¹ Lorrain, D., ‘La socio-économie de l´eau ou les facteurs invisibles’, in Lorrain, D. (ed.), Gestions urbaines de l´eau (Paris, 1995), 8–11Google Scholar; Fernandez, A., Un progressisme urbain en Espagne. Eau, gaz électricité à Bilbao et dans les villes Cantabriques, 1840–1930 (Bordeaux, 2009), 19–29Google Scholar; Accornero, C., ‘Réformer la ville: ingénierie sociale et politiques urbaines à Turin au début du XXe siècle’, in Marec, Y. (ed.), Villes en crise? (Rouen, 2005), 165–71Google Scholar.

² Matés, J.M., ‘Las empresas de abastecimiento de agua en la España del Norte (1840–1970)’, in Ruiz, L. González and Barco, J.M. Matés (eds.), La modernización económica de los ayuntamientos: servicios públicos, finanzas y gobiernos municipales (Jaén, 2008), 280–4Google Scholar.

³ J.M. Naredo, ‘Costes y cuentas del agua. Propuestas desde el enfoque ecointegrador’, Biblioteca del Agua, Fundación Nueva Cultura del Agua (2007). A prominent contribution to environmental history and its conceptual and methodological framework can be found in de Molina, M. González and Toledo, V.M., Metabolismos, naturaleza e historia. Hacia una teoría de las transformaciones socioecológicas (Barcelona, 2011), 24–9, 59–69Google Scholar.

⁴ Anabitarte, A. Gallego, Rexach, A. Menéndez and Lema, J. Díaz, El derecho de aguas en España (Madrid, 1986)Google Scholar. On this point, see, in particular, the work of E. Swyngedouw, who analyses the relationship between water, its agricultural and industrial uses, and the state: Swyngedouw, E., ‘Not a drop of water: state, modernity and the production of nature in Spain, 1898–2010’, Environment and History, 20 (2014), 68–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ Racine, J.B., La ville entre Dieu et les hommes (Geneva, 1993), 171Google Scholar.

⁶ Ogle, M., All the Modern Conveniences: American Household Plumbing, 1840–1890 (Baltimore, 1996)Google Scholar; Fougères, D., ‘Une approche socio-technique pour l´étude historique des infrastructures et des services urbains: l´exemple du service d´eau potable à Montréal’, in Capel, H. and Linteau, P.-A. (eds.), Barcelona–Montreal: desarrollo urbano comparado (Barcelona, 1997)Google Scholar; Hassan, J., A History of Water in Modern England and Wales (Manchester, 1998), 91Google Scholar; Melosi, M.V., The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore, 2000), 74Google Scholar.

⁷ Portilla, M. González, La formación de la sociedad capitalista en el País Vasco (1876–1913) (San Sebastián, 1981)Google Scholar; García, M. Montero, Mineros, banqueros y navieros (Bilbao, 1990)Google Scholar.

⁸ Bilbao grew from 32 hectares at the beginning of the nineteenth century to 190 hectares after the annexation of Begoña and Abando in 1870, when the population grew to 40,000 inhabitants. The city began the twentieth century with a population of 93,000 inhabitants.

⁹ Portilla, M. González (ed.), Bilbao en la formación del País Vasco contemporáneo (Bilbao, 1995)Google Scholar; Merino, L.V. García, La formación de una ciudad industrial. El despegue urbano de Bilbao (Oñate, 1978)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Matés-Barco, J.M. and López, P.A. Novo, ‘Gestionar la ciudad moderna: la provisión de agua en Bilbao y Madrid’, in Carvajal, L.E. Otero and Trigueros, R. Pallol (eds.), La sociedad urbana en España, 1900–1936. Redes impulsoras de la modernidad (Madrid, 2017)Google Scholar.

¹¹ The Nervión–Ibaizabal basin receives an annual average rainfall of 1,200 mm and can, therefore, be characterized as humid. However, early environmental pollution, caused by intense mining and industrial and urban activity, prevented the use of its water for human consumption. That is the reason why the water from springs in the middle slope of the nearby mountains that surround Bilbao was captured and used for public and domestic supply.

¹² Bilbao Municipal Archive (AMB), Bases preliminares y reglamento de la Comisión Directiva para la conducción y distribución de aguas en la invicta villa de Bilbao, Imp. de Larrumbe, Bilbao, 1857.

