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"City planning Environmental aspects United States History 19th century."
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Taking the Land to Make the City
The history of the United States is often told as a movement westward, beginning at the Atlantic coast and following farmers across the continent. But cities played an equally important role in the country’s formation. Towns sprung up along the Pacific as well as the Atlantic, as Spaniards and Englishmen took Indian land and converted it into private property. In this reworking of early American history, Mary P. Ryan shows how cities—specifically San Francisco and Baltimore—were essential parties to the creation of the republics of the United States and Mexico. Baltimore and San Francisco share common roots as early trading centers whose coastal locations immersed them in an international circulation of goods and ideas. Ryan traces their beginnings back to the first human habitation of each area, showing how the juggernaut toward capitalism and nation-building could not commence until Europeans had taken the land for city building. She then recounts how Mexican ayuntamientos and Anglo American city councils pioneered a prescient form of municipal sovereignty that served as both a crucible for democracy and a handmaid of capitalism. Moving into the nineteenth century, Ryan shows how the citizens of Baltimore and San Francisco molded landscape forms associated with the modern city: the gridded downtown, rudimentary streetcar suburbs, and outlying great parks. This history culminates in the era of the Civil War when the economic engines of cities helped forge the East and the West into one nation.
eBook
The Politics of Trash
The Politics of Trash explains
how municipal trash collection solved odorous urban problems using
nongovernmental and often unseemly means. Focusing on the
persistent problems of filth and the frustration of generations of
reformers unable to clean their cities, Patricia Strach and
Kathleen S. Sullivan tell a story of dirty politics and
administrative innovation that made rapidly expanding American
cities livable. The solutions that professionals recommended to rid
cities of overflowing waste cans, litter-filled privies, and animal
carcasses were largely ignored by city governments. When the
efforts of sanitarians, engineers, and reformers failed, public
officials turned to the habits and tools of corruption as well as
to gender and racial hierarchies.
Corruption often provided the political will for public
officials to establish garbage collection programs. Effective waste
collection involves translating municipal imperatives into new
habits and arrangements in homes and other private spaces. To
change domestic habits, officials relied on gender hierarchy to
make the women of the white, middle-class households in charge of
sanitation. When public and private trash cans overflowed, racial
and ethnic prejudices were harnessed to single out scavengers,
garbage collectors, and neighborhoods by race. These early informal
efforts were slowly incorporated into formal administrative
processes that created the public-private sanitation systems that
prevail in most American cities today. The Politics of
Trash locates these hidden resources of governments to
challenge presumptions about the formal mechanisms of governing and
recovers the presence of residents at the margins, whose
experiences can be as overlooked as garbage collection itself. This
consideration of municipal garbage collection reveals how political
development often relies on undemocratic means with long-term
implications for further inequality. Focusing on the resources that
cleaned American cities also shows the tenuous connection between
political development and modernization.
eBook
The Sociable City
When celebrated landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted despaired in 1870 that the \"restraining and confining conditions\" of the city compelled its inhabitants to \"look closely upon others without sympathy,\" he was expressing what many in the United States had already been saying about the nascent urbanization that would continue to transform the nation's landscape: that the modern city dramatically changes the way individuals interact with and feel toward one another. An antiurbanist discourse would pervade American culture for years to come, echoing Olmsted's skeptical view of the emotional value of urban relationships. But as more and more people moved to the nation's cities, urbanists began to confront this pessimism about the ability of city dwellers to connect with one another.
The Sociable Cityinvestigates the history of how American society has conceived of urban relationships and considers how these ideas have shaped the cities in which we live. As the city's physical and social landscapes evolved over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, urban intellectuals developed new vocabularies, narratives, and representational forms to express the social and emotional value of a wide variety of interactions among city dwellers.
Turning to source materials often overlooked by scholars of urban life-including memoirs, plays, novels, literary journalism, and museum exhibits-Jamin Creed Rowan unearths an expansive body of work dedicated to exploring and advocating the social configurations made possible by the city. His study aims to better understand why we have built and governed cities in the ways we have, and to imagine an urban future that will effectively preserve and facilitate the interpersonal associations and social networks that city dwellers need to live manageable, equitable, and fulfilling lives.
eBook
Eden on the Charles
In Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston, Michael Rawson examines how the city's relationship with its natural surroundings informed its early growth and development. His compelling, well-researched narrative touches on several milestones on Boston's road to modernity, including the Common's conversion from a place of labor to a place of leisure, the emergence of pastoral suburbs as a respite from an increasingly urbanized landscape, and the long fight over a proposed municipal water system to bring fresh water to those who needed it most...Perhaps the book's most important lesson comes from a frustrated mariner who, upset over the maltreatment of the harbor, laments that \"the past seems to be forgotten, the present only is regarded as of importance, and a veil is drawn over the future.\" Eden on the Charles is a valiant effort to combat such shortsightedness, reminding us that the key to building a successful community lies in respecting the natural resources that provide for it and in understanding our responsibility to our fellow citizens.
eBook
The sanitary city: urban infrastructure in America from colonial times to the present. Review of: Melosi, M.V. The sanitary city: urban infrastructure in America from colonial times to the present. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. Pr., 2000
[Martin Melosi]'s principal thesis is unobjectionable, but, as Melosi recognizes and attempts to illustrate, the application of an environmental paradigm to specific urban settings requires attention to the myriad factors that governed infrastructure reform and to the diversity of solutions to sanitary problems developed in American cities this period. The lack of detailed analyses of particular urban histories may be the most disappointing part of the book for urban historians, though, to be fair, Melosi's stated goal was to delineate broader national trends. At other times, however, the wealth of detail occasionally overwhelms the narrative, particularly in Melosi's discussion of important post-1945 legal and regulatory developments. Finally, the odd error creeps in when Melosi moves away from his area of specialization: anthrax was not the first disease in which a micro-organism was identified as the cause, and Pasteur had not worked on it before 1877 (111); London's Metropolitan Board of Works was not established by the 1855 Nuisances Removal Act (52). And there are occasional proofreading lapses (yellow fever instead of typhoid fever on page 85).
Journal Article