John Anthony Allan’s “Virtual Water”: Natural Resources Management in the Wake of Neoliberalism
Virtual water is heralded as the solution to freshwater scarcity and overconsumption, but it oversimplifies global water flows.
Virtual water is heralded as the solution to freshwater scarcity and overconsumption, but it oversimplifies global water flows.
In this chapter of their virtual exhibition “‘Commanding, Sovereign Stream’: The Neva and the Viennese Danube in the History of Imperial Metropolitan Centers,” the authors describe fish resources in St. Petersburg and Vienna and their role in urban life from different perspectives. Fisheries constituted an important part of local economic activities and fishers—both poor professionals and wealthy leisure anglers—were very visible in the cities’ crowds, at their markets, and on the banks of their rivers and canals.
This exhibition shows some of the many links between the Neva River in St. Petersburg and the Viennese Danube discovered during the joint Russian-Austrian research project “The Long-Term Dynamics of Fish Populations and Ecosystems of European Rivers.”