Adelaide: Water of a City

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Contributions from 130 authors
Editor in Chief: Christopher B. Daniels
Photography: John Hodgson
Foreword: Barbara Hardy
581 pages

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Awards:

Stormwater Industry Association (National) award:
Excellence in Research, Innovation, Policy and Education
Planning Institute of Australia (SA) award:
Planning Scholarship, Research and Teaching
Stormwater Industry Association (SA) award:
Excellence in Research, Innovation, Policy and Education

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Water is a basic human need. Essential to our survival, the presence of clean, fresh water has dictated the location and structure of settlements throughout our existence on this planet. The Laetoli footprints bear witness to 3.5 million years of habitation near water. We built our family communities, then towns and finally cities on major waterways to provide drinking water and a method of removing wastes. Water also provides food in the form of plants and animals, enables irrigation for farms and gardens, and influences the social and aesthetic character of our communities.

The search for new locations to base communities invariably involved the search for reliable water supplies. However, as communities grow they can exceed the amount of water available, poison their own supplies, or overcrowd flood-prone regions. Polluted water brings disease, flooding brings death and destruction, and drought can eliminate entire settlements. The management of water is now the biggest challenge for our large and growing population.

Adelaide, the capital city of South Australia, is an isolated community of about 1.5 million people on the south-central coast of Australia. The history of Adelaide is a story of water. Established as an English colony in 1836 on the banks of the River Torrens, the growth, development and survival of this remote community depended on how it used the available water. Eventually the city outstripped its available local catchment and it is now reliant on water from the Murray-Darling Basin system, a system that is drying. Now Adelaide, like many communities around the world, must rethink the way it uses water, and move to embrace sustainable water management.

This book, written by over 130 South Australian experts on water, describes the breathtakingly broad array of roles water plays in the functioning of a large community. It describes the nature of the city as a catchment, the history of water usage and management, and the issues, problems and pitfalls we face in developing sustainable water management practices. As we move into a new environmental era, where we are recognising and dealing with the limitations of many natural resources, this book examines how Adelaide is taking responsibility for its own future, and in particular, its precious water resources.

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