Resources of the City

Contributions to an Environmental History of Modern Europe

Bill Luckin, Bill Luckin, Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud, Dieter Schott, Bill Luckin, Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud, Dieter Schott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351903790
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The field of urban environmental history is a relatively new one, yet it is rapidly moving to the forefront of scholarly research and is the focus of much interdisciplinary work. Given the environmental problems facing the modern world it is perhaps unsurprising that historians, geographers, political, natural and social scientists should increasingly look at the environmental problems faced by previous generations, and how they were regarded and responded to. This volume reflects this growing concern, and reflects many of the key concerns and issues that are essential to our understanding of the problems faced by cities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Addressing a variety of environmental issues, such as clean water supply, the provision/retention of green space, and noise pollution, that faced European and North American cities the essays in this volume highlight the common responses as well as the differences that characterised the reactions to these trans-national concerns.

CHAPTER ONE

Resources of the City:
Towards a European Urban
Environmental History

Dieter Schott

This book originates in a conference held at the Centre for Urban History at the University of Leicester in June 2002 on ‘Urban Environment: Resources, Perceptions, Uses’.¹ Nearly forty scholars from Europe, North America and Japan came to this ‘Second Round-Table on Environmental History’ which took its place in a - still developing - line of similar events which aim to generate discussion on European environmental history in and related to cities.

One of the steps on the way to the Leicester meeting was a major session on ‘Urban Environmental Problems’ at the International Conference of Urban History in Venice 1998, organised by Christoph Bernhardt, which resulted in a book comprising contributions from some of the leading scholars in the field.² Eleven papers, covering six European countries and the USA, dealt with a wide range of topics relating to the history of the urban environment. From this well-received initiative longer-term cooperation developed in the form of bi-annual round-tables on environmental history.

In May 2000 the first of the round-tables was held in Clermont-Ferrand, France, organised by Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud.³ The central theme was ‘Pollution in Cities’ and the papers delivered and the volume in which they were collected⁴ demonstrated that urban environmental history is now following a promising trajectory in Europe. As we shall see, earlier impulses had their origins in the United States. The leading and inspiring role played by American scholars is highlighted by the example of Joel Tarr, a pioneer in the field. Based on a comprehensive state-of-the-art survey of major studies in American urban and environmental history, Tarr has pointed out how, since the early 1990s, urban environmental history has emerged in the USA as a ‘major sub-field of both urban and environmental history’.⁵

Three influences can be seen as underpinning this process. Firstly, research into urban technical infrastructures, especially systems of water provision and sewage, as well as waste collection and disposal, has been developed by Tarr, Martin Melosi and other scholars since the 1970s. This research has greatly expanded knowledge of how these systems were put in place and how perceptions of the problems with which they were meant to deal governed their design and implementation. Such contributions had not initially been defined as ‘environmental history’ per se, but rather as being situated within the fields of the history of technology and public works (or public) history.⁶

The second influence can be seen in the seminal work of William Cronon on Chicago, which conceptualizes the city-hinterland relationships of that city and demonstrates how crucial Chicago was for the environmental transformation of the Mid-West and how that city -in turn - transformed itself and its immediate environment in order better to fulfil the functions of a ‘gateway to the west’.⁷

Current political influences, especially contemporary debate in the wake of the Rio conference of 1992 on climate change and a generally, though by no means universally, agreed target to aim for ‘sustainable development’, comprised a third influence. This motivated urban historians to ask themselves to what extent the cities had been ‘sustainable’ in the past. In addition, these contemporary developments encouraged scholars to focus on changes and breaks in the ways in which cities managed their environments and used their resources.

From 1993 on, historians such as Melosi, Tarr, Christine Meisner Rosen, Jeffrey Stine, Samuel Hays and others went onto the offensive.⁸ In a series of programmatic articles they took their stand against the reduction of environmental history to a ‘history of the natural environment’, an idea postulated by Donald Worster in ‘Transformations of the Earth. Towards an Agro-ecological Perspective in History’.⁹

Melosi broke the ice with his 1993 essay ‘The Place of the City . ..’ in which he attacked Worster’s definition of nature as ‘the world we have not in any primary sense created’ and which effectively excluded the built environment and the city in general from environmental history. Melosi criticized this position as arbitrary, insisting that the built environment ‘is not wholly expressive of culture, since on its creation it is part of the physical world; whether we like it or not, it interacts and sometimes blends with the natural world’.¹⁰ Moreover, such an isolation of the natural world ‘denies the powerful holistic quality of environmental history, which demands inclusion more than exclusion, . . .’.¹¹ Thus Melosi pleads for an urban environmental history which would combine ‘the study of the natural history of the city with the history of the city building process and the possible intersections between the two’.¹² Nevertheless, this urban environmental history - he reminds his readers - would need to gain a better foothold in theory and undertake research, which gives more attention to the real functioning of real cities.

