Urban History, Urban Health

Abstract

Over the course of the 20th century, the United States became an urban nation: 80% of Americans now live in metropolitan areas. Supplying basic sanitary services—drinking water, sewers, and garbage removal—to these cities is a gargantuan task, yet most people have little understanding of urban infrastructure systems and their enormous regional ecologic impacts.

Municipalization of sanitary services, especially since 1880, distanced people from their wastes and gave city dwellers a simplistic experience of one-way material flow through cities, without knowledge of the environmental costs. Most sanitary infrastructures were built primarily for durability and lack the elasticity to meet changing needs. The challenge now is to adapt sanitary systems for flexibility and simultaneously move from unchecked material consumption toward resource-based thinking.

THE 2000 CENSUS SHOWS that 80% of the US population now lives in metropolitan areas, with 30% in cities of 5 million or more.1 The environmental issues posed by such large population centers have profound impacts on public health beyond the city limits. Providing city dwellers with basic sanitary services—drinking water, sewers, garbage removal—has enormous effects on regional ecosystems. To many city dwellers, it seems simply that water flows from taps, while sewage and garbage are conveniently, mysteriously conducted away. The fallacy here is a powerful one: this one-way flow of materials is contrary to nature, since of course the cities' effluvia does persist and has to end up in someone' backyard. How have Americans become alienated from understanding the realities of material flow, and how does urbanization bear on this fallacy?

The tremendous population boom in US cities over the last 200 years demanded that sanitary systems be designed and built to handle urban growth; the success of these systems has in fact allowed for even more development. Invisible infrastructures, mostly unappreciated and taken for granted, support urban life. Without efficient sanitary systems for water, sewage, and garbage, not only is public health compromised but commerce and a sense of civil security are corroded. The municipalization of sanitary systems that took place after 1880 initiated city dwellers into the experience of one-way material flow and free use of these public goods. Yet many sanitary systems designed and built in the 19th century are now overtaxed by urban sprawl and continuing waves of immigration.

Two historians, Martin V. Melosi and Susan Strasser, have recently given us their accounts of how urban environmental culture got to where it is today. Melosi' The Sanitary City is the first “comprehensive history of water supply, wastewater, and solid-waste disposal systems in American cities from colonial times to the year 2000.” Melosi examines the attitudes that prevailed within the professional sanitation community during that time. Concentrating on the evolving “technologies of sanitation,” he defines 3 major periods in public health philosophy according to the prevailing theory: the miasma theory of disease, prior to 1880; bacteriologic theory, from 1880 to World War II; and the “new ecology,” from 1945 to 2000. Within each period he examines in depth the evolving development of water, sewer, and trash collection systems. Melosi has previously written extensively on urban environmental history; his newest collection of essays, Effluent America: Cities, Industry, Energy, and the Environment,2 uses an ecologic perspective to illuminate the juxtaposition of affluence and waste-making.

Rather than concentrating on attitudes of public health professionals, Susan Strasser' Waste and Want considers popular notions about our relationship to material culture in looking at the history of American trash-making over the last 200 years. In her analysis, the defining moment occurred as production and consumption became unlinked around the turn of the 20th century.

FROM DURABILITY TO ADAPTABILITY?

The explosion of manufacturing fueled by the Industrial Revolution outstripped an earlier 19th-century system in which households had made by hand most of what they used, trading their leftovers to peddlers for what few manufactured goods existed. The peddlers then sold their amassed scraps to manufacturers as feedstocks for goods that would eventually make their way back into households. There was a cyclical, 2-way flow of materials between household consumers and manufacturing producers. When the rise of huge industries demanded raw materials on a scale that households could no longer provide, the cyclical material flow between producers and consumers was broken. As Strasser notes, “the growth of markets for new products came to depend in part on the continuous disposal of old things . . . a throwaway culture replaced one grounded in reuse.”

Strasser looks at the history of trash because it “offers fundamental insights about the history of industrial society and its consumer culture.” She draws fresh connections and meanings from the lowly things we have discarded. Her historical–social context lends new colors and shadings to the picture of how we embraced purchasing and packaging and became embroiled in an ongoing “garbage crisis.”

With a wealth of details and original source material from the 19th and 20th centuries, Waste and Want sometimes verges on the very overabundance that Strasser implicates in the collective devaluation of our everyday material wealth. However, her writing brings to life the values and mood of a nation long gone, one in which material objects—even the most mundane—were highly valued. In framing her picture of Americans' evolution from frugal householders in the early 19th century to today' expert trash-makers, Strasser employs a somewhat bumpy chronology that lessens the clarity of the overall historical evolution of American consumerism and trashing. Melosi' chronothematic organization allows a clearer picture to emerge of how prevailing theories of environmental and public health informed the development of city infrastructure.

