Water technology and the urban environment: Water, sewerage, and disease in San Francisco and Melbourne before 1920

Abstract

The challenges cities face in supplying safe water and disposing effectively of sewerage and wastewater are affected by historical and environmental conditions and the long-standing effects of choices of infrastructure. This article provides case studies of two similar cities, San Francisco and Melbourne, from the mid-nineteenth-century gold rushes to 1920, to show how differences in geography and governance structure can shape water technologies in a path-dependent way. While the two cities developed safe water supplies early in their histories, these were not well integrated with sewerage systems. The use of typhoid death rates, which provide a proxy for water quality and urban pollution, reveals the impact of defective water technology on the urban environment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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