Melosi’s perspective on urban environmental history as a comprehensive and interdisciplinary field is echoed by Harold Platt, also a champion of this relatively new style of history, when he characterizes this scholarship as ‘reversing decades of academic fragmentation’ and as leading towards ‘an integration of the physical and social sciences’.¹³

By 2000 Tarr was able to report on an impressive body of scholarship dealing with urban environmental history, seen by John McNeill as ‘the most interesting frontier’. Tarr identified five primary themes in this field:¹⁴

• the impact of the built environment and human activities in cities on the natural environment
• societal responses to these impacts and efforts to alleviate environmental problems
• exploration of the effect of the natural environment on city life
• the relationship between cities and an ever-widening hinterland
• the role of gender, class and race in regard to environmental issues

European Environmental History: Themes, Questions, Preoccupations

In Europe, environmental history also made strides from the 1970s onwards, although clearly at a slower pace than in the United States and with significant national variations. Perhaps with the exception of some Scandinavian environmental historians,¹⁵ most European scholars had never subscribed to an ‘agro-ecological perspective’, as the notion of wilderness, of ‘untouched nature’ held little relevance in a region so thoroughly characterised by the domestication of nature over so many centuries. On the other hand, although many studies of environmental problems had thus far also dealt with pollution in and produced by cities, the urban dimension had in some ways been incidental. Cities were frequently only dealt with as places where pollution occurred, not as actors and shapers of their environments in their own right. Dominant here were studies focusing on the pollution of one environmental medium (air, water, soil) and the history of environmental protest, regulation and conflict resolution which centred on degradation of this kind.¹⁶ This was in some ways an academic reflection of the way environmental protection evolved from the 1970s onwards with the passage of specific legislation targeted at individual media.¹⁷ Thus the environmental history of the city is, as Verena Winiwarter observed in 2000, by no means a well-established field of research in Europe.¹⁸

In Germany environmental history tended to be located within the history of technology, and was stimulated by contemporary problems such as the intense debate over nuclear energy.¹⁹ This provided an impetus for scholars to reflect on the historical genesis of energy systems beyond the threshold of industrialization, on earlier perceived or real limits to growth set by scarcity of energy resources.²⁰ As a result of these debates some protagonists developed a universal model of the periodization of world history according to dominant energy systems.²¹ The energy issue also provided a field in which urban historians, historians of technology and environmental historians could develop shared interests in the role of cities during the formation of network-bound systems of energy in the late nineteenth century. Inspired by the ground-breaking work of Thomas P. Hughes and the general debate over the ‘networked city’,²² scholars analysed the choices and decisions made by municipalities on electrification and the development of gas works in terms of embarking on different technological pathways which had at the same time potentially long-term economic, social and environmental consequences.²³

Another field in which a close overlap emerged between urban and environmental history was public health and the creation of the ‘sanitary city’. The focus of earlier research, still inspired by the Whiggish triumphalism of engineering achievements, had largely been on the beneficial health aspects of sewage systems and municipal health policy.²⁴ More recent studies have tended to embrace a wider environmental agenda. This has highlighted the damaging effects of displacing residential and industrial waste into rivers and watercourses, which would eventually lead to widespread environmental degradation.²⁵ The entire complex of urban water cycles has recently attracted significant scholarly attention, as a result of the more obvious direct health relevance of water-borne diseases, which made healthy water a top priority for city governments. The preponderance of public health on municipal agendas during the second half of the nineteenth century, perceived from a Chadwickian perspective, was predicated on an ideology in which a clean urban environment would not only improve the health of urban residents, but also their ability to work and live a moral life.²⁶ Such notions motivated urban governments to undertake expensive investments in sanitary infrastructure which comprehensively reshaped cities. Bill Luckin claims in his contribution to this volume that in Britain research into place-related and differential mortality and morbidity, under the general rubric of the ‘social history of medicine’ has to a certain extent played the role developed by urban environmental history in the United States.

