Resilience Roundtable: Histories of Urban Water Management

Today, urban dwellers tend to think about where their water comes from only when it stops flowing, or when it flows too much. This water usually makes it to residential consumers through an extensive and technologically sophisticated infrastructure that remains largely invisible outside times of crisis.

Across much of human history (and in many parts of the world today), by contrast, the question of where to get water for daily needs was much more immediate. This is especially true of places where large numbers of people gathered together in dense settlements, posing challenges for both the supply of fresh water and the disposal of wastewater and excess precipitation.

While the technologies used to gather and distribute water in the past may have been less complex than those now in use, the basic principles are the same: water is pulled downhill by gravity, soaks into the soil, evaporates into the air, and can be retained and directed by barriers and conduits. The investigation of water management in urban contexts in the past can help us to understand the challenges those societies dealt with and the solutions they developed. Not only are these solutions sometimes relevant to modern challenges in water management in densely-settled areas, but they also help us understand the evolution of the systems we now have.

This panel brings together scholars who study human interactions with water resources in urban environments of the past, from the Romans to the Maya to the modern US Southwest. They will explain how their research illuminates past water management practices, and discuss the connection of those practices with social and historical developments in both the Old and the New Worlds.