Water and the Making of Californian and Australian Cities: Introduction

Comparing California and Australia

California and Australia offer opportunities for fruitful comparative history because of two characteristics they share. First, both were the location of major gold discoveries in the mid-nineteenth century that resulted in large in-migrations, increasing the size of markets and creating opportunities for new activities. Political and institutional settings were conducive to the productive reinvestment of wealth from resource extraction industries. ⁴ In the 1890s, a fresh round of gold discoveries took place in Western Australia, and oilfields helped maintain a boom in Southern California. World War II was a further positive economic shock—a “Second Gold Rush,” as Marilynn S. Johnson titles her history of wartime Oakland and the East Bay area—that prompted a wave of in-migration and industrial growth. ⁵ World War II also boosted Australia’s industrial base, and, in the postwar period, increased international immigration, which provided consumers and a labor supply for the manufacturing sector, most of which was located in the capital cities. In 1870, the population of California and Australia’s major cities totaled around six hundred thousand, two-thirds living in Australia, while a century later, the figure was more than twenty-two million, with two-thirds living in California. ⁶

Throughout this period of urbanization, the housing stock more than kept pace with population growth, with ordinary houses becoming larger and better equipped. The characteristic low-density, sprawling built form of Californian and Australian cities that was established in the nineteenth century is a product of high incomes and the predominance of an Anglo culture that valued detached, single-family homes in suburban settings, rather than urban apartments. ⁷ San Francisco and Sydney are exceptions, having faced geographic and transport constraints to suburban expansion, but after World War I, transport improvements and the rise of the automobile allowed these cities to add new suburbs, with the detached house becoming the standard dwelling unit outside the old core. Meeting the demand for water services in sprawling cities is an expensive process, with population growth and the spread of new suburbs necessitating new sources of supply and extensions to sewerage and storm-water infrastructure. In California, water was also required for the generation of hydroelectricity (most of Australia’s electricity is generated by coal-fired power plants).

The second common feature of California and large parts of Australia is the climate. In Southern California and Southwest Australia, the summers are long, hot, and dry, and the winters cool and wet. This distinctly Mediterranean climate, which also prevails in South Central Chile and South Africa’s Western Cape, is produced by special geographic conditions. ⁸ These regions lie roughly between thirty-two and thirty-nine degrees latitude, with a western exposure to an ocean. They are located on a frontier between tropical climates dominated by easterly trade winds, and those of temperate latitudes dominated by prevailing westerlies. These wind belts shift with the seasons, as the effects of the trade winds meeting hot inland winds create arid summers, and the movement of moisture-bearing westerlies toward the equator create late autumn and winter rains that can be torrential. Outside the Mediterranean region itself, such climates are confined to relatively narrow coastal fringes, as mountain ranges block the movement of oceanic weather fronts, creating rain shadow effects. Where the mountains are not high, as in Western Australia’s Darling Ranges and South Australia’s Mount Lofty Ranges and Central Hill County, the Mediterranean climate extends some distance inland, with winter rainfall creating a wheat belt between twenty- and twelve-inch isohyets, and increasingly arid country further inland. ⁹ Due to the high rainfall, river systems and valleys in nearby mountains provide sites for water storage for cities on the coastal plains.

San Francisco’s cool, dry summer and moist, mild winter climate is influenced by the currents of the Pacific and San Francisco Bay. The city’s long-term average rainfall is almost twenty-four inches per annum, almost all of it falling between November and March. ¹⁰ Further inland, the Central Valley, the long stretch of alluvial plain walled by the Coast Ranges and Sierra Nevada that drains the Sacramento and San Joaquin river systems to San Francisco Bay, has summers that are long and hot. ¹¹ Extending some 600 to 700 miles, and averaging a width of around 100 miles, the Central Valley is prone to flooding as its rivers collect the rain that falls on the mountains. Rainfall is higher in the northern part of the Valley (Sacramento averages 18.5 inches per annum); in its natural state, the San Joaquin Valley is a desert (Fresno averages less than thirteen inches; Bakersfield just over six inches). ¹² Dams, canals for drainage, and irrigation projects have turned the Central Valley into one of the world’s richest agricultural regions.