The general acceptance of environmental history within mainstream history proceeded in Europe at a slower rate than in America.²⁷ At the same time the process of institutionalization was significantly delayed. American environmental historians successfully organized themselves into the ‘American Society for Environmental History’ (ASEH) in 1977. This organization has held well attended conferences since 1982. These have now become annual. Moreover, the ASEH now produces the premier journal in its field, Environmental History. In Europe, on the other hand, early attempts to establish international cooperation and discussion, which appeared to have made ground with the publication of conference proceedings from 1988 in the form of a volume entitled Silent Countdown²⁸ and in the establishment of an Environmental History Newsletter, faltered.²⁹ Only in the late 1990s did conditions appear ripe for the establishment of the ‘European Society for Environmental History’, an equivalent body to the American ASEH.³⁰ Following two successful ESEH-conferences (at St. Andrews in 2001 and Prague in 2003), European environmental history has achieved a much higher profile and now seems to be in a promising position.

The Purpose of the ‘Round-Table’

Within this overall context, then, the aim of the ‘Round-tables on Environmental History’ has been to create a framework for a more intensive discussion of urban environmental problems, involving scholars from a range of fields such as urban history, environmental history, history of technology and history of planning. It was hoped that these meetings, involving a limited number of participants, and structured in sessions around clearly focused themes, would generate deep and well-informed debate. It was also intended that research and methodological issues originating in different countries would be related to one another, thereby opening up a genuinely comparative perspective. These hopes have to a significant degree been realized. Moreover, interchange between younger and more senior scholars has also proven rewarding.³¹

At the round-tables we have sought to study cities not simply as localities, in which pollution occurred, and in which resources were consumed and waste produced. Cities, it has been agreed, should be analysed as collective social actors engaged in the opening up of resources, in the shaping of technologies implemented to organize the provision of certain resources. And these activities should also be considered in terms of their effects on remodelling urban patterns of behaviour. Such a perspective, it is to be hoped, will challenge the notion of inevitability, that is, that levels of environmental degradation that were actually experienced were the necessary by-products of urban industrialism. Rather, it is intended to isolate and interrogate debates and choices which were involved in shaping the kind of urban environment with which we live today. An urban environmental history of this type will create awareness of the significance of context, and of dialectical relationships between concurrent chains of events in different fields. Concentration on place, not in a merely spatial, geographical sense, but as a constellation of topography, natural resources, social, economic and cultural relationships, might thus produce a multi-layered and more complex narrative of the processes by which cities made use of their environments in the past.

With these ideas in mind the issue of ‘resources’ was selected as the main theme for the round-table at Leicester in June 2002.³² Following the meeting in Clermont-Ferrand with its concentration on pollution and the impact of towns and industries through emissions and effluents - the ‘...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Resources of the City
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• General Editors’ Preface
• 1 Resources of the City: Towards a European Urban Environmental History
• 2 A Metabolic Approach to the City: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Paris
• 3 Urban Horses and Changing City-Hinterland Relationships in the United States
• 4 ‘Returning to Nature’: Vacation and Life Style in the Montréal Region
• 5 Citizens in Pursuit of Nature: Gardens, Allotments and Private Space in European Cities, 1850-2000
• 6 Sustainable Naples: The Disappearance of Nature as Resource
• 7 The Struggle for Urban Space: Nantes and Clermont-Ferrand, 1830-1930
• 8 Sanitate Crescamus: Water Supply, Sewage Disposal and Environmental Values in a Victorian Suburb
• 9 Resource Management and Environmental Transformations. Water Incorporation at the Time of Industrialization: Milan, 1880-1940
• 10 Constructing Urban Infrastructure for Multiple Resource Management: Sewerage Systems in the Industrialization of the Rhineland, Germany
• 11 Towards the Socialist Sanitary City: Urban Water Problems in East German New Towns, 1945-1970
• 12 Experts and Water Quality in Paris in 1870
• 13 Noise Abatement and the Search for Quiet Space in the Modern City
• 14 Environmental Justice, History and the City: The United States and Britain, 1970-2000
• 15 ‘In Stadt und Land’: Differences and Convergences between Urban and Local Environmentalism in West Germany, 1950-1980
• 16 Path Dependence and Urban History: Is a Marriage Possible?
• Index