Sink or SUWM

Climate change, environmental degradation and poor water management are turning Pakistan into a water scarce country.

Sir Ganaga Ram’s samadhi, like other buildings built at the time and before, sits facing the River Ravi in an area that has now come to be known as Karim Park in Lahore. When the samadhi was built, the river provided one of the ways of approaching the city. Newer structures have been built facing the roads that lead to the newly developed and densely populated Karim Park and now stand with their backs to the river.

With rapid urban development, the speed and manner in which Lahore has sprawled has also changed the way we perceive and treat the River Ravi. We have literally turned our backs to it!

This metaphor serves well to raise the fundamental question: what is our hydro-social contract; our relationship, as a society, to our water resources?

In “Transitioning to Water Sensitive Cities: Historical, Current and Future Transition States”, a paper delivered at the 11^th International Conference on Urban Drainage, a team of Australian academics surveyed their water practices from the early 1800s onwards to identify a typology of six different type of city states and their relationship to water.

The Water Supply City is said to represent the first modern urban water state. Here, the hydro-social compact was relatively straightforward: the effective provision of safe and secure water supplies. Local governments played their part by attempting to ensure “limitless fresh water” as a public right at low cost.

With the discovery — sometime in the mid to late 1800s — that people were getting ill due to pathogen infection of water supplies, London and other cities around the world led the transition to The Sewered City, which involved the design and construction of a sewage system that could dispose of effluent outside cities and usually into receiving waterways that were perceived as environmentally benign. The existing hydro-social contract was expanded so that local water boards assumed responsibility of public health protection to rapidly growing urban populations.

The Drained City emerged after the Second World War with cities rapidly sprawling and suburbanising due to the automobile and low cost of fossil fuels. Large urban footprints upset delicate ecological balances, leading to flooding and property damage, and so, engineers began to develop new cognitive tools (rainfall records and drainage design standards, for example) to meet the challenges they faced. With the large amount of waste they carried, waterways began to be viewed as a nuisance and we begin to see houses built facing away from them for just this purpose. The hydro-social contract remains essentially the same with the centralised service delivery functions of local governments. However, we see more complexity due to the addition of multiple urban water service providers that arose as a consequence of suburban sprawl.

The next three city-state types are not found in history but are located in theory and academic rhetoric. These are the Waterways City, the Water Cycle City and the Water Sensitive City. These differ from existing practices and the existing hydro-social contract in two fundamental ways: firstly, due to rise of internationally recognised principles of environmental law and sustainability, the environment is no longer perceived as benign; and secondly, they recognise the limitations of centralised planning in the sustainable management of water resources and drainage. These models would radically alter the hydro-social contract as they introduce new stakeholders and this, in turn, brings tension between those who still carry the traditional values around water supply and those who seek to adopt new practices. The hydro-social contract of such city states would be adaptive and continually evolving, underpinned by a flexible, decentralised and multiple institutional regime.

The study of water states emanates from the study of sustainable urban water management (SUWM). In Pakistan, where we are told that we are fast becoming a water-scarce country, where we are told that climate change, environmental degradation and poor water management are resulting in the serious misuse of one of our most precious natural resource; where even the fundamental right to access to clean drinking water is being violated, it is time to sink or do SUWM.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 10^th, 2013.