The aim of this article is to study how the Swedish cities Linköping and Norrköping treated new working-class suburbs during the period from 1860 to 1890, by looking at the extension of piped water supply. The author concludes that working-class suburbs were located in poor, geographically unfavourable and unsanitary places, to which extensions of water could be technically demanding and expensive, which led to frequent urban inability or unwillingness to help. It is also suggested that by denying water cities separated spatially between city and suburb, thereby underlining already existing environmental and even spatial injustice between the two.