Farther south, on the alluvial plain of Southern California, between the Pacific and a chain of mountains, Los Angeles averages just more than fifteen inches of rain per annum. However, as Mike Davis observes, this average is an abstraction, due to unpredictable storms from the Pacific that bring intense rain in short periods. In only seventeen of 127 years of recorded rainfall was actual rainfall within 25 percent of the historic average. ¹³ The large floodplain, the shallowness of the Los Angeles River, and the region’s vulnerability to drought (which reduces vegetation that would absorb rainwater and check erosion) make the city vulnerable to flood damage. ¹⁴ While San Diego is subject to drought (annual rainfall average is less than ten inches), the San Diego River also experienced serious flooding in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. ¹⁵

In Western Australia, Perth enjoys relatively high annual rainfall, with a long-term average (since 1876) of thirty-three inches, much higher than that of Australia’s other Mediterranean capital city, Adelaide, which averages twenty-one inches. ¹⁶ However, Perth has experienced a drying trend from the last quarter of the twentieth century. Average rainfall has been declining since 1971, and the figure from 1994 through 2015 was 13 percent below the historic average. Very little rain falls in Perth in summer, the sandy soil does not retain water, and evaporation rates are high. In Melbourne, the climate is a more temperate, oceanic one, with changeable weather conditions resulting from the influence of hot inland winds and air masses, and the cool Southern Ocean. Rainfall averages twenty-five inches per annum, and is distributed more evenly over the year than in Perth and Adelaide. The more northerly east-coast capitals, Sydney and Brisbane, average almost fifty inches of rain per annum, although both are also occasionally vulnerable to drought. Sydney’s climate is temperate, with warm, sometimes hot summers and mild winters, and extreme temperature variations being moderated by proximity to the Pacific. Brisbane’s climate is subtropical, with hot, humid summers, in which thunderstorms are common, and dry, moderately warm winters.

Perth, Melbourne, and Brisbane are built on floodplains. Perth’s Swan River and its tributaries is part of a very large river system, the Avon River, which has a catchment area of more than 46,000 square miles. Perth’s most extensive flooding was in 1862 and 1872, and the city experienced eleven floods with an average recurrence interval of ten years between 1910 and 1983. ¹⁷ Melbourne’s Yarra River drains a catchment of around 2,000 square miles south of the Great Dividing Range, and the city of Melbourne is located on flat, naturally swampy ground. Major floods occurred in Melbourne in 1839, 1863, 1891, and 1934. At more than 5,000 square miles, the Brisbane River catchment, also in the Great Dividing Range, is larger than the Yarra catchment, and is subject to heavier rainfall. Brisbane’s inundation in 1893 was the result of three flood events over three weeks, the 1974 flood was caused by rainfall from decaying tropical cyclones, and the catastrophic flood of 2011, which killed at least thirty-five people, was associated with strong La Niña rain events. ¹⁸

This experience of a high level of demand for suburban living in warm regions, where rainfall can be variable, allows common and contrasting features between Californian and Australian cities to be detected. Such connections may pass unnoticed in case studies of particular times and places if the historian assumes that his or her subject is unique. The challenge for urban historians, as Richard Rodger argues, is to convey the complexity and peculiarities of a particular place, while also “revealing the mechanisms and dynamic qualities, both visible and invisible, which align one place with another, or indeed distinguish it from others.” ¹⁹ Through the study of a single issue that is of universal relevance, water, this series of articles aims to combine detailed empirical case studies, in conjunction with broader processes. While the literature on urbanization in California and in Australia is extensive, comparative studies of the two are rare. ²⁰ The issue of how city or colonial and state governments overcame the challenge of providing water to city dwellers is implicit in much of the literature. Some works provide insight into how households negotiated water scarcity, and what they did with it when it was abundant. Through a comparative approach, studies of cities created under similar conditions can reveal how so ubiquitous an activity as managing water can, with only minor changes, manifest differently in different places. ²¹

