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Video 6.1: A Historical Development Path – UK, London and Manchester
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En provenance du cours de University of Manchester
Water Supply and Sanitation Policy in Developing Countries Part 1: Understanding Complex Problems
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University of Manchester
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À partir de la leçon
Development Paths for Water and Sanitation Services
Rencontrer les enseignants
Prof Dale WhittingtonProfessor
Manchester Business School
Dr Duncan ThomasLecturer
Alliance Manchester Business School
[BLANK_AUDIO]
In this video we're going to build upon the water development path
idea from the exercise you just did for a rural African village.
You considered there the sequence of choices a village community might make.
And the associated costs to move from no improved water
and sanitation, to full coverage of piped water and sanitation services.
We're going to extend this idea to a national scale.
We're looking at the UK, and particularly the capital city London, England.
And Manchester here in the North of England.
Will see a development path across centuries.
Will see it takes a long time, also lot of money.
We'll find path dependency.
In other words, limits to have easy or affordabilities to
reconfigure piped water and sanitation systems after they've been installed.
As expectations change nationally and globally over time.
I should make clear that I'm not a historian.
I'm relying on secondary sources here and we're interested in the main trends.
As there's a lot more you could say when looking
at the history of a very old global city like London.
It's possible to look more into the details of these
kind of historical paths or transitions as they are referred to.
By our colleague here at th University of Manchester, Professor Frank Geels.
Frank's work is one of your readings for this week.
In it, he explains how he frames
long term socio-technical developments using a multi-level perspective.
Frank's paper looks in detail at what happened when the
Netherlands moved from cesspits to sewers in the 19th century.
So, why look at the UK in a
mook on developing country water and sanitation issues.
Well there are a number of reasons.
First, returning to our conceptual model of water
and sanitation interventions taking place against the dynamic baseline.
Looking at the UK, highlights the long term importance
of the dynamic baseline and the local conditions within it.
We'll see that local politics and governance,
industrialization, development of other utility services and housing,
at the same time as pipe sanitation, and
changing social attitudes and practices are all important.
This complicated picture avoids us thinking that a
long term water development path is straight forward.
We can also look at the long term picture in the
UK to see that this kind of path was not inevitable.
There were several public health milestones
and scientific breakthroughs in the 19th century.
They were important, but they're only part of the story.
And we'll see that the story is not finished.
The dynamic baseline moves on.
There are new expectations for the design and
operation of water and sanitation systems in the UK.
Realizing there are other aspects to the dynamic baseline,
not just technological developments for instance, helps us understand why
nearby perhaps quite similar countries with similar scientific knowledge,
like the Netherlands case that Franks explores in his paper.
Lunked after the UK, and only invested in sewer systems some decades later.
Second, the UK path stretches across many centuries.
It took a long time.
As we go through the story, you'll see just
how many repeated expensive capital intensive investments have been involved.
Third, again referring back to your exercise this week,
the UK had a long period of water first development.
The UK grew with limited pipe water from a mix
of public and private sources from about the 13th century onwards.
And yet it lacked a proper network of piped sewers until the late 19th century.
In fact, none of the hundreds of UK cities
and towns that installed piped water in the 19th century
are known to have put in piped sewers at
the same time, apart from a few short private sewers.
And this is according to historian Professor Joel Tarr,
who is also one of the readings this week.
Knowing that the UK did this, is worth keeping in
mind when thinking about what development paths other countries may take.
Fourth, the U.K.'s path over time shows us that a water development
path can lock a country into situations that later generations then reject.
When society's expectations have changed, and other
base line conditions have emerged, like climate change.
In other words, there is path dependency.
The UK was a pioneer with its large-scale sanitation
infrastructure investment at the end of the 19th century.
There have been many benefits.
However, this first mover approach has left the UK with a system
that is now costly to reconfigure some 100 or 150 years later.
Decisions made long ago can strain current
planners and policy makers who wish to remould
the system to meet new expectations like
resilience to climate change and increasing quality standards.
Fifth, the U.K. story is interesting because of its outlier features.
The bulk of the UK water sector in England and Wales was fully privatized in 1989.
