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In Switzerland, the use of water in cities was designed to provide power for workshops before the invention of electricity and as water supply. This dual function helps generate the financing necessary for the installation and generalization of the network while stimulating, under the influence of the German model, a culture of well-managed water utilities by powerful municipalities under a federal regime. During the whole of the 20th century, these multi-service municipal utilities gradually extended their networks, in particular with regard to the supply of drinking water and waste water treatment, to suburban and outer peri-urban districts, often leading to sectoral or multi-sectoral concentrations on a multi-district scale. This increase in power and the extension of major municipal urban water services reached a new stage from the 1950s onward with the development of Alpine dams, thus extending to mountain areas the competence of providers to the use of water in providing power, as had already been instituted in cities from the beginning of the 20th century.