¹³ Until 1873, the water service was managed by the city council and representatives of real estate owners. Before the professionalization of municipal management, in the late nineteenth century, the council of owners, who were owners of urban housing and commercial and industrial businesses, advised the municipal authorities. Provincial Historical Archive of Bizkaia, AHFB-AMB Second Section, 0586/088; Third Section, 0416/005; and Fourth Section, 0259/058.

¹⁴ Fournier, P., ‘De la souille à la pollution, un essai d'interprétation des origines de l'idée de pollution’, in Bernhardt, C. and Massard-Guilbaud, G. (eds.), Le démon moderne. La pollution dans les sociétés urbaines d´Europe (Clermont-Ferrand, 2002)Google Scholar; Verdier, I., Façons de dire, façons de faire: la laveuse, la couturière, la cuisinière (Paris, 1979)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ For studies of similar cities, see Berger, L., ‘Annonay et la cance vers 1880: impacts hydrologiques et écologiques d'une ville industrielle’, in Regrain, R. and Auphan, É. (eds.), L'eau et la ville (Nice, 1996), 176–96Google Scholar; Ronzón, J., ‘Abasto y desabasto de agua en el puerto de Veracruz durante el Porfiriato’, in Gardida, D. Birrichaga (ed.), La modernización del sistema de agua potable en México 1810–1950 (Toluca, 2007), 103–23Google Scholar; Ferreira, A. Lúcia et al. , Uma cidade sá e bela. A trajetória do saneamento de Natal, 1850–1969 (Natal, 2008)Google Scholar; Guardia, M., Rosselló, M. and Garriga, S., ‘Barcelona's water supply, 1867–1967: the transition to a modern system’, Urban History, 3 (2014), 415–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ Dagenais, M., Montréal et l´eau. Une histoire environnementale (Montreal, 2011), 68Google Scholar. Dagenais argues that the creation of the city of Montreal resulted from the establishment of a drinking water and sewage network, as well as its regulation.

¹⁷ Stone, M.N., ‘The plumbing paradox: American attitudes toward late nineteenth-century domestic sanitary arrangements’, Wintentur Porfolio, 14 (1979), 295–8Google ScholarPubMed.

¹⁸ The change from public to private ownership of water management is analysed in Montreal by Fougères, D., L´approvisionnement en eau à Montréal. Du privé au public 1796–1865 (Cahiers des Amériques, Septentrion, Québec, 2004), 375–92Google Scholar. In ch. 10, the author states that the water supply started to be publicly managed from 1845, while ascertaining that the service continued to be privately provided.

¹⁹ Specifically, per place of habitation and in m³: from 0.05 pesetas to 5; and from 0.015 to 15; then for each m³ that exceeded the previous volume, 2 pesetas. Industrial rates varied, as they were cheaper for public establishments (e.g. schools, asylums and hospitals) than for private ones (such as hotels and inns, cafés and taverns, bakeries and pharmacies). AHFB-AMB Segunda, 0573/073.

²⁰ Per tap, in pesetas per year: 10 per kitchen sink, 5 per kitchen washbowl, 2 per toilet washbasin, 5 per toilet, 15 per bathtub and 5 per fire hydrant.

²¹ 0.10 pesetas per m³.

²² AHFB-AMB Tercera, 0426/002, and Cuarta, 0398/056. See also ‘La cuestión del agua’, El Noticiero Bilbaíno (ENB), 9 Jan. 1892 and 12 Aug. 1898; and ‘Las aguas del Nervión, el Ganges de Bilbao’, El Liberal, 6 Aug. 1912; and ‘Bilbao en peligro. La política y el tifus’, El Liberal, 7 Feb. 1912.

²³ The municipal laboratory began operating in 1885. Its main task was to analyse the food products consumed in the village, especially those that were suspected to be adulterated. The laboratory staff also analysed the chemical qualities of water and gas.

²⁴ Proceedings of the Municipal Health Board, 3 Jun. 1887, AHFB-AMB Sección Bilbao Libros.

²⁵ The list of inhabitants is an official statistical record compiled and continuously updated in order to establish the number of inhabitants in a municipality. Its creation, management and custody is the responsibility of the town councils. It is different from a census in nature and content, although both are aimed at counting population by head.

