155: Martin Melosi's Sanitary City

In The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban America from Colonial Times to the Present, Martin Melosi shows that the technologies chosen for a city's sanitation infrastructure depended heavily on the prevailing environmental concerns, available technologies, money, and politics of the day.  Because most American sanitation systems were built around the turn-of-the-century, when permanence was more valued than flexibility, and because this infrastructure is costly (socially, politically, functionally, economically) to replace outright, American sanitation systems are path dependent in that they are constrained by choices made early in their construction, and they are also determinist in the sense that they shape/ constrain development around them.  Melosi thus argues that "to function effectively the American city has to be a sanitary city."

Working from the water management systems in several major American cities, including Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, Melosi traces the development of sanitation infrastructure through three phases:

• The "Age of Miasmas" (colonial times to 1880): basically, if you can't see or smell it, it isn't there; dilution of waste water will purify it.  

40: Bill Cronon - Changes in the Land

Bill Cronon’s Changes in the Land is an ecological history arguing that “the shift from Indian to European dominance in New England entailed important changes…in the ways these peoples organized their lives, but it also involved fundamental reorganizations… in the region’s plant and animal communities.” (xv)  By extension, history and ecology cannot be separated; further, biological and ecological changes were just as active in shaping history as were the intentional actions of human beings toward each other.  Cronon builds his argument for interdisciplinarity/ interconnection/ ecological history using a variety of sources, including geography (of course), historical descriptions of landscape and environment, anthropology, and, when sources from these disciplines proved too general or inconsistent, “modern ecological literature.”  The result sometimes feels like a smaller Nature’s Metropolis or a more academic Guns, Germs, and Steel: English attempts to make New England more like Europe economically and politically were intimately connected to ecological changes.  (Indians were not passive in this transformation, either.) 

Lewis Mumford - The City in History

 Mumford is such a lovely writer, and it's easy to think that what he lacks in primary research he more than makes up for in thought-provoking speculation.  He's a utopian thinker who advocates a balance between humans and their environment in the form of decentered, thoughtful, federated social structures. He also writes a lot about the relationship between space and technology.  This book is a ginormous grand narrative of "the city" in Western civilization, from the very dawn of time to the present, so here are just a few of my notes:

In an era shaped by white flight, deindustrialization/ suburbanization, not to mention the fear of nuclear war, Mumford calls for a return to city building instead of destruction.  He argues that cities serve two main purposes: religion and the state.  Biology is a (distant?) third, though really cities are for the people, so people should come first.  The shrine and the citadel are its two dominant structures, carried over from villages.  The city exists to nurture human biological and cultural reproduction, not to use technology to tame whole populations into submission.  The city is the stand-in for society, and he is very adamant that spatial forms and social forms interconnect.  Also, space and the built environment are articulated with technology; humans shouldn’t be afraid of their own inventions or let a few wackos use technology to control them.  The city should be humanity, magnified; communality, nurturing, love.  I sense Hardt & Negri here, where a surplus of love and community lead to a radical democracy, and also the dread fear of totalitarianism and technology, which apparently went hand-in-hand in WWII, what with the Nazis and all.  

in defense of the humanities

In the larger view we know that attitudes and beliefs cannot be excluded even from the practical approach, for it is practical to recognize human passions in any environmental calculus; they cannot be excluded from the theoretical approach because man is, in fact, the ecological dominant and his behavior needs to be understood in depth, not merely mapped.

Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values.  Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1974, p. 2.

call for papers: western history association due 9.1.12

2013 Call For Papers
53rd Annual Conference of the Western History Association
9-12 October 2013, Tucson, Arizona

VITAL SIGNS: EARTH, POWER, LIVES

No region of the world has been more important than the West of North America in encouraging historians to take an environmental perspective on the past. Today that perspective has become global in scale and significance, and it is time to bring it back home for reassessing ourselves. The 2013 program committee invites proposals on the theme of checking the “vital signs,” those indicators of health and illness that societies as well as individuals need. They include such measures of well being as energy supplies and consumption, ecological and cultural diversity, the distribution of wealth and power, the ups and downs of climate, and the resilience of ecosystems and human communities.