The assets were sold, not just the service business as a concession.
A related auditory here is that the water sectors in neighbouring
water sectors in Scotland and Northern Ireland remain in public ownership.
Because of this full divestiture privatization, the
UK also has a highly developed regulatory situation.
But we'll return to this in our follow-on look.
The UK also has relatively low water demand for agriculture.
It's rainy here and households and industry are the majority water users.
These local water conditions are important to know when thinking about
transferring any learning about the UK to other countries around the world.
To take you through the UK's water development
path, I'll focus first on the capital, London, England.
Most of the early developments were in London.
And most of the institutional changes that affected
the rest of the UK were legislated from London.
So it's a reasonable place to begin.
It would be ideal to take you through the UK's
path using a graph of changing water and sewer coverage conditions
over time, like the kind of data we saw from the
JMP data in the global status quo conditions from week one.
It could also be great to know what water prices were going back a long time.
Sadly, this data was simply not available.
Instead, I'm going to use estimated and census population data that do go back
far enough to cover the water development path that I want to show, it's
not perfect, but this will help me to show how the UK's path happened
as population increase and this would of
lead to probably an increasing need for water.
And sanitation services.
On the graph here you'll see the population
data is split into inner and outer London.
Inner is orange, blue is outer.
You'll note that the population before the
18th century is much lower than modern levels.
The scale of water and sanitation systems used there were
far different from what we see today, and what came later.
As we'll see.
You'll also note that the horizontal x axis here is nonlinear.
I've done this so that we can see the later population growth more clearly.
As we start the development path, I'd like to make clear that of course
we're not talking about the modern London that you can see in this photo.
Instead, we're talking about a much
smaller settlement, something about the size of
modern day Hyde Park in the centre
of London, that's about 2.5 square kilometres.
This is a picture of inner London with modern street names
on it, showing the wall built by the Romans around the
second and third centuries A.D. London, or Londinium as it was
known, was settled from at least 50 AD by the Romans.
Roman water wheels lifting water out of deep wells have
been found in London dating from 63 and 108 AD.
But before where we'll pick up the path, the 13th century, most people in London
and the rest of the UK would have
been using local, unimproved, surface and ground water.
From simple springs and wells.
The 13th century saw the first known deliberate plan to supply pipe
water to collection points, or so called conduits, across the city of London.
The Tyburn Brook came into the London area, from the
northwest of the village of Tyburn in the county of Middlesex.
Around 1236, the city of London authorities agreed with Tyburns'
Land owner to protect and canalize the natural springs of
Tyburn, and to transfer the water in lead pipes, dug
about 2 meters underground, by gravity flow to inner London.
This was about a three kilometre journey.
It started from where modern day Bond Street underground tube station is.
That's about one kilometre east of high park and round down to
Charing Cross, strand fleet street and the cheap side areas of the city.
At the end, an ornamental great conduit
stone edifice was built to distribute the water.
A number of streets in London have the word
Conduit in them, because of this underground canalized river.
The Great Conduit took around 30 to 40 years to build.
Probably from around 1245-1285.
The water from the Great Conduit was mainly free to the general public.
The Conduit and other smaller conduits for public use that were built
along its route seem to have been valued and celebrated at the time.
The stone Conduit edifices protecting the supply points were ornamental.
More than once they were even, quoting from the
quote here, made to run with wine instead of water.
Orders were also given from the city authorities, in 1337 and
1345, that water should not be wasted at the Great Conduit.
Researchers have also found evidence of illegal
connections into the Conduit in around 15th century.
In 1480, the Great Conduit was rebuilt but was
later destroyed in 1666 in the great fire of London.
It was not rebuilt.
Being in the middle of the road, it would have obstructed horse-drawn road traffic.
Some rich households in London also had
private piped water supplies by this point.
This picture shows new Gage House.
This is the start of a 60 kilometre
gravity flow water aqueduct that was built from 1609
to 1613 to connect the River Lee in the north of the city to the city of London.
This probably cost around 19,000 British Pounds at the time.
That's a few million pounds in current money.
