Our third panel focuses on the connection between water and urbanization. These presenters will highlight how urban growth and wartime exigencies reshaped metropolitan watersheds as well as how local populations experienced these changes and how socio-cultural values penetrated discourses about water management. The growth of modern cities not only incited disputes over water use among city dwellers, but also fomented lasting tensions between cities and their rural hinterlands.
Chair: Abhishek Nanavati (Georgetown) is a third-year PhD student in East Asian history. His dissertation project is titled, "Transnational Occupation: U.S. Military Settlements in Japan, Korea, and Okinawa: 1945-1972."
Commentator: Jordan Sand (Georgetown) is a professor of Japanese history. His published work includes House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space and Bourgeois Culture, 1880-1930 (2004) and Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects (2013). Professor Sand is currently researching the history of marginal and informal settlements in Tokyo and other Asian cities.
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Jeffrey Egan (University of Connecticut) |
Design, Development, and Demise: Building Boston’s Quabbin Reservoir, 1927-1939
Sixty-six miles west of Boston lies the largest lake in southern New England. On sunny days, its crystal-clear waters reflect a shoreline of coniferous trees—red and white pine, spruce, larch, and hemlock, mostly. In summer, visitors flock to its shores to hike and fish, sometimes chancing a glimpse of one of the bald eagles that have taken refuge there in recent years. Yet, this is no nature reserve or national park; it is Quabbin Reservoir—an artificial lake built from 1927 to 1939 to supply water to Greater Boston. When the Massachusetts legislature approved this project, it gave the Boston Metropolitan District Water Supply Commission unprecedented power to purchase, manage, and transform a watershed spanning 185.9 square miles—nearly 2% of the entire state. My paper tells the story of an engineering marvel under construction and a rural landscape—the Swift River Valley—torn apart. Engineers and laborers bored a twenty-five-mile aqueduct tunnel under the Massachusetts countryside—the world’s second longest at the time—and built two large earthen dams to hold back the 412-billion-gallon reservoir. They reforested the surrounding hills with ten million new trees and chopped and burned their way across the thirty-nine-square mile basin. But, in the process, they also displaced 2,500 rural residents, removed 7,500 graves, and erased four towns from the map. This paper—a chapter from my dissertation Watershed Decisions—examines this event as an expression of what historians such as Adam Rome, Bruce Schulman, Paul Sutter, and others have come to describe as the rise of the “environmental management state.” Here I explore the building of Quabbin Reservoir and the attendant human costs: the pain of eviction, loss of home, and deeply-strained relationship between urban Boston and rural western Massachusetts during the first half of the twentieth century.
Sixty-six miles west of Boston lies the largest lake in southern New England. On sunny days, its crystal-clear waters reflect a shoreline of coniferous trees—red and white pine, spruce, larch, and hemlock, mostly. In summer, visitors flock to its shores to hike and fish, sometimes chancing a glimpse of one of the bald eagles that have taken refuge there in recent years. Yet, this is no nature reserve or national park; it is Quabbin Reservoir—an artificial lake built from 1927 to 1939 to supply water to Greater Boston. When the Massachusetts legislature approved this project, it gave the Boston Metropolitan District Water Supply Commission unprecedented power to purchase, manage, and transform a watershed spanning 185.9 square miles—nearly 2% of the entire state. My paper tells the story of an engineering marvel under construction and a rural landscape—the Swift River Valley—torn apart. Engineers and laborers bored a twenty-five-mile aqueduct tunnel under the Massachusetts countryside—the world’s second longest at the time—and built two large earthen dams to hold back the 412-billion-gallon reservoir. They reforested the surrounding hills with ten million new trees and chopped and burned their way across the thirty-nine-square mile basin. But, in the process, they also displaced 2,500 rural residents, removed 7,500 graves, and erased four towns from the map. This paper—a chapter from my dissertation Watershed Decisions—examines this event as an expression of what historians such as Adam Rome, Bruce Schulman, Paul Sutter, and others have come to describe as the rise of the “environmental management state.” Here I explore the building of Quabbin Reservoir and the attendant human costs: the pain of eviction, loss of home, and deeply-strained relationship between urban Boston and rural western Massachusetts during the first half of the twentieth century.