Water and Californian and Australian Cities

When Mexico ceded Alta California to the United States in 1848, none of the urban settlements in the region had more than around a thousand inhabitants. Alta California was a patchwork of missions, pueblos, presidios, and rancho lands, with limited commercial activity. ²² San Francisco Bay is the only major natural shelter along North America’s Pacific coast between San Diego Bay and the Puget Sound-Straits of Georgia complex, where Seattle, Tacoma, and Vancouver developed. Under Spanish and Mexican rule, San Francisco Bay and its hinterland was judged to be of little value; British and American trading and hunting ships that operated in the eastern Pacific stopped at Monterey. Just over a week before the peace treaty was signed, gold was discovered, about fifty miles from San Francisco Bay. By the end of 1852, California’s white population increased from 14,000 in 1848 to 250,000; the city of San Francisco, the most convenient gateway to the goldfields, had between 36,000 and 42,000 inhabitants. ²³

After the discovery of goldfields in Australia in 1851, the population of the colony of Victoria increased from 77,000 to 237,000 in three years; in the same period, Melbourne, the main entry port, grew from 29,000 to 97,000. ²⁴ Unlike California, Australia was already highly urbanized prior to the gold rush. British and American sealers and whalers operating in the Pacific called at the British convict settlements at Sydney (established in 1788) and Hobart (1804) for repairs and provisions, and to hire crews. After 1820, the towns attracted increasing numbers of free settlers as the indigenous inhabitants were dispossessed and inland farming and pastoral country was occupied and developed. A third convict outpost was founded at Brisbane (1825); the Swan River colony (and its capital, Perth) and the South Australian Company (and its capital, Adelaide) were established in 1829 and 1836. Squatters from Van Diemen’s Land (present-day Tasmania) established a settlement on the southern coast of the mainland, where Melbourne would be sited, in 1835. By 1851, Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide, with a combined population of 101,000, were established commercial cities, linking prosperous rural hinterlands to world markets. ²⁵

As Carl Abbott observes, America’s Pacific gateways functioned in a similar way to the treaty ports created in China after the opium wars of the early 1840s. ²⁶ In Chinese treaty ports, European and American merchants enjoyed unrestricted trading rights, and were exempted from Chinese law. As gold seekers poured into San Francisco, existing patterns of settlement and resource development were transformed. In the inland valleys and hillsides, a large Native American population was devastated by “a vast mob running amok: tens of thousands of armed males swarming over the countryside, under no general leadership or discipline, restrained by no laws or police, driven by greed, imbued with contempt for all ‘lower’ forms of humanity.” ²⁷ The Anglo intruders imposed taxes and licenses on “foreign” diggers, casting themselves as California’s only legitimate natives. ²⁸ The 25,000 Chinese who arrived in California in the three years after gold was discovered suffered overt racism, through discrimination, violence, and, by the 1870s, laws to restrict further immigration. ²⁹ The economic outcomes of the gold rush were enjoyed by only a small proportion of the miners, with most of the new wealth accruing to urban-based merchants and service providers. ³⁰ Dividends and capital gains were reinvested in transport infrastructure and purchase of land for farming and cattle raising in the Central Valley, made possible by land laws that overrode the earlier rancho grants. ³¹

The commercial gateway cities in California and Australia also resembled treaty ports in that they tended to be built “in the face of local site problems inevitably resulting from the choice of spots whose advantage for trade were accompanied by serious disadvantages for the physical welfare of traders.” ³² These issues were largely water-related, and the ways in which they were addressed reflected governance structures in the two regions. In both California and Australia, state and colonial legislatures allocated administrative tasks to city governments, but were reluctant to transfer legal powers and resources. Californian cities operated under charters that limited borrowing, established elected boards of supervisors to control public works, and required infrastructure works to be approved by the state legislature. Australian colonial governments worked actively to restrict the power of the capital city corporations (town councils), which were seen as potential rivals, by taking direct responsibility for water supply, and allowing new municipalities to be created as cities grew. ³³

