Increased urbanization coupled with demand for water has placed the provision of a sustainable supply of clean water high on the agenda for large cities. The approach of this book is to describe various contexts in a range of global cities, starting with many of the larger cities in Asia, including Beijing, Hong Kong, Osaka and Singapore. These are compared with other cities across Europe, Australia and the Americas.

In these largely mature water economies, per capita use has usually begun to decline or at least level out, although the causes are not clear. Yet provision costs have...