King James I paid the, half the cost in return for half
a share holding of a new water company, The New River Company.
That was created at the time to sell water from this aqueduct.
The New River is still functioning as a source for London and
brings about 200 mega liters a day to London ready for water treatment.
Institutional changes were taking place here too.
Around 1541, Parliament authorized a public water
supply in London for the first time.
Sometime later in 1698, the first statutory water company
responsible for larger scale water supply in London was created.
So by this time in the UK's water development path, the city
of London had had canalized protected
springs delivering the public water supply.
It had built an aqueduct to get more
wholesome water to the city, and it had state
authorized water supply and some small private water companies,
one of which had been underwritten by the King.
So this was the water first beginnings for London.
But what about sanitation?
Network sanitation throughout this period were pretty much nonexistent.
There were reports from 1579, of 60 houses
in a typical London street sharing just three latrines.
Into the 19th century, London had overcrowded
slums with waste and excrement in the streets,
and any visitors to slums would normally put down stones to be able to walk around.
You can see conditions in 1852 in this illustration, A Court for King Cholera.
Two developments here compounded the situation.
First, water was available from stand pipes and some
in-house intermittent pipe supplies from various public and private sources.
This water was used in new flush toilets, but the waste from them had nowhere to go.
It overflowed cesspool, flooded basements, spilled into the streets.
In 1815 legislation committed draining of the streets and cesspools
into open sewers that then went into the river Thames.
Here's a cartoon portrayal of what the water
in the River Thames looked like as a result.
A monster soup.
The text underneath reads, being a correct representation
of that precious stuff doled out to us.
At the top, the picture is dedicated to the London Water
Companies, showing that they were operating at this time in 1854.
An act of Parliament in 1852, banned the use
of the Thames as a drinking water source from 1855.
But its use continued somewhat.
Here's an illustration from 1858 that shows Father Thames introducing his
offspring of deep theoria scrofula, cholera to the fair city of London.
There are also dead animals shown floating in the river.
The poem going along with this stresses how the river is
a vile cesspool, but from whence is made the beer we drink.
The population was increasing at this time,
increasing the water supply and sanitation system challenges.
If you remember the orange section of the graph here is
Inner London, basically most of the city of London at this time.
There the population density is important.
Here we can see that the problems were probably becoming more acute
because population density was increasing as
well as absolute population was growing.
According to Thames Water's historical records in 1805, the beginning of this
graph, there were only 150,000 cesspits for the 1,000,000 London population.
It's no surprise then that overflowing cesspits were being illegally connected
to surface water drains before the 1815 legislation made this legal.
The condition of the River Thames even caused a temporary succession of
the government in 1858 due to the offensive smell during a hot summer.
The drape curtains and parts of the parliament building facing the river were
treated with bleach to try to counter the smell coming from the river.
The Great Stink in 1858 because it effected politicians directly, is
sometimes presented as a turning point for UK Public Health and Sanitation.
There were also tens of thousands of deaths
from waterborne cholera reported up to about the 1850s.
And other disease outbreaks around this time.
There are also scientific developments at this time.
For instance, John Snow's work with death maps,
to isolate the cause of the transmission of cholera.
But I think it's a bit simplistic to say that
any of these aspects in isolation, inevitably led to the massive
installation of centralized sewer systems that then took place from
the middle to the end of the 19th century in London.
I'm going to use a simplified way of
understanding the situation to critique this kind of view.
I'm going to present the intervention of installing pipe
sewer systems as resulting from at least three aspects.
You can see these here in the Venn diagram.
There's science, including the evidence.
Politics and implementation.
And implementation here includes the available resources for delivery.
This Venn diagram in fact adapts a chart
from 2013 about how civil servants in the Government
Office for Science in the U.K. present the role
of science coming into current policy making for academics.
In part, this is to mitigate the expectations of academics
to get immediate action in policy from their particular research findings.
So let's take the science part first.
There were some major scientific developments around the 19th century
that influenced water and sanitation planning and policy in the UK.
Just to give some examples, Chlorine had been isolated
in 1774 by Swiss German Chemist, Carl Wilhelm Scheele.