Private companies built and operated water works in Californian cities, under franchise agreements with municipal governments to control prices and ensure adequate public provision of water. Construction of large-scale works to bring water from distant mountain sources was delayed until water supplies were converted to municipal ownership, which allowed financing by city bond issues. In Australia, after early unsuccessful attempts at private provision, a public ownership model of infrastructure provision, based on the ability of colonial governments to borrow cheaply on overseas markets, became established. ³⁴ At the height of the gold rush, the Victorian government borrowed funds to construct the world’s largest artificial reservoir, which, from 1857, supplied water to Melbourne. In Adelaide, the South Australian government constructed reservoirs in 1860 and 1871 to supply the city with piped water. ³⁵ However, public provision of infrastructure was not uniformly effective. In Sydney, where the New South Wales parliament was dominated by rural members who were indifferent to the issue of urban sanitation, as late as 1886, water supplies were piped from polluted sources, and residents in poorer areas relied on water from wells and standpipes. ³⁶ The fragmentation of municipal government often prevented progress in issues such as sewerage and flood mitigation, as many local councils had conflicting aspirations and lacked the capacity to deal with environmental issues beyond their own jurisdictions. By the end of the nineteenth century, Melbourne and Sydney had established statutory authorities with the expertise and resources to tackle water-related issues on a metropolitan-wide basis; in Perth, a state government department, created in 1910, had responsibility for these issues. After the Greater Brisbane Council was created after an amalgamation of municipal councils in 1925, Brisbane became the only Australian capital city with a metropolitan governance system. ³⁷

At the end of the 1860s, when San Francisco’s population had risen to close to 150,000, Los Angeles, which had been founded by the Spanish government in 1781, remained “a filthy pueblo,” and “stunted little slum,” with a population of less than 6,000. ³⁸ Southern California had been only lightly affected by gold, and remained isolated from the vigorous San Francisco region. ³⁹ San Diego, with its fine natural harbor, seemed destined to become the major city of Southern California, but was located at the periphery of the region. In the basin of the Los Angeles River, which reached more than 100 miles inland and fifty miles from north to south, a scatter of small towns, including Los Angeles itself, acted as a service center for local farmers. As D. W. Meinig observes, “One of the problems confronting commercially-minded Americans was that the only decent harbor had no hinterland, whereas much the most attractive area had no harbor.” ⁴⁰ This changed in the 1870s, when the Los Angeles business community, through its involvement in the city council, secured funds through a bond issue to pay a subsidy to the Southern Pacific railroad to detour a new transcontinental line from San Francisco to New Orleans through Los Angeles. ⁴¹ Improvements to the harbor at San Pedro, by constructing a jetty more than a mile long, and dredging a shipping channel, financed by the city government, were completed in 1881. Railroads provided access to eastern markets, and immigrants, attracted by reduced fares and promotion of the health benefits of the region’s Mediterranean climate, flooded in. The development of artesian well technology for use in irrigation, and the planting of citrus groves in the 1870s, underpinned a boom in sales of land for small-scale farms, creating an “Orange Empire” that drove economic growth in Southern California from the 1880s until World War II. ⁴²

The population of the City of Los Angeles grew by an average of 35 percent per annum in the 1880s, rising to more than 50,000 by 1890, and the city required access to new sources of water to continue growing. Under Mexican law and usage, water had been a communal resource, conveyed from the Los Angeles River via open trenches (zanjas) used to supply irrigation water. The trenches were also used for bathing, washing animals, and domestic water supply. Under American administration, a series of private companies piped water from the river to domestic customers, and in 1868, the city granted rights to the entire water supply to the Los Angeles City Water Company, through a thirty-year lease. The city acquired the water distribution system in 1902, placing it under the management of the Los Angeles Board of Water Commissioners, which allowed for the raising of money for water infrastructure through bond issues.

