Three Engineering Paradigms in the Historical Development of Water Services: More, Better and Cheaper Water to European Cities

International audienceThe size and complexity of large cities creates the ‘urban water’ sustainability issue: where water transport and treatment technologies, public water services, including public water supply, sewage collection and treatment, and storm water control, had become the object of specific policies, separate from water resource allocation. Today, large metropolitan areas cannot take natural abundance for granted any more, and they need to protect and to manage water resources, if only to reduce the long term cost of transporting and treating water. In this chapter, we describe the historical development of water services in European metropolitan areas, placing the technological developments in their geographic, socio-economic, and political contexts. Our framework follows the successive contributions of three paradigms: civil engineering, sanitary engineering, and environmental engineering. Civil engineering has to do with the ‘quantity of water’, and it allows water to be moved in and out of cities, up hills, and under floors. Sanitary engineering has to do with ‘water quality’, and water treatment has given cities more freedom to take water from nearby rivers and to reduce impacts of sewer discharge. Lastly, environmental engineering has the potential to overcome supply-side shortcomings: it can use demand-side management, water conservation, water allocation flexibility; it can also provide an integrated approach to water services, water resources management, and land use policies

Vergleich der Trinkwasserpreise im europaeischen Rahmen

In this project, the costs of water supply services and drinking water prices in selected Member States of the European Union were investigated. An analysis of available studies and statistics was complemented with research and interviews carried out by experts based in countries under study. The results of these were documented in case study reports following a standard outline. These are documented in their original language version in the materials annex to this report. There are clearly a number of obstacles to international comparisons, factors whose distorting influence can only be assessed and controlled on the basis of detailed knowledge of the units of comparison (supply areas, municipalities, regions, states). Prominent among these are different tariff structures with fixed and variable components, the allocation of costs for new connections, accounting and invoicing procedures, taxes and charges, depreciation of assets and the fiscal and liquidity effects, provisions and reserves, subsidies and cross-subsidies as well as differences in the quality of services rendered. Plausible as the relevance of these factors for international comparisons of water prices may be, data and information which would meet the requirements of a systematic comparison of costs and prices of water supply services are nevertheless not currently available in the Member States investigated. Through this project, a number of shortcomings in existing international comparisons of water prices were revealed and recommendations were reached on possible improvements of such comparisons. (orig.)SIGLEAvailable from TIB Hannover: RN 8422(1998,22) / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekBundesministerium fuer Umwelt, Naturschutz und Reaktorsicherheit, Bonn (Germany)DEGerman