And it was then confirmed to be an element in the UK by Sir Humphrey Davie in 1810.
[SOUND] Dr. John Snow, the English physician had ordered
water supplies to be disinfected with chlorine after linking.
Cholera deaths to them, in London, from research
he'd done on contamination of hand pumps in 1854.
From 1910 onwards incidentally, UK water supplies were permanently
chlorinated, rather than just in response disease, to disease outbreaks.
By linking the cholera deaths to a dozen or
so contaminated hand pumps around Broad Street in central London.
Using simplified street maps showing dots or bars, like the
one we see here, for the number of deaths around hand
pump locations, John Snow challenged the prevailing science that disease
was a property of bad air, otherwise known as miasma theory.
Pasteur's later work enabling a microbiology view of disease
followed in the 1860s, further undermining the miasma theory.
Interestingly though, it was miasma theory that determined the design, more or
less, of the sewer systems installed in the UK in the 19th century.
The sewers were intended to remove disease
causing sewer gases from decaying material from households.
In other words, massive sewer investments were not
directly justified on the basis of certain current science.
Even without these scientific breakthroughs, issues
of public health and the very
definition of public health that emerged
at this time, we're already being explored.
This was, in part led by Sir Edwin
Chadwick is typically credited with having established the
link between public health and good sanitation in
the U.K. This was one outcome of Chadwick's career.
But if you look carefully at his
investigations into health in towns and cities in
England in the 19th century, he did have other concerns upper most in his mind.
Chadwick was born in Manchester, then trained
in London after his family moved there.
In the 1830s, he became involved in the reform of poor laws.
The poor laws at the time operated locally through
parishes and magistrates, to allocate welfare relief to the poor.
Chadwick came to favor a more centralized administration for the poor laws.
There's a lot that could be said here, and I recommend Professor Christopher
Hamlin's entire book on public health and social justice in the age of Chadwick.
But in overview, the 19th century was a hotbed of
conflicting ideas and controversies about what to do with the poor.
During population growth and urbanization, there were
issues such as long working hours for children
and adults in dangerous factories of the industrial
revolution, conditions of malnutrition and starvation, overcrowded housing.
And the escalating degradation of public
health and the environment, among other things.
Chadwick's framing of piped sewers as the solution to the
various social ills of the time was very specific and particular.
There was every reason instead to build soup
kitchens, medical dispensaries, to regulate workplaces and working
hours better, to build schools, or to follow
other ways of following a path of economic development.
Ultimately, it seems that the argument came down to
filth or destitution as the cause of poor public health.
If destitution and poverty were the causes
of poor health, this places more responsibility
on the growing state to provide things
like good housing, food, and reasonable working conditions.
Over, if the cause was filth.
Then the environment could be improved in a more politically benign way without
pointing the finger at more challenging causes, such as inequality and so forth.
Throughout this time leading to his 1842 and 1843 reports on sanitation and
the formation of the first ever public health board in the UK in 1848,.
Chadwick was selective in his use of evidence collected
by various local doctors and other researchers around the UK.
He supported his arguments with matching evidence.
It's fair to say that Chadwick presented a view of environmental determinism.
The idea that the physical and even mental health of people were conditioned by
filth in the environment and so if
the filth were removed well being would follow.
Hamlin describes Chadwick's mobilization of sewer
systems to address public health in
this attempted apolitical way as like using a gentle policeman for the poor.
Neither the science nor the politics alone however,
explain the massive sewer building program that followed.
As we know already from the course, water
and sanitation systems are very expensive and capital-intensive.
The situation in 19th century London was no different.
Four aspects help us to explain how resources were mobilized.
First, in 1847, a new rateable
value charge helped to fund sanitation improvements.
This was a tax based on property value.
Second, a cost benefit analysis, of sorts, was carried out to show
that the liquid and solid sewage harnessed and collected from the new sewers.
Could have an economic value.
Estimates were also made of about 23 million pounds
saved each year from fewer deaths because of the sewers.
These were put forward by the Health of Towns Commissioner, Lyon Playfair.