In 1902, the board’s engineers calculated that the Los Angeles River had sufficient water to supply a city of 150,000 people (the population was then 128,000). ⁴³ With the tapping of artesian sources and the introduction of water meters (which reduced consumption by pricing water usage), sufficient water was available for a city of 250,000 by 1907, but the superintendent of the Water Board, William Mulholland, argued that this was an absolute limit to the city’s growth. ⁴⁴ With federal government approval, the city acquired land in the Owens Valley, and voters were asked to approve a bond issue to finance the construction of a 225-mile aqueduct to the city. This was an enormous gamble, as the city would have been bankrupt if the project failed, and Mulholland, who designed the system and would supervise construction, was a self-taught engineer with no experience on similar projects. ⁴⁵ However, voters carried the issue 10-1. When water from the aqueduct first arrived in 1913, the city’s water supply increased fourfold, with enough for around one million people. Municipally owned hydroelectric plants were attached to the aqueduct. Water from the aqueduct was sold to farmers for irrigation, replenishing underground reservoirs via percolation in the process, as well as domestic consumers, but a condition of federal approval was that municipal water could only be sold within the City of Los Angeles. The city pursued a vigorous policy of growth by annexation, expanding from ninety square miles in 1910 to 364 square miles in 1930. ⁴⁶

Los Angeles boomed in the 1920s, fuelled by oil production, the expansion of trade through the port of Los Angeles, banking and finance, tourism, the movies, and land speculation and house construction. Each year between 1920 and 1924, 100,000 people migrated to Los Angeles. Two million people migrated to California in the 1920s; 1.2 million of them to Los Angeles County. ⁴⁷ One of the world’s largest networks of electric streetcars fanned out into Los Angeles County. As the streetcar network became more crowded and operated more slowly, people increasingly turned to their cars for commuting. The construction of wide boulevards encouraged the subdivision of orange groves beyond walking distance of public transport. In 1925, enough land had been subdivided for a city of seven million. ⁴⁸

Los Angeles was by then looking for more water and electricity, and had applied to the federal government to draw water from the Colorado River, equivalent to four times the capacity of the Los Angeles aqueduct. To meet the costs of the project, Los Angeles led a consortium of thirteen cities, called the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD), formed in 1928. Completed in 1941, the 268-mile Colorado River Aqueduct brought water stored in Hoover Dam to Santa Monica, Pasadena, and other cities that had not been annexed by the City of Los Angeles. After a drought in 1944, San Diego joined the MWD, and completed a pipeline to access water from the Colorado River Aqueduct in 1947. The City of Los Angeles extended its own aqueduct to Mono Basin, 105 miles beyond the Owens Valley, in 1940. ⁴⁹

A distinct Southern Californian townscape had emerged in Los Angeles before World War I:

. . . streets lined with eucalyptus, acacia, and palms; city halls, banks, hotels, and mansions reflecting various interpretations of a Mediterranean style—Mission, Spanish Colonial, Italian Renaissance; ordinary house styles shifting from be-towered and gabled Victorian to the horizontal lines, wide eaves, and veranda fronts of the “bungalow” embowered in an array of exotic trees, shrubs, and flowers. ⁵⁰

This conception of the ordinary Los Angeles house—the “Californian Bungalow”—dominated suburban housebuilding in cities throughout the American West and Australia during the interwar years. ⁵¹ In the new suburbs opened up by expansion and electrification of public transport systems, housing densities were low because Californian Bungalows sat broadly across lots, rather than ran down them as earlier styles had done. Even modest designs were thirty-eight feet wide, which necessitated lots with a fifty-foot frontage to allow access down the side. As cars became more common, frontages were widened to fifty-five or sixty feet. ⁵² These lots were large enough for gardens in the front, with lawns that required regular watering. At the rear, the more private space was used for fruit trees, growing vegetables, and keeping chickens. ⁵³ As Robert Freestone notes, the practice of gardening was linked to how householders defined themselves, and the value they placed on space, autonomy, and freedom. “The front yard was both a zone of display and a social contract, a semi-public space of neatness encoding a statement about individual personality in the context of community.” ⁵⁴ The detached suburban house, with its garden, continued to sustain high demand for water after World War II.

