ABSTRACT
Urbanization is considered to be an irreversible force driven, at least in part, by an economic shift in many countries from agriculture to industry, trade and services. Development economists, looking at Asia, Africa and Latin America after World War II, considered urbanization to be a positive development. Urbanization affects the access of peri-urban residents to water in several ways creating the potential for conflict. The usual articulation of the rural-urban water nexus is in terms of the physical movement of water from rural to urban areas, as demonstrated, for instance, in the transportation of water from villages to urban centers through water tankers. Cities are characterized by several changes, in particular an ever-increasing metabolism and ecological foot-print as reflected in the growing demand for natural resources like land and water. Why is it a conundrum? In large part, it is a conundrum because there is a question of who owns the water.
