Frost, Lionel <br/><br/>
Water Technology and the Urban Environment:  Water, Sewerage, and Disease in San Francisco and Melbourne before 1920/ 

 -  Sage,  2020. 
 - Vol 46, Issue 1, 2020 ( 15-32 p.). 
<br/><br/> The challenges cities face in supplying safe water and disposing effectively of sewage and wastewater are affected by historical and environmental conditions and the long-lasting effects of choices of infrastructure. This article provides case studies of two similar cities, San Francisco and Melbourne, from the mid-nineteenth-century gold rushes to 1920, to show how differences in geography and governance structure can shape water technologies in a path-dependent way. While the two cities developed safe water supplies early in their histories, these were not well integrated with sewerage systems. The use of typhoid death rates, which provide a proxy for water quality and urban pollution, reveals the impact of defective water technology on the urban environment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.