²⁶ J. Urrutikoetxea Lizarraga and P. Novo López, ‘Hacia la comprensión de los procesos de modernización: diseño, perfiles y alcance de una base de datos: padrones y País Vasco, 1825–1975’, Biblio 3W, Revista Bibliográfica de Geografía y Ciencias Sociales (2014), 107. The research group's lines of investigation can be accessed at: www.ehu.eus/es/web/grupo-demografia-historica-historia-urbana/home.

²⁷ Van Leeuwen, M.H.D., Maas, I. and Miles, A., HISCO: Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations (Leuven, 2002)Google Scholar. See History of Work and Van Leeuwen, M.H.D. and Maas, I., ‘Trabajos, títulos y códigos de profesiones, clase y rango en una perspectiva comparativa. Notas introductorias para un número especial sobre HISCO’, Revista de Demografía, 32 (2014), 15–33Google Scholar.

²⁸ Pareja, A., ‘La actividad laboral y productiva de las mujeres bilbaínas en 1900. Una propuesta metodológica para su recuperación’, Vasconia. Cuadernos de Historia-Geografía, 35 (2006), 201–19Google Scholar; Pareja, A., El capital humano en el mundo urbano. Experiencias desde los padrones municipales (1850–1930) (Bilbao, 2011)Google Scholar; Pareja, A. and Zarraga, K., Profesiones, oficios y tareas de las mujeres en Bizkaia. Imágenes de ayer y hoy (Bilbao, 2006)Google Scholar.

²⁹ AHFB-AMB Tercera, 0966/001.

³⁰ AHFB-AMB Cuarta, 0262/005.

³¹ The management of the domestic water supply system in Bilbao was different from that of British cities, as the works of Trentmann and Taylor indicate, specifically in the case of nineteenth-century London. The authors distinguish two categories, users and consumers. The latter were urban landowners and, as such, subject to the payment of local taxes and the rates charged by the private companies providing the water. Those amounts were related to the value of the property, and not the volume of water consumed, as was the case in Bilbao whenever metered water was available, by the subscribers to the service. Trentmann, F. and Taylor, V., ‘From users to consumers: water politics in nineteenth-century London’, in Trentmann, F. (ed.), The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World (Oxford, 2005), 53–79Google Scholar. See also Trentmann, F. and Taylor, V., ‘Liquid politics: water and the politics of everyday life in the modern city’, Past and Present, 211 (2011), 199–241Google Scholar.

³² ‘Recopilación de las Ordenanzas de construcción vigentes en el Casco y Ensanche de la I. Villa de Bilbao’ (Bilbao, 1902).

³³ The system the city of Montreal adopted to universalize water consumption by its inhabitants was attractive from a number of reasons, specifically, the duty to install a water service in buildings; a rate was imposed on water use. See Fougères, L´approvisionnement en eau à Montréal, 393–420.

³⁴ ENB, 1 Apr. 1895, ‘Contadores de agua’.

³⁵ Strasser, S., A History of American Housework (New York, 1982), 93–4Google Scholar; Ogle, All the Modern Conveniences, 36; Heller, G., Propre en ordre. Habitation et vie domestique 1850–1930: l´exemple Vaudois (Lausanne, 1979), 46Google Scholar.

³⁶ Hillier, J., ‘The rise of constant water in nineteenth-century London’, London Journal, 36 (2011), 48CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The author distinguishes between two types of supply: constant and intermittent systems. The success of the first grew notably, from 10 per cent in 1874, to 50 per cent in 1880 and 95 per cent in 1901, at the expense of the second.

³⁷ Processes similar to that of Bilbao can be seen in A. Guillerme, ‘The genesis of water supply, distribution, and sewerage systems in France, 1800–1850’, in Tarr, J. and Dupuy, G. (eds.), Technology and the Rise of the Networked City in Europe and America (Philadelphia, 1988), 92–5Google Scholar.

³⁸ Hallström, J., ‘Technology, social space and environmental justice in Swedish cities: water distribution to suburban Norrköping and Linköping, 1860–1890’, Urban History, 32 (2006), 411–33Google Scholar.

³⁹ Cowan, R.S., A Social History of American Technology (New York, 1997), 19ffGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁰ In addition, 15,000 m³/d were taken to use exclusively for sewage.

⁴¹ Douglas, M., Pureza y peligro. Un análisis de los conceptos de contaminación y tabú (Madrid, 1991), 28Google Scholar.