Both authors identify the mass migration to America' cities from 1880 to 1920 as a catalyst in creating the sanitary infrastructure systems and material culture that persist to the present day. Melosi notes that urban industrialization, especially in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions, provided the concentrations of labor, resources, transportation, and communication that allowed the blossoming advertising industry to create and maintain new product markets. But the 2 authors diverge in their assessment of the relationship between durability—of systems and goods—and its environmental consequences. In Melosi' view, the sanitary systems of the 19th and early 20th centuries were built for permanence, with the result that today the systems are inflexible and resist adaptation even as they decay. Strasser, on the other hand, derides the planned obsolescence of consumer goods as a recipe for the rampant waste-making of the last hundred years.

It seems we have a problem thinking coherently about time in an environmental context: we decry things for lasting too long, or not long enough. How can we design both our objects and our thinking to be more elastic—that is, capable of being true to their initial intention even after adapting to changing circumstances? Melosi comments on our inability to deal effectively with long-standing environmental issues by analyzing the commonly used phrase “garbage crisis.” He notes that “the notion of ‘crisis’ confers upon the problem relatively tangible, concrete properties, which might be resolved through equally tangible, concrete solutions. . . . In some sense, ‘crisis’ denies the complexity of the problem and ignores its persistence over time.”

THE CITY IN NATURE

Environmental professionals and the public may lack a sense of our own place in the ongoing evolution of urban America. Not only are cities worth saving as historical and cultural jewels—the city is America' home. Yet the media typically has portrayed cities as blighted sources of crime, drugs, poverty, and emerging diseases. Nancy Tomes has written in this Journal3 about the “second germ panic” evident in the media over the last 20 years. She draws parallels with an earlier time of “intense anxiety about disease germs” between 1900 and 1940: both periods “reflected anxieties about societal incorporation associated with expanding markets, transportation networks, and mass immigration.” As transportation, immigration, and commerce hubs, cities often are the portals for new viruses such as HIV, Ebola, and West Nile. Widespread obsession with “nature striking back” reflects a general anxiety about our relationship to the “global city” and the natural world, as well as our lack of understanding of our place in the natural world.

The miasma or filth theory of disease, although misguided, was the impetus for the sanitary movement of the late 19th century. Filth and foul odors were thought to be the cause of epidemics. In their attempts to expediently remove the putrefying, fetid wastes from booming cities, sanitarians were responding to an idea that was to become outmoded by the turn of the 20th century. However, the upshot was that sanitary systems that could deliver clean drinking water and move and treat sewage were designed and put into place in most large American cities by 1900. Are there similar misguided notions under which we labor today—notions that hamper our collective efforts to envision and design truly sustainable cities?

Melosi may provide us with an answer. He observes that sanitary technologies “were meant to distance humans from their wastes and discards—materials that presumably had embedded in them the threat of disease.” Thus a major limitation of our urban sanitary infrastructures is that they were designed in the 19th century simply to conduct wastes away from city residents. By institutionalizing sanitary services, cities “took over and kept citizen responsibility . . . at a minimum.” The eventual fate of wastes was not part of the sanitary system design. Nature outside the city limits was treated as a place that could somehow absorb, neutralize, or clean up after the cities.

This attitude has persisted and become deeply ingrained in common thought: most modern urbanites regard nature as a place where one spends vacations and assume that natural processes do not apply on city streets. The city' municipal services have effectively become extensions of “Mother Nature,” an agency that provides what we need, then somehow picks up our leftover stuff and reorganizes it into more pleasing forms. Unfortunately, nature cannot make waste disappear and can only transform it slowly, especially since human populations have reproduced and redistributed in ways that overtax natural systems.

Cities are open ecosystems whose effluents have regional if not global impacts—in Melosi' words, “not self-contained, not functioning independently or in isolation from the rest of the world.” For instance, some urban planners now dream about building urban “vertical farms” in which a city' sewage and wastewater flows would be treated to remove pathogens and toxins but retain nutrients, then recycled in-city to nourish food crops grown in an urban agricultural complex—a “vertical” version of traditional agriculture. The idea is radical, but it illustrates a movement toward reestablishing cyclical material flows within cities and reducing their effluence. If such ideas are to take root, then rebuilding sanitary systems to be more elastic—less constrained by permanence or by inflexibility—will prepare us to meet unforeseen developments in the urban future.

Reclaiming responsibility for waste has been extremely difficult for Americans, in part because we have been unwilling to critically examine prosperity, which is still the heart of the American dream. The 20th-century flowering of the culture of consumption promoted purchasing as the soul of prosperity. Someone else—usually the city—would take care of the discards. But now the concept of “material sufficiency” needs to be promoted: we must develop criteria for “enough” consumption of resources, based on an assessment of our real needs. This applies to both urban environmental planning and household consumption, as the 2 are intimately linked.

The critical challenge will be to address now, rather than in hindsight, how to retool our sanitary systems with the elasticity to adapt to an unpredictable future and how to reeducate ourselves to replace trash-making with resource-based thinking. Historians Strasser and Melosi have given us much food for thought with regard to that reeducation.

Figure 1.

Cover of The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America From Colonial Times to the Present.

Martin V. Melosi. 2000. 578 pp. ISBN 0801861527 (hard). Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Figure 2.

Cover of Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash.

Susan Strasser. 1999. 355 pp. ISBN 0805048308 (hard). New York, NY: Henry Holt & Co.