Topic 4B: Urban Water Courses

Urban Water Courses

Tim Van Til

Urban watercourses have many uses in cities - one main use being for transportation of sewage and waste. Without these watercourses, waste would build up on the streets and the outbreak of disease was imminent. For example, Cholera is a disease that affected large numbers of people living in cities, due to the contamination of drinking water. Having proper watercourses helped to prevent the spread of this disease, as clean water could be delivered to houses, and separation of sewage and drinking water was made possible.

Whilst transportation of sewage isn’t the most attractive feature of a city, it is definitely one of the most important. The introduction of proper underground sewers was a major step forward, and helped to eradicate many diseases and horrible living conditions.

Watercourses can also, however, be a thing of beauty. Rivers, streams and canals can all be considered watercourses, and offer both practicality and beauty to a city. In the reading on the Canal du Midi last week, it was shown that the construction of such a large canal could produce economic benefit for an entire town. Laborers were given jobs working on the canal; they were given fairly good incentive and decent working conditions to take part in this mammoth job.

In this week’s reading by Ian Douglas, it focuses on how watercourses were often vital in considering the location of cities, as well as the relationships between rivers and cities themselves. Large cities such as Paris, London, Bangkok and Chongqing are all located on rivers. The reading discusses the advantages of these cities being sited on rivers, as well as the disadvantages of floods and pollution associated with the location.

Flooding by avulsion helped shape agricultural settlement, as crops were positioned to take full advantage of this. Once channel networks were abandoned and canals constructed, the prosperity of these urban settlements did decline to an extent, as natural watercourses were disrupted.

Douglas discusses the impact that the Euphrates and Tigris rivers had on neighboring cities. The water from these rivers was vital to the cities’ survival, for drinking and irrigation. However, when these rivers flooded, this proved to be a serious problem for the cities. The watercourses were both vital and problematic to the city.

Douglas also discusses the case of the Indus River in north-western South Asia. It is shown that the original cities were often built right up on the shores of the Indus River, however flooding destroyed many of these cities and forced them to build citadels right on the shore, to help assist with the flooding. To this day, flooding still occurs on the Indus River, claiming many lives. ‘Since independence in 1947, floods in the Indus River Basin in Pakistan have claimed more than 7,000 lives and cause massive infrastructure and crop losses’. (Douglas, 2013). Similar occurrences can be seen with the Yangtze River, with many deaths and destruction to cities caused by flooding of the river. Concrete retaining walls had been built since to help defend the cities from massive floods.

Many towns on the Mississippi River were not built on hills or raised up, but they had built walls and levees to keep floodwaters out of their cities. The levees often broke and gave way, and in 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans when levees gave way and floodwaters tore through the city. Most people living here didn’t have insurance, and merely packed up and left.

In conclusion, watercourses can serve cities with drinking water, water for irrigation, transportation of sewage, and much more. However, these urban watercourses often lead to devastation of cities via flooding, leading to cities trying to combat this through the construction of infrastructure such as concrete walls and levees. Even so, natural disasters such as floods can be unimaginable in scale, and it is next to impossible to predict just how devastating a certain flood may be. Hurricane Katrina is an example of how cities may think that they are safe and protected from floods, however the scale of such natural disasters can be underestimated.

References:

Douglas, I. (2013). Cities: An Environmental History. London: IB Tauris, pp.233-251.