Matthew Gandy. The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2014 and Ruth A Morgan. Running Out?: Water in Western Australia. Crawley, Western Australia: UWA Publishing, 2015. [Book Review

Abstract

Two books published recently, Matthew Gandy’s The Fabric of Space and Ruth Morgan’s Running Out?, both use a focus on water to examine wider conditions of how people relate to their environment. Coming from a geographicalperspective, Gandy’s book is located amongst new work toemerge on water in urban studies and examines six different cities: Paris, Berlin, Lagos, Mumbai, Los Angeles and London. Each city forms a different chapter and focuses on a different point in time to ask questions about how people relate to water in a city environment, and what this revealsabout cultural values. Running Out? in contrast focuses on just one area, Western Australia, but follows this state from the invasion of British colonisers to the present day, documenting the relationship different people had to the land and its water. This work takes as its specific focus hydroresilience, and documents the ways in which the Aboriginal peoples’ relationship to this land demonstrated such hydroresilience, however, the colonisers did not respect this and their attitudes, actions, and decisions, contributedto the considerable risk of the colonisers running out of water.