This chapter focuses on urban water demand management, a critical strategy for enhancing water security in growing cities. Traditional water management has relied on supply-side solutions, such as large-scale infrastructure projects like dams and reservoirs. However, these solutions are often costly, environmentally damaging, and politically contentious. In contrast, demand-side management seeks to reduce water consumption and optimise existing water resources, making it a more sustainable and cost-effective approach. Urban water demand management aims to change societal behaviours, attitudes, and practices towards water use. By implementing water conservation strategies, urban managers can decouple water demand from economic and population growth, reducing pressure on municipal water supplies. The chapter explores various demand management tools, including pricing mechanisms, water trading, metering, active leak detection, and alternative water supplies like rainwater harvesting and greywater systems. Additionally, the chapter highlights the importance of public education, communication, and stakeholder engagement in fostering a culture of water conservation. By utilising a portfolio of regulatory, technological, and communication-based instruments, cities can manage water demand more effectively, improve water security, and reduce the environmental impact of urban growth. Ultimately, demand management is essential for creating resilient urban water systems in the face of climate change and increasing population pressures.

In the wake of the ‘golden age’ of economic growth in the early 1970s, public provision of urban infrastructure came under the close scrutiny of governments seeking to reduce the size of their bureaucracies in the face of expanding budgets, rising prices, and increasing unemployment. Australian governments and water utilities followed the UK and USA by introducing price mechanisms to attain more efficient water use. This coincided with severe droughts that affected urban water supplies and led state governments to impose residential water restrictions, save for Brisbane, where catastrophic floods in 1974 reminded residents of their vulnerability to the elements. Growing concern for the environment, as well as the implications of environmental degradation for human health, meant that the sights, smells, and sounds of the Australian suburbs were on the eve of change. The use of suburban waterways as drains for industrial and domestic waste would no longer be tolerated, as local residents campaigned to protect built and natural environments from pollution and development projects. Such health and ecological concerns collided with the neoliberal reform agenda of the 1990s, when newly restructured water utilities faced a series of crises in their provision of water and disposal of wastes.