Health and the Urban Environment

Kristin Brig-Ortiz, "Crafting Uneven Waterscapes: The Well, the Tank, and the Racialized Contestation of Early Water Infrastructure in Colonial Durban, 1854-1898"
 
Abstract: From its founding in 1824, the colonial port town of Durban depended on this standalone provisional water infrastructure to maintain healthy and productive urban environments that enabled imperial control in a crucial area of the southern African coast. Following its municipal incorporation in 1854, the town took control of and built on the existing spiderwebbed networks of wells and tanks to maintain a clean water supply until the introduction of piped water. By reading archival sources against the grain, this article argues that as Durban grew in size and racial make-up during the mid-nineteenth century, the municipality paid increasing attention to the state of its standalone provisional water supply system and the public health threats it generated, implementing racialized restrictions and policies around wells and tanks that depended on the blurred lines between public and private technologies. Although scholars have investigated the construction and use of piped waterworks in colonial sites, few have explored the importance of autonomous infrastructure and its persistence in the urban environment even after piped infrastructure is implemented, particularly in significant British imperial port town like Durban. Examining urban relationships to autonomous infrastructures like wells and tanks demonstrates that water infrastructures in the early urbanized colonial landscape led to the uneven water supply landscape of South African cities, exposing how racial capitalistic logic and social norming influenced who received access to water supplies and the kinds of technologies available to them.

Naomi Adiv, "Last Bathhouse Standing: The Allen Street Public Bath, New York City, 1905-1975"
 
Abstract: In this paper I focus on the New York City public bathhouse that outlived them all: the Allen Street bathhouse, which remained open for seventy years. Most of the other two dozen public baths built by the city of New York in the early 1900s were either shuttered, or converted to pools and recreation centers by mid-century. This downtown bath, however, remained operational for decades after the ideas and budgets that supported public bathing were no longer central to state projects of public life. Indeed, by 1960, Allen Street was the last bathhouse, as such, standing, serving more than 131,000 people each year, 28,000 of them women, and charging nothing for admission but a quarter for the use of soap and towel. (Allen Street would finally close in the face of the city’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s.

NOTE: Paper copy with notes.

Donald Dostie, "'The original situation of the large necessary'--Urban Privies in Post-Revolutionary Philadelphia"

Abstract: François Rabelais once compared privies to monasteries. Though both were places that held a wide variety of people, they were “separated from political conversation.”[1] Rabelais was wrong. In urban environments like Philadelphia’s at the end of the eighteenth century, outdoor privies were intensely political. The location of privies on public and private property and the ability of different people to access them were intimately connected to notions of bodily privacy and social status. The yards and alleys in which urban privies were situated were intimate spaces that all Philadelphians were compelled to share with other people to varying degrees. The physical relationships between people in these often-overlooked urban spaces--who could share this space with you, who could surveil you in that space, and your ability to control that situation—helped define their social relationships.

No meeting. Happy 2025!

Short Writings Roundtable
 
If you have a shorter piece--an abstract, a proposal, an op-ed, etc.--that you would like feedback on, this session is for you!

Michael Holleran, "The Urban Ditch: Landscape, Life and Afterlives"
 
Abstract:"The Urban Ditch: Landscape, Life and Afterlives" explores the history of surface water distribution - acequias, zanjas, canals, ditches - in cities of the US West. These channels were the first water systems, not only for irrigating gardens and street trees but for every urban purpose: drinking and cooking, washing bodies and clothes, fighting fires and sprinkling streets. Urban history largely ignores this technology and landscape in favor of modern piped water. Urban ditch networks were not quickly supplanted but for decades grew alongside pressurized mains serving parallel functions, and in many cities they still flow. How did cities and ditches develop together? How and why have urban ditches persisted? I answer these questions through original research on four cities: San Antonio, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City and Phoenix, from their European settlement to the present. This is a history of urban infrastructure, urban environment, urban social institutions and governance, the shaping of public and private space, and urban daily life.
 
Comment: Paul Sutter, University of Colorado Boulder

Kirke Elsass, "Getting Comfortable in the Basement: Children’s Health, Women’s Work, and Respectability in the Domestic Subterranean, 1850-1930"
 
Abstract: Throughout the nineteenth century, American social reformers sharply distinguished between above-ground and below-ground living spaces. They decried cellar dwelling, associating underground apartments with economic and moral poverty as well as serious health risks to young children. Basements were assumed inevitably dark, damp, cramped, ill-ventilated, and infested by rodents and bugs. By the late 1920s, rigid anti-basement thinking had completely given way and a new type of underground living space was an aspiration of the American middle class. Parents integrated the underground into existing concepts of the single-family home as a retreat from the exterior chaos of industrialized society. White middle-class mothers embraced basements as comfortable spaces for domestic work and as beneficial to children’s healthy development. This chapter examines how increased use of a material technology, cement, factored into this reversal. Cement helped exclude enough rainwater, sewage, pests, and earthy stink to allow new definitions and imaginations of the basement’s place in a respectable home. The chapter is part of a dissertation on the adoption and development of modern cement technology in the United States and the material’s participation in twentieth-century American cultures.
 