⁴² Lupton, E. and Miller, J.A., El cuarto de baño, la cocina y la estética de los desperdicios. Procesos de eliminación (Madrid, 1992)Google Scholar; Wright, G., Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (Cambridge, 1983), 102–4Google Scholar; Garvan, A.N.B., ‘Efectos de la tecnología en la vida doméstica, 1830–1880’, in Kranzberg, M. and Pursell, C.W. (eds.), La historia de la tecnología y la técnica en occidente, de la prehistoria a 1900 (Barcelona, 1981), 611Google Scholar.

⁴³ de Marnhac, A., Femmes au bain. Les métamorphoses de la beauté (Paris, 1896), 164Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Tarr, J.A., The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron, 1996), 113–15Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Rybczynski, W., La casa. Historia de una idea (San Sebastián, 1986), 27–60Google Scholar; Buchanan, R.A., ‘Public utilities’, in McNeil, I. (ed.), An Encyclopaedia of the History of Technology (New York, 1990), 922Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ Lequin, Y., ‘Les citadins et leur vie quotidienne’, in Augulhon, M. (ed.), La ville de l´âge industriel (Paris, 1998), 339Google Scholar, calculates that two out of three homes did not have a toilet in France in 1906. Strasser, S., Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York, 1982), 97Google Scholar. In 1893, 53 per cent of families in New York, 70 per cent in Philadelphia, 73 per cent in Chicago and 88 per cent in Baltimore could only access a private privy situated outside the home. Guerrand, R.-H., ‘Espacios privados’, in Ariès, P. and Duby, G. (eds.), Historia de la vida privada, vol. VIII: Sociedad burguesa: aspectos concretos de la vida privada (Madrid, 1991), 39Google Scholar. The extension of the supply of toilets happened in the second half of the century.

⁴⁷ Waste was collected daily by municipal workers, but the actual service exploitation was rented out to private companies: AHFB-AMB Tercera, 065/059.

⁴⁸ Condrau, F. and Tanner, J., ‘Working-class experiences, cholera and public health reform in nineteenth-century Switzerland’, in Sheard, S. and Power, H. (eds.), Body and City: Histories of Urban Public Health (Aldershot, 2000), 110Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Reparaz, V., Vizcaya en la Mano. Completo y verdadero anuario de toda la provincia (Bilbao, 1907)Google Scholar.

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⁵¹ Just as sewers are repeatedly associated with dirt, danger and the unseen, they are physical manifestations of new patterns of water usage, bodily hygiene and the progressive application of new advances in science and technology; Gandy, M., The Fabric of Space. Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 2014), 29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵² Lucan, J., Eau et gaz à tous les étages (Paris, 1992), 24–6Google Scholar; Perrot, P., Le travail des apparences. Le corps fémenin, XVIIIe–XIX^e siècle (Paris, 1984), 131Google Scholar.

⁵³ AMB C-021468/001, C-021469/001, C-21470/001 and C-021472/002.

⁵⁴ Reglamento que ha de regir en la construcción de retretes y desagües de aguas negras de las viviendas de Bilbao (Bilbao, 1897)Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ During the Second Empire in the city of Paris, the construction of a modern sewerage system responded to the dialectical tension between medical and engineering knowledge, together with the interests of the economic elites, and the politics of government intervention. The contradiction in these discourses appears when observing the diligence shown by the same national or local authorities in this construction, for in the city's streets spatial and social inequalities can be observed, as we have shown for Bilbao at the turn of the century. See Gandy, The Fabric of Space, 52–3.

⁵⁶ Memoria acerca del estado y progreso de las obras de saneamiento de la ilustre villa de Bilbao (Bilbao, 1904)Google Scholar. Contains the period 1 Jan. to 31 Dec. 1903.

⁵⁷ AHFB-AMB Sección Bilbao Libros (access number 0128), 1908.

⁵⁸ Melosi, The Sanitary City, ch. 6, part II.

⁵⁹ Eleb, M. and Debarre, A., L´invention de l´habitation moderne, Paris, 1880–1914 (Paris, 1995), ch. XGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁰ Corbin, A., ‘Entre bastidores’, in Ariès, P. and Duby, G. (eds.), Historia de la vida privada, vol. IV: De la revolución francesa a la primera guerra mundial (Madrid, 1989), 391–531Google Scholar; Eleb, M., L´apprentissage du chez soi (Marseille, 1994)Google Scholar.

⁶¹ AHFB-AMB Segunda, 0573/054.

⁶² AHFB-AMB Segunda, 0573/023.

⁶³ AHFB-AMB Cuarta, 0262/005.