Rethinking urban metabolism: water, space and the modern city

'Water is a brutal delineator of social power which has at various times worked to either foster greater urban cohesion or generate new forms of political conflict’. In the paper which follows, Matthew Gandy explores this statement by looking at the expansion of urban water systems since the chaos of the nineteenth‐century industrial city. In this early period, the relationship between water and urban space can be understood by the emergence of what he calls the 'bacteriological city’, defined by features such as new moral geographies and modes of social discipline based upon ideologies of cleanliness, a move away from laissez‐faire policies towards a technocratic and rational model of municipal managerialism,…