, securing supply and negotiating changes over time across a wide spectrum of cultures, environments, and periods of time. Within the wide range of articles offered by WIREs Water to date, our selection currently presents case studies that illustrate different regional and cultural contexts for two main reasons. First, we want to illustrate the sheer diversity and complexity of past water-city interactions, with a focus on the creativity, dynamism, and flexibility expressed by historical water supply systems. Second, we aim to expose some of the links between opportunities and challenges shaping the water-city interplay over the long term. In our globalized world, urban living is characterized by increasing speed in the way we operate, relate to our surroundings, and satisfy our needs. Modern urban water supply is largely dependent on pipeline provisioning for fast and reliable delivery. While this collection does not explore the contribution of historical developments to issues concerning present and future urban water systems, we hope that the articles presented will inspire thinking beyond our times and reflecting on how past urban societies have secured water provision over the long term. Featuring profoundly different historical developments, the case studies in this collection illustrate some general threads running across three main topics. 1 | WATER AND URBAN LANDSCAPES Local environmental conditions have played a critical role not only in shaping approaches to and maintenance of past water management strategies but also in the spatial organization of the urban settlement. For the same services, chiefly water supply to the urban population, ancient societies developed adaptive strategies that appear tailored to their environments. This is clearly demonstrated in the examples from Mesopotamia (Altaweel, 2019) and Mesoamerica (Chase & Cesaretti, 2018; Mejía Ramón & Johnson, 2019) that show how water supply was organized across urban landscapes, whereby conditions in the hinterlands had direct implications for the central areas and vi...

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“…Water supply has already been recognized in historic cities as one of the greatest challenges for the creation of major cities and administrative centers [4]. The basic tasks of urban planning have been solved since ancient times, such as the ancient cities of Rome, Pompeii, Mesopotamia, ancient India [4][5][6][7]. Sewerage networks were addressed at the same time [8][9][10].…”