Understanding and Managing Urban Water in Transition
Abstract
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.
Origin : Files produced by the author(s)