City Water Matters: Cultures, Practices and Entanglements of Urban Water

223 Pages·2019·4.859 MB·English

by  Sophie Watson

City Water Matters
Cultures, Practices and Entanglements
of Urban Water
Sophie Watson
City Water Matters
Sophie Watson
City Water Matters
Cultures, Practices and Entanglements
of Urban Water
Sophie Watson
Sociology Department
Open University
Milton Keynes, UK
ISBN 978-981-13-7891-1 ISBN 978-981-13-7892-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7892-8
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore
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For Jessie
Acknowledgements
This is a book that began some years ago, taking shape in fits and starts
over the following years. It was very much a sole endeavour but there are
several people to thank. First, to the people who gave their time to be
interviewed and who seemed to care about water, in its many guises, as
much as I did. Second, the book came together during a month’s visiting
fellowship at the Max Planck Institute in Gottingen; my thanks to Steve
Vertovec for inviting me there. My thanks also to those who read the first
chapter and made me realize I had a book worth publishing, to Paddy
Hillyard for first encouraging me to think about water, to Jeri Johnson
for introducing me to Ulysses, to Edward Wigley for his interviews on
Wudu, to Russell Hay for his idiosyncratic contributions and cuttings, to
Olly Zanetti for his enthusiasm, and to Farhan Samanani for his very
insightful comments on the final draft. The earth without water, and all
who live on it, will not survive. As climate change activists put it: The time
to act is now.
vii
Contents
1 C ity Water Matters: Cultures, Practices and Entanglements
of Urban Water—An Introduction 1
2 P ublic Water Features: Assembling Publics, Enlivening
Spaces, Promoting Regeneration 15
3 C onsuming Water: Habits, Rituals and State Interventions 43
4 R iver Powers: Assembling Publics, Connections and
Materials in a Global City 73
5 E mbodied Water Entanglements: Sex/Gender, Race/
Ethnicity and Class Urban Sanitation Practices 105
6 P ublic Waters: The Passions, Pleasures and Politics of
Bathing in the City 135
7 D ifferentiating Water: Cultural Practices and Contestations 167
ix
x Contents
8 W ater Traces in Urban Space 197
9 Final Word 215
List of Figures
Photo 2.1 Granary Square Kings Cross. Sophie Watson 35
Photo 2.2 A drinking fountain in Venice. Sophie Watson 39
Photo 3.1 Green doctor anonymous. Sophie Watson 57
Photo 4.1 A group of Watermen 78
Photo 4.2 A waterman’s licence. Sophie Watson 79
Photo 4.3 The waterman’s coat. Sophie Watson 94
Photo 5.1 A council laundry—early 1900s. Sophie Watson 123
Photo 5.2 A wash and fold laundry in New York. Sophie Watson 125
Photo 5.3 Sycamore laundry boxes. Sophie Watson 130
Photo 6.1 In de Arte Natandi. Sophie Watson 139
Photo 6.2 The report of the British Spas Federation. Sophie Watson 144
Photo 6.3 Hampstead Women’s Pond. Katrina Silver 153
Photo 6.4 The Bondi Icebergs Pool. Sophie Watson 162
Photo 7.1 Mosque washroom. Sophie Watson 172
Photo 7.2 Wudhu washing instructions. Sophie Watson 173
Photo 7.3 The river Ganges at Varanasi. Jessie Watson 188
Photo 8.1 A horse trough in Sydney. Sophie Watson 200
Photo 8.2 An African water tap 201
Photo 8.3 The Wapping Old Stairs 202
Photo 8.4 A cistern in Rye, Sussex. Sophie Watson 205
Photo 8.5 The Acquedotto in Puglia. Jessie Watson 207
Photo 8.6 Mission Brewery San Diego 210
Photo 8.7 The Bondi sewage outflow plant. Sophie Watson 211
xi
1
City Water Matters: Cultures, Practices
and Entanglements of Urban Water—
An Introduction
In Ulysses (Joyce, 1922) what was it about water that Leopold Bloom
admired? It was its
universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its
own level… its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, artesian wells, eruptions,
torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings,
geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts:
its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent
humidity,… the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of
hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues… its infal-
libility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud,
rain, sleet, snow, hail: What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water,
watercarrier returning to the range, admire? Its strength in rigid hydrants: its
variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons
and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal
estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility
in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations,
bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable,
floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or
watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (ana-
coustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the
globe. (James Joyce’s Ulysses. Episode 17. Ithaca)
© The Author(s) 2019 1
S. Watson, City Water Matters, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7892-8_1