Comment: Conevery Bolton Valencius, Boston College

Introductions & Inspiration
 
Our first session does not have a common reading, but is a chance for everyone to share who they are, what they are working on/thinking about, and what is currently inspiring this work. 

Slava Savova, "Re-Ottomanizing modernity: domesticating balneology in early to mid-20th century Bulgaria"

This dissertation chapter examines the local intermingling of a specific type of sociomedical architectures – Ottoman and European thermal baths - and the persistent vernacular uses that bind them together.

Public baths, one of the most prominent typologies within the Ottoman architectural nomenclature, were erected in the vicinity of dozens of thermal springs across the territory of
present-day Bulgaria, simultaneously facilitating the access to the natural resource and establishing the boundaries of its uses. After Bulgaria’s liberation from Ottoman rule in 1878,
the country embarked on a course of modernization that saw the rapid elimination of the Ottoman era infrastructures. I argue that the eclectic shells of their “modern” replacements
enclosed pre-existing healing and bathing practices and the process of their building became the contested territory of political, cultural, and social conflicts. Furthermore, I will question the modern/archaic, hygienic/unclean, Western/Ottoman binaries deployed in the remaking of the civic environment and will demonstrate that the modernization of early to mid-20th century Bulgaria was a non-linear process of adaptation and absorption of preceding cultural practices, that aligned modern technology along the contours of pre-existing ecologies of care and healing.

Kara Murphy Schlichting, "Summer Complaint: Heat as a Public Health Crisis in 19th-Century New York City"
 
Abstract: When it came to public health, seasons mattered in nineteenth-century New York City. Extreme heat endangered human health, sickening people with heat stroke and dehydration and spiking the fatality rates of infectious diseases. This paper opens in the 1860s as physicians and sanitarians established a Board of Health, the nation's first, to address urbanites' ill-health, including summertime mortality rates. Miasmic theory's focus on the role of environmental factors led public health offiicials to see summertime through an explanatory frame that focused on environmental conditions of city streets and atmosphere. In studying the city environs, enumerating and charting temperature, humidity, and wind alongside vital statistics, public health officials built an etiology of seasonal ill-health that linked urban form and weather phenomena. I argue taht climatological understanding of healthfulness and disease led health officials to study the city's atmosphere and attempt to improve the housing conditions of airless tenements and the sanitation issues of filthy streets. Public health struggled to understand and mitigate summertime deaths through successive reforms concerning street cleaning, housing improvements, and the slow shift from miasma to germ theory.
 
Comment: Richard C. Keller, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health

Evan Roberts, "Young but daily growing? The decline of stunting and growth faltering in the United States, 1857-2014" 
Abstract: Growth faltering—where children's stature falls below reference standards in infancy and through age 3-—is common in developing countries today. It is less clear how growth faltering has changed over long periods of time. However, historical data on growth patterns is abundant, because of sustained interest in the health of urban children that developed in the late nineteenth century United States. Using unique individual-level data from a 1918 childhood health survey I benchmark growth faltering in the early twentieth century, with the sample matching national growth patterns. 
 
Using published data on children's stature, I then examine how growth patterns changed over time. Although American preschool children around 1920 were taller than populations in developing countries today, a clear pattern of growth faltering through the toddler years is observed. Published growth data on US children from 1900 through World War II suggest growth faltering was common in the United States, and that rural children were slightly taller. Rural and urban differences declined by the beginning of World War II. 
 
Comment: Andrew Ruis, University of Wisconsin

Short Writings Roundtable
 
If you have a shorter piece--an abstract, a research description, an op-ed, etc.--that you would like feedback on, this session is for you! Please submit you short piece via this Google form by January 26 for posting.