This Issue

Lionel Frost’s study of San Francisco and Melbourne, the largest cities in California and Australia in the second half of the nineteenth century (Sydney’s population drew level with Melbourne’s shortly before 1900; Los Angeles moved ahead of the Bay Area in the 1920s ⁵⁵ ), shows that choices regarding water supply and waste disposal made during the gold rushes had lasting impacts on the quality of the urban environment. Both towns secured safe drinking water, but drained untreated wastes to the nearest waterway. San Francisco built a system of underground sewers leading to the Bay; sewage in Melbourne ran along open gutters and drains to the Yarra River, or was collected manually from pan toilets. Using typhoid death rates as a proxy for water quality and levels of urban pollution, Frost shows that before 1890, Melbourne was less healthy than San Francisco, and ranked with the world’s dirtiest cities. When Melbourne began building a sewerage system in the 1890s, its engineers were able to start from scratch. San Francisco’s sewer system could not be rebuilt, so reliant was it on discharge into the Bay. Sydney, in somewhat similar fashion, relied on ocean outfall sewers from the early 1890s. By the 1900s, Melbourne was less vulnerable to typhoid than San Francisco, and compared favorably with other cities worldwide.

In a case study of a working-class district in inner Melbourne, Meredith Dobbie, Ruth Morgan, and Lionel Frost examine public and private responses to two major floods of the Yarra River, in 1863 and 1891. Drawing on theoretical literature relating to governance and the formation of social capital, the authors interpret these responses as being shaped by relationships between state and nonstate actors. After the 1863 flood, the local community drew on existing social networks to support those who were directly affected, and worked with the local city council to develop strategies for flood prevention. Melbourne’s fragmented system of local government, made up of councils willing to respond only to local environmental issues, was not conducive to addressing an issue that extended across municipal boundaries. By 1891, councils had agreed to the colonial government establishing an authority to build a sewerage system across the metropolitan area; this authority took responsibility for widening and straightening the Yarra to prevent further flooding. The response of private citizens to the 1891 flood was more muted than the response in 1863, which reflected the changing socioeconomic condition of the area, and an economic depression that followed in the subsequent years.

Much of the literature on water in Southern California focuses on large infrastructure projects that were built to capture, control, and distribute water for urban and agricultural use. ⁵⁶ Benjamin Hackenberger and Char Miller offer a different perspective, in their case study of the grassroots action by farmers, local water agencies, and irrigation districts to control surface and groundwater in the Pomona Valley. Pomona and Claremont in Los Angeles County, and Ontario in San Bernardino County, were irrigation colonies established by white, middle-class land speculators who envisaged ideal communities, the success of which depended on the protection of mountain and subterranean water sources. Hackenberger and Miller characterize the early twentieth century emergence of a Pomona Valley Protective Association to capture storm flow, control flooding, and recharge artesian sources as a seminal event in the evolution of modern institutional arrangements to manage groundwater in a sustainable way.

Andrea Gaynor argues that the general appeal of a green front lawn was enhanced in the Perth context by a desire to create a “civilized” city in a perceived wilderness, and the practical challenges of keeping houses cool and free of dust and sand. A desire to maintain year-round green gardens, which Gaynor calls “lawnscapes,” called for a water supply sufficient for households to be able to use hoses and sprinklers regularly over the long summers. As Perth boomed in the 1890s, the city’s water supply was expanded to make water available democratically, just as the ability to live in a detached house on a large lot was. The demand for water grew faster than supply in the 1920s, and a further dam was built in 1925. The attachment of Perth residents to lawnscapes locked the city in to a culture of high water usage, and government attempts to impose water restrictions were regarded with hostility. Neither water restrictions, nor the introduction of pricing based on usage, resulted in a sustained reduction in garden water consumption. Demand for water continues to be high, despite declining average rainfall.

