Urban Water Sanitation: Urban Water Sanitation

Urban Water Sanitation
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December 10, 2017
For any civilization to exist, the need for a sufficient water supply is almost always a given. Even when viewed historically, it could be seen that most of the cities and metropolitan areas are built along or near water systems, which in turn helped them in more ways than they could imagine. However, one problem with this interaction between human civilization and the environment is that humans tend to overpopulate metropolitan areas to the extent where their numbers exceed the environment’s “carrying capacity”. In this article, two metropolitan cities – Ancient Rome and Manchester – would be compared in relation to the issue of overpopulation and insufficient and/or inefficient water supply. In the succeeding section, the relationship of these two would then be related to the existing problems in the slums these days. Nevertheless, the author believes that in light of the issue of overpopulation, both water supply and waste disposal (which are related to water issues) are important to prevent the spread of epidemics and other health issues.
The main difference between Rome and Manchester when it comes to the issue of water supply is their lack of infrastructures for certain necessities. For Rome, the main problem was that despite the ingenuity of its aqueducts for water provision, it was deemed “incomplete” for it only caters for the houses of the rich and the public places such as the Cloaca Maxima and the public bathhouses during those days (Rodà, 2016). This insufficiency in the water supply had caused many problems since most people would still need to walk a few miles just to be able to fetch water from their houses. However, despite the problems with water p...