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Nikiwe Solomon (University of Cape Town) |
Fluid Relations: The Kuils River in the History of the Cape Town Metropole
Using the Kuils River as a case study, this paper reflects on the human-river relationship in the history of the Cape Town metropole. Drawn from ethnographic research, the paper explores the ways of relating between the various actors and how they have enacted the Kuils River in relation to the city’s history. The paper demonstrates that in South Africa, the history of the discourse around water management is often highly anthropocentric, technical and assumes that there is a singular viewpoint from which to develop and implement solutions. However, even hydrological approaches to water are not free of socio-cultural values and the Kuils River case study demonstrates this. The threat of the poor water quality, poor service delivery and tensions arising from inherited colonial spatial planning and development agendas have generated conflicts between nature, science, techno-efficiency, legal instruments and politics. Through looking specifically at the river course, in recent history and now -- through aerial photos, early maps as well as oral narratives, the paper traces the river’s entanglements with the city. The paper looks at the history of the ecologies of practice along the Kuils, the role of power, becoming, belonging, subsistence and livelihoods on the urban periphery. From the research, a theme that came out quite strongly was that of the “undesirables” and waste streams. The paper therefore look at the history of the “undesirables” and waste. It explores the efforts to manage and control the expansion of these “undesirables” beyond allocated spaces of the Cape Town metropole.
Using the Kuils River as a case study, this paper reflects on the human-river relationship in the history of the Cape Town metropole. Drawn from ethnographic research, the paper explores the ways of relating between the various actors and how they have enacted the Kuils River in relation to the city’s history. The paper demonstrates that in South Africa, the history of the discourse around water management is often highly anthropocentric, technical and assumes that there is a singular viewpoint from which to develop and implement solutions. However, even hydrological approaches to water are not free of socio-cultural values and the Kuils River case study demonstrates this. The threat of the poor water quality, poor service delivery and tensions arising from inherited colonial spatial planning and development agendas have generated conflicts between nature, science, techno-efficiency, legal instruments and politics. Through looking specifically at the river course, in recent history and now -- through aerial photos, early maps as well as oral narratives, the paper traces the river’s entanglements with the city. The paper looks at the history of the ecologies of practice along the Kuils, the role of power, becoming, belonging, subsistence and livelihoods on the urban periphery. From the research, a theme that came out quite strongly was that of the “undesirables” and waste streams. The paper therefore look at the history of the “undesirables” and waste. It explores the efforts to manage and control the expansion of these “undesirables” beyond allocated spaces of the Cape Town metropole.
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Xiangli Ding (SUNY Buffalo) |
A New Man-made Disaster? A Study of Small Hydroelectric Projects in Wartime Southwest China
It is well known that the Chinese Nationalist broke the dike of the Yellow River to delay the march of Japanese army in a destructive way. Meanwhile, the Nationalist also built hydropower projects in the southwest, trying to use water in a more constructive way. Before and during the War of Resistance against Japan (1937-1945), the energy crisis stimulated the Nationalist government’s surveying, planning and building of hydropower projects in southwest China. Through examination of the Longxi River project and Fuyuan Electrical Company in the area of the wartime Nationalist capital of Chongqing, this paper analyzes the interactions among warfare, energy, rivers and local community in the southwest. When there was insufficient water in the rivers or the reservoirs to drive the turbines, factories and other electricity consumers had to adjust their daily behavior based on the ultimate natural and not completely controllable rise and fall of rivers. In addition, this paper underlines the social effects of those projects. The hydropower plants undermined riverside community’s right of using water by submerging watermills and farmlands. In a short term, only those upscale households and businesses in town benefited from the hydropower project, not farmers along the river, or anyone residing around the plant and the dam. Thus, they emotionally attributed an unexpected flood to the building of dam on the river, blaming it as the source of a new man-made disaster. In sum, through rebuilding waterscape in the southwest, those hydropower projects not only provided energy for the War of Resistance against Japan, but also stimulated tensions among local society.
It is well known that the Chinese Nationalist broke the dike of the Yellow River to delay the march of Japanese army in a destructive way. Meanwhile, the Nationalist also built hydropower projects in the southwest, trying to use water in a more constructive way. Before and during the War of Resistance against Japan (1937-1945), the energy crisis stimulated the Nationalist government’s surveying, planning and building of hydropower projects in southwest China. Through examination of the Longxi River project and Fuyuan Electrical Company in the area of the wartime Nationalist capital of Chongqing, this paper analyzes the interactions among warfare, energy, rivers and local community in the southwest. When there was insufficient water in the rivers or the reservoirs to drive the turbines, factories and other electricity consumers had to adjust their daily behavior based on the ultimate natural and not completely controllable rise and fall of rivers. In addition, this paper underlines the social effects of those projects. The hydropower plants undermined riverside community’s right of using water by submerging watermills and farmlands. In a short term, only those upscale households and businesses in town benefited from the hydropower project, not farmers along the river, or anyone residing around the plant and the dam. Thus, they emotionally attributed an unexpected flood to the building of dam on the river, blaming it as the source of a new man-made disaster. In sum, through rebuilding waterscape in the southwest, those hydropower projects not only provided energy for the War of Resistance against Japan, but also stimulated tensions among local society.