In 2009, the City of Paris made a decision that went against the dominant logic of the previous two decades: it took its water back.

Paris had privatized its water service in the 1980s, handing management to two large French water companies. By 2009, the city's new mayor concluded that the private model was delivering profits at the expense of quality, investment, and affordability. Paris created Eau de Paris — a fully public water utility — and launched a new philosophy of "100% public water management from source to tap."

The effect was immediate. Water prices dropped 8% for three million customers on the first day.

Since then, Eau de Paris has reinvested every euro of revenue back into the service rather than distributing it to shareholders. Between 2020 and 2026, the utility invested €475 million in infrastructure, source protection, and quality improvement. A network of 3,000 acoustic sensors detects leaks in real time. Paris has also filed a formal legal complaint against PFAS chemical producers — the "forever chemicals" increasingly found in water supplies worldwide — demanding application of the polluter-pays principle.

The result, confirmed in the 2025 annual barometer, is that Parisians' confidence in the quality of their tap water is at an all-time high.

There is a design philosophy embedded in this. Paris treats water as a common good — not a commodity, not a service, not a product — which means the logic of managing it is fundamentally different. A private company manages water to generate returns. A public utility manages water to maintain trust.

Parisians who drink 1.5 litres of tap water per day spend approximately €2 per year. That price includes capture, treatment, transport, monitoring, distribution, wastewater collection, and purification before the water returns to the natural environment.

The comparison to bottled water — which costs 240 to 10,000 times more per litre for a product that is, in 25% of cases, simply repackaged municipal tap water — should not be necessary. But in most cities around the world, it is.

Paris has named its water well. It has invested in its water seriously. And it has declared, in policy and in practice, that clean water is not a luxury for those who can afford it.

(Sources: Eau de Paris / Reasons to Be Cheerful / World Economic Forum — 2023–2026)

Seoul 🇰🇷 — Seoul's tap water has its own brand: Arisu — a name drawn from the ancient Korean name for the Han River. And Incheon, the city next door, has gone further: its branded tap water "Hanulsu" — clean water bestowed by the sky — won the grand prize at the New York Festivals Korea National Brand Awards for the fourth consecutive year in 2026. Seoul and Incheon are proof that the branding of municipal water is not a Western phenomenon. Both cities have invested seriously in the quality and the identity of their tap water, and both have done so within a public management model that mirrors Paris's core logic: water belongs to the city's citizens, not to its shareholders.

Tokyo 🇯🇵 — Tokyo has been bottling its own tap water since 1995. "Tokyo Water" is sold in vending machines across the city as a premium municipal product — a declaration that the city's water is good enough to compete with commercial bottled water. It is. Tokyo's tap water is soft, low in minerals, and consistently rated among the best-tasting in Asia. The city runs a comprehensive public testing programme with results published openly. What Tokyo has built — the municipal water product as a point of civic pride and commercial confidence — is the logical extension of what Paris has built in infrastructure: a city that treats its water as something worth naming, tasting, and selling.

Singapore 🇸🇬 — Singapore has no natural freshwater. The city-state sits on an island 50 kilometres wide, receives heavy rainfall, and still faces permanent water scarcity. Its response is NEWater — reclaimed and purified wastewater that meets drinking water standards — branded and marketed as a technological achievement rather than hidden as a necessity. NEWater currently meets 40% of Singapore's water demand and the government has set a target of 55% by 2060. Singapore's water strategy is the most aggressive act of branding in the history of municipal water: it took the least desirable possible input — sewage — and made it a national symbol of engineering excellence. Paris nationalized its water and improved trust. Singapore industrialized its water and built an entire national identity around it.