It's interesting, in terms of the issue of being aware of status quo conditions, that
we saw in week two, that concerns were
raised about the impact of centralized pipe-sewer networks.
On existing excrement or night soil collection businesses.
There was concern for how the market would shift from many vendors being able to sell
sewage to agricultural users, to just those located
near the sewage outfalls of the new system.
Third, there was a moral reform element to the sewer investment program.
The 19th century was a time
of philosophical, political and religious format.
And improving sewers had a benign philanthropic appeal.
Fourth, large urban improvement programs were underway in various
domains at this time, such as with transport and electrification.
We'll return to the resources and costs in a later video for this week.
There we'll look at the capital expenditures on the water
and sanitation system in England and Wales from the 1920s onwards.
Data before that time are difficult to separate out because
the cost specifically for water and sanitation are not separated.
However we do know, and I'm quoting
Christopher Hammond's research here, that by 1905 local
authority [UNKNOWN] in England and Wales for
waterworks and sewers was nearly 100 million pounds.
That's around 9 billion British pounds in current money.
The scale of sewer program implantation was startling, and Sir Joseph [UNKNOWN]
83 miles of brick interceptor sewers were built, from 1858 to 1874.
Over 3 hundred million bricks were used for the sewers over all.
A mixture of pumps and gravity flow was
used to take the collected sewage and storm
water flows away from houses, businesses and streets,
to the east of London towards the sea.
It's worth remembering that these systems were
never intended to treat the discharges, though.
They simply displaced the problem, as we'll see in the following videos.
The image on the left here shows how Bazalgette was caricatured.
Because of this unprecedented sewer program.
The image on the right is telling.
It shows in cross-section how the north-most interceptor
sewer, the pipes that are in the lower right
closest to the river Thames here, sat along
side newly built sections of the London Underground network.
The resources deployed to develop this part of
London, known as the Victoria Embankment, was significant.
Multiple infrastructure services arrived at once.
The London Underground Tube transport network was expanded, as I've
said, to run part of the district line under embankment.
Electrification of the area also took place.
The embankment itself was a huge project.
It reclaimed part of the river Thames.
Almost 90,000 square meters of land were reclaimed in this way.
And this took place about 5 years, from 1865 to 1870.
So a
combination of scientific developments, local
political decisions and ways of defining
the problem and significant resource allocations
steered the U.K.'s water development path.
It was not one aspect in isolation.
The Netherlands case, I mentioned at the start of
this video, is an example of these interconnected situations.
So why did the Dutch water development path differ, when
it was so close geographically, scientifically and culturally to the UK.
For the science part, Dutch scientists allied a bit more with
the miasma theory for longer, but that's only part of the story.
The political system in the Netherlands was
also far more decentralized than in the UK.
And this apparently hindered rapid top
down decisions about sewer system investment.
There would have also been a shift from
labor intensive cesspool emptying, to capital intensive sewer systems.
But that's not really different to the UK.
For implementation, greater decentralization of the
political institutions also fragmented available resources.
Local politicians seemed unwilling or unable
to marshal the large capital resources needed.
Or to divert them from other political projects and priorities.
There was also an existing workable practice of sewage di, disposal to
canal systems in the Netherlands which
practitioners were apparently unwilling to displace.
More details on this case are in
the Professor Frank Geels reading for this week.
But it's fascinating that such a similar and nearby
country rejected sewer system plans for it's capital Amsterdam repeatedly.
In 1870, 1897 and 1902 due to costs and
other concerns before a system finally opened in 1913.
This was several decades after the
installation of large piped sewers in London.
To wrap up, we've seen the early parts of the UK's water development path here.
They were dependent upon a sequence of
local conditions and decisions made over time.
The intervention to install large scale pipe sewers in particular in
the 19th century was the result of various factors and baseline conditions.
These included scientific developments, policy and planning decisions and the
ability to marshal resources to water and sanitation system development.
In the next video, we're going to
continue looking at the UK's water development path.
We'll look there at how knowledge practiced and attitudes were changing over
time along time along side the changing water and sanitation system conditions.
Thanks for watching this video.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
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