The Sardar Sarovar Dam is constructed in India to aid in the country’s industrialization, providing irrigation, electricity, and economic stimulus. After heavy controversy and international pressures to examine the costs of the project, the World Bank cuts financial assistance, exposing the social costs surrounding modernization and wide scale infrastructure projects.
Following catastrophic flooding of the Red River in 1950 in Winnipeg, citizens demanded a more permanent solution to flooding control in the city. The result was the Red River Floodway, a feat of engineering affectionately referred to as “Duff’s Ditch”.
Corroded chemical drums from WR Grace and Company were discovered leaking trichloroethylene and perchloroethylene into the town’s water supply, causing childhood leukemia in several cases.
“The City’s Currents: A History of Water in 20th-Century Bogotá” was created by Stefania Gallini, Laura Felacio, Angélica Agredo, and Stephanie Garcés (2014) under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
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This exhibition explores the role of water in the struggle of Colombia’s capital to become a modern city. For Bogotá, complying with the standards of sanitary reformers and the governing elite was a social, technological, and environmental control endeavor. The exhibition examines everyday and gendered experiences of water, such as washing clothes or bathing, as well as urban infrastructural interventions including the domestication of rivers for water supply and wastewater disposal systems.
Stefania Gallini, Laura Felacio, Angélica Agredo, and Stephanie Garcés
Maps are political rather than objective representations of a place. By selecting some pieces of information and codifying them, while silencing others, maps work as political discourses and are used as “marching orders” of geographies to be built.
This exhibition explores the role of water in the struggle of Colombia’s capital to become a modern city. For Bogotá, complying with the standards of sanitary reformers and the governing elite was a social, technological, and environmental control endeavor. The exhibition examines everyday and gendered experiences of water, such as washing clothes or bathing, as well as urban infrastructural interventions including the domestication of rivers for water supply and wastewater disposal systems.
Stefania Gallini, Laura Felacio, Angélica Agredo, and Stephanie Garcés The textual primary sources for this virtual exhibition include articles in scientific journals, magazines, and newspapers, as well as published books, academic dissertations, and manuals authored mainly by physicians, engineers, journalists, and public officials belonging to the intellectual elite of Bogotá. Municipal regulations by the Bogotá City Council, the National Health Directorate, the Central Board of Hygiene, and the Department of Urban Planning for Bogotá were also important.
This exhibition explores the role of water in the struggle of Colombia’s capital to become a modern city. For Bogotá, complying with the standards of sanitary reformers and the governing elite was a social, technological, and environmental control endeavor. The exhibition examines everyday and gendered experiences of water, such as washing clothes or bathing, as well as urban infrastructural interventions including the domestication of rivers for water supply and wastewater disposal systems.
Stefania Gallini, Laura Felacio, Angélica Agredo, and Stephanie Garcés The virtual exhibition “The City’s Currents: A History of Water in Twentieth-Century Bogotá” is a collaboration of the Environment & Society Portal and the Línea de Historia Ambiental, the Environmental History Research Group of the department of history at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá. The exhibition was researched and authored by historians Stefania Gallini, Laura Felacio, Angélica Agredo, and Stephanie Garcés.
This exhibition explores the role of water in the struggle of Colombia’s capital to become a modern city. For Bogotá, complying with the standards of sanitary reformers and the governing elite was a social, technological, and environmental control endeavor. The exhibition examines everyday and gendered experiences of water, such as washing clothes or bathing, as well as urban infrastructural interventions including the domestication of rivers for water supply and wastewater disposal systems.
Stefania Gallini, Laura Felacio, Angélica Agredo, and Stephanie Garcés With no intention of providing an exhaustive literature review on the topics of urban environmental history, water history, waste history, and Bogotá history, we offer some reading suggestions based on the literature that we found most influential for this exhibition.
This exhibition explores the role of water in the struggle of Colombia’s capital to become a modern city. For Bogotá, complying with the standards of sanitary reformers and the governing elite was a social, technological, and environmental control endeavor. The exhibition examines everyday and gendered experiences of water, such as washing clothes or bathing, as well as urban infrastructural interventions including the domestication of rivers for water supply and wastewater disposal systems.
Stefania Gallini, Laura Felacio, Angélica Agredo, and Stephanie Garcés 
Saúl Ordúz, Niños en calle sin pavimentación, 1930
Saúl Ordúz, Niños en calle sin pavimentación, 1930
Unpaved street with an open ditch in the middle. This ditch was used to channel waste, taking advantage of the rain and the slope of the Eastern Mountains of Bogotá.
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This exhibition explores the role of water in the struggle of Colombia’s capital to become a modern city. For Bogotá, complying with the standards of sanitary reformers and the governing elite was a social, technological, and environmental control endeavor. The exhibition examines everyday and gendered experiences of water, such as washing clothes or bathing, as well as urban infrastructural interventions including the domestication of rivers for water supply and wastewater disposal systems.
Stefania Gallini, Laura Felacio, Angélica Agredo, and Stephanie Garcés 
