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. 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 vice versa. A second main theme emerging from this collection is the sheer diversity of strategies used by past societies to secure water and negotiate scarcity or excess and conditional changes in social, environmental, and economic development. Firmly embedded and operating within urban landscapes, as illustrated above, ancient cities had several, often integrated ways to tap water from multiple sources and distribute it. We tend to consider rainfall as the main, if not the only, source of water for cities that have no immediate access to freshwater (surface) bodies. However, there are ample examples of past water systems integrating the management of groundwater reserves, water catchment stability, and soil moisture together with capturing and storing technologies to secure water supply for subsistence, food production, and resource processing. This is particularly well illustrated by examples from the Jordan desert (Raja & Lichtenberger, 2019), the Mediterranean island of Sardinia (Cespa, 2018), and Scandinavia (Poulsen & Gundersen, 2019) where ancient urban societies turned challenges into opportunities by developing a wide range of waterworks and solutions. A third, equally important aspect concerns how water availability, management, and changes shape societal power structures, behaviors, and belief systems. Control over, and access to, water determines the survival of people, species, and habitats, as we learn from the ancient cities in pre-Columbian North America (Baires, 2015), Maya Belize (Lucero, Harrison, Larmon, Nissen, & Benson, 2016) and medieval south Italy (Jäckh, 2019), where urban water availability and provision are intertwined with wealth, power, and prestige. These case studies show the intangible, often hidden influence of water on cultures, processes of decision-making and social relations, and the underlying mechanisms of adaptation in urban contexts. Water and Urban Landscapes Managing Urban Water Valuing Water and Urban Cultures