Jenny Gregory examines Perth’s water crisis of the 1920s, when the city experienced serious water shortages, especially in new suburbs and in suburbs on higher ground. The cause of the crisis was the city’s aging water infrastructure being required to serve a much larger city than was intended. Expansion of the system was complicated by governance issues, with water supply being controlled by a state government in which rural interests were strongly represented. Hostility of urban consumers toward the government over water shortages was a major political issue, which resulted in the government being defeated in the 1924 election, and a government proceeding with plans to construct a dam the following year.

Perth’s Hills Water Supply Scheme was one of a number of dam-building projects embarked on by state government authorities in the interwar years to increase metropolitan water supplies. Sydney and Melbourne built dams in the 1920s and 1930s in an attempt to keep up with demand for water, and continued to do so after World War II. Seamus O’Hanlon and Peter Spearritt note that this was the work of semigovernment public authorities, which had been established in the late-nineteenth century to address water infrastructure issues on a metropolitan-wide basis. Dominated by engineers, these authorities responded to the effects of “Fordism”—mass affluence, consumption, suburbanization, and car ownership—on the demand for urban infrastructure by adopting a Modernist approach to planning and problem solving. During the postwar economic boom, the solution to water shortages was the construction of ever bigger dams. Brisbane was different, as the City of Brisbane covered a much larger part of the metropolitan area than was the case in Sydney and Melbourne, and decisions on water infrastructure investment were made by the Queensland Parliament, which was dominated by rural members. By the 1970s, the public authorities were being criticized as inflexible and undemocratic, and public sector reforms from the 1980s resulted in them being privatized to meet market-oriented criteria. In Sydney and Melbourne, the construction of new dams was now off the policy agenda, and water authorities responded with pricing based on usage, and campaigns to reduce consumption. O’Hanlon and Spearritt argue that market-based water authorities are as dismissive of the possibilities of adaptation and incremental modification as their Modernist predecessors were, and they are critical of the costly desalination plants that were built in Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne.

Ruth Morgan compares the processes of the early twenty-first-century construction of desalination plants in Perth and San Diego, which offered politically attractive water “independence” at a time of uncertain future supplies. The two cities took different paths to desalinated water, with Perth, as the capital and dominant city in Western Australia, having greater ability to respond to a long drying trend and concerns about the impact of climate change. San Diego’s vision of desalination was based on independence from the MWD, formed in the drought of the late 1980s and 1990s, when water demand from several Californian cities exceeded supply. Perth’s two desalination plants were the model for San Diego’s. However, the former attracted opposition from environmentalists due to its impact on greenhouse gas emissions, and the cost-effectiveness of the infrastructure remains a concern. Morgan is cautious as to whether desalination technology will bring water independence to the two cities, given current climate drying trends; like Gaynor, and O’Hanlon and Spearritt, Morgan stresses the importance of measures to reduce demand for water.

The Australian-based contributors to this issue are members of the Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) for Water Sensitive Cities. CRCs are cross-disciplinary research centers established by the Australian government that bring together subject matter experts and industry practitioners and organizations. The CRC for Water Sensitive Cities was established in 2012 to bring about change in urban water management in Australia and overseas. The research program that the contributors are members of (Project A2.1. Understanding social processes to achieve water sensitive cities) focuses on understanding and delivering the social change needed to support water sensitive cities, through changes in community attitudes and water-related behaviors, and changes in institutional and urban water governance. A key driver of this work is the principle that the historical context of urban and suburban development can inform understandings of current practices and policy options. ⁵⁷ In several of the articles in this issue, path-dependent processes may be observed that shape demand for water and community responses to water-related problems. This urban history suggests that in a time of climate-influenced water uncertainty, conventional engineering solutions to increase water supply may be less effective and environmentally sustainable, than pragmatic, everyday incentives to reduce water demand, through water pricing and public education campaigns.