Understanding and Managing Urban Water in Transition

Résumé En

This book has its origins in a meeting of Australian and French researchers inMontpellier in June 2011, a meeting that was preceded by an approach by FritzSchmul at Springer to Quentin Grafton to write a book on urban water. On theAustralian side, the French–Australian collaboration was initiated by KatherineDaniell and Quentin Grafton from the Australian National University, and on theFrench side, by Olivier Barreteau and Nils Ferrand from IRSTEA and the Embassyof France in Australia. The vision of the principals was to link across disciplines,distance, and language to develop meaningful collaborations and insights that wouldotherwise not be possible.Several research initiatives grew out of the 2011 workshop and have led tovarious outcomes and outputs. One of the outcomes is this volume on urbanwater in transition. The book initially began as a series of ideas in a breakoutsession chaired by Quentin Grafton at the Montpellier workshop, and then, afterthe event, was developed further by all the editors. As editors, our goal has beenbroad: to develop a single framework, applicable to both rich countries anddeveloping and emerging economies, for understanding and acting on urbanwater issues, despite the manifold shifts and transitions underway. We wanted tounderstand 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 followingthe 2011 workshop. All the editors realized that the original group in Montpellierdid not have suffi cient diversity of knowledge and experience to deliver on what wasintended to be a book on global urban water. Consequently, many additional experts,practitioners, and researchers were invited to contribute, and almost all accepted theinvitation.