Understanding and Managing Urban Water in Transition

This book has its origins in a meeting of Australian and French researchers in Montpellier in June 2011, a meeting that was preceded by an approach by Fritz Schmul at Springer to Quentin Grafton to write a book on urban water. On the Australian side, the French–Australian collaboration was initiated by Katherine Daniell and Quentin Grafton from the Australian National University, and on the French side, by Olivier Barreteau and Nils Ferrand from IRSTEA and the Embassy of France in Australia. The vision of the principals was to link across disciplines, distance, and language to develop meaningful collaborations and insights that would otherwise not be possible. Several research initiatives grew out of the 2011 workshop and have led to various outcomes and outputs. One of the outcomes is this volume on urban water in transition. The book initially began as a series of ideas in a breakout session chaired by Quentin Grafton at the Montpellier workshop, and then, after the event, was developed further by all the editors. As editors, our goal has been broad: to develop a single framework, applicable to both rich countries and developing and emerging economies, for understanding and acting on urban water issues, despite the manifold shifts and transitions underway. We wanted to understand how urban water is valued, supplied, managed, delivered, consumed, and treated. This volume is the outcome of a 3-year gestation and much hard work following the 2011 workshop. All the editors realized that the original group in Montpellier did not have suffi cient diversity of knowledge and experience to deliver on what was intended to be a book on global urban water. Consequently, many additional experts, practitioners, and researchers were invited to contribute, and almost all accepted the invitation.