Sam Hege, “When Noxious Odors Prevail”: Dust, Race, and the Creation of an Agro-Industrial Complex in the Texas Panhandle
Abstract: In the mid-20th century, intensive efforts to suppress dust throughout the Southern Plains of the United States sparked a region wide surge in agricultural production. Following the 1930’s dust storms, which earned the region the enduring moniker, the Dust Bowl, many outside observers deemed this part of the country unsuitable to farming and permanent human settlement. To counter this malignant perception of the Dust Bowl, local boosters, farmers, and politicians adopted new and extractive approaches to farming that could persist amidst severe periods of drought. Although much has been written about the history of industrial farming in the Southern Plains, scholars have paid little attention to the impact of this transformation on working-class Black and Latinx communities. As activists in Lubbock, TX, a primary urban hub of the Southern Plains, have argued, ag-related dusts were not so much suppressed as they were disproportionately respatialized. Concentrating dust within racialized urban spaces allowed local boosters to turn the region’s dust particles from a national spectacle into a localized and tolerable nuisance. This article argues that racial conceptions of health, space, and atmosphere ultimately sustained the region’s transformation into an agro-industrial complex.
In tracing how West Texas dust transformed from a rural disaster into an urban nuisance, this article identifies key, yet unrecognized, mechanisms underlying the formation of postwar agro-industrial complexes throughout the U.S. Southwest. To develop this argument, I draw out the “creative” forms of extraction that boosters and developers employed to enable this transition. As Louise Seamster and Danielle Purifoy have argued, the extraction of value from Black and Latinx spaces, via “displacing environmental harms” through innovations “in laws, policies, and implementation to reproduce racialized uneven development,” makes possible the creation of white land values. While Purifoy and Seamster focus on the ways that “creative extraction” has constricted the possibilities of Black towns in support of the expansion of metropolitan white suburbs, a similar model applies to the dynamic urban-rural settings that comprise the Southern Plains agricultural landscape. In West Texas, this included the development of racialized systems of labor appropriation as well as the use of development tools such as urban renewal to expand industrial operations and concentrate dust within particular communities. Building Jennifer Gabrys’ practice of “tuning in... to the demands for justice that particulate pollution instigate,” this article argues that discussions of the future of industrial farming must address the disproportionate distribution of dust that continues to infect Black and Latinx resident’s lungs, breakdown their a/c units, and pollute their greenspace. This history illustrates how the relational mechanisms of racism and pollutive sitings are not “externalities” but rather fundamental to the formation of modern industrial agriculture.
 
Opening comment by Josiah Rector, University of Houston

Taylor Desloge, "Sanitized Violence: The Strange Liberal Rebirth of Jim Crow and the Origins of an Urban Renewal Coalition, 1917-1929" 
Abstract: In the fall of 1923, in response to an outbreak of smallpox and a larger panic over public health spurred by the Great Migration, the St. Louis city health department instituted a mandatory vaccination program for Black Migrants at St. Louis’ Union Station. As city health commissioner Max C. Starkloff fought to implement the program, he faced a widespread protest movement from Black St. Louisans, who gathered daily at Union Station to jeer and taunt at the police officers enforcing the quarantine. In time, Starkloff would be forced to the bargaining table—and to eventually abandon his scheme altogether—by a new coalition of interracial reformers. This chapter argues that moments like the 1923 Quarantine, when both disease and Black political dissent threatened the day-to-day operation of the Jim Crow city, were the building blocks of a reconstructed Jim Crow in the interwar era, with profound consequences for 20th century urban policy. As men like Starkloff, and later, city planner Harland Bartholomew sought to implement an aggressive modernization campaign in the name of the public welfare, they quickly discovered that meeting the demands of a growing and increasingly influential bloc of Black St. Louisans was essential to the legitimation of their schemes. In place of a color line that had emerged through decades of violence and dispossession perpetrated against African American St. Louisans, technocrats like Starkloff offered a new, modern Jim Crow that sanitized the violence and neglect of segregation beneath a promise of universal welfare, racial reconciliation and most importantly of all, the democratic consent—real, imagined and sometimes wholly fabricated—of Black St. Louisans themselves. I argue that the interwar reconstruction of Jim Crow in places like St. Louis played a foundational role in the dispossession of Black communities later in the century. As interracial reformers worked out a new vision for 20th century St. Louis,  they tied the long post-emancipation fight for Black health and environmental equity with a newer vision of urban reconstruction that valued the needs of a deeply racialized urban land market over those of residents themselves.
 
Opening comment by Michele Mitchell, NYU

Kristin Brig-Ortiz, "Hydrological Dissonances: Climate, Geography, and Port City Waters"
Abstract: Southern African port municipalities designed their various water infrastructures as part of the non-living environments around them. Environmental history and histories of technology have together argued that we cannot separate infrastructure from its climatic, topographic, and “natural” surrounding. Building on literature in environmental histories of imperial technologies and control over nature, this chapter shows the close attention colonial municipalities paid to the non-living environmental landscapes around and within their cities in order to construct durable water infrastructure. Through this analysis, I argue that the non-living natural environment created a continual challenge to British hydrological authority and management along the urban Cape and Natal coastline. While scholars have long examined this struggle in different contexts, they often examine major infrastructural pieces such as dams, irrigation technology, and railroads instead of the daily nature-human struggles inherent in the built colonial environment. As they tried to construct western infrastructure in these areas, British colonizers framed the coastal southern African environment as a “deviant” being that resisted and often impaired colonial actions and technologies. Southern African non-human nature may have been beautiful, but it was also destructive and subversive, radiating the tumor of urban colonialism as the latter sought to expand into and manipulate the landscape around it.
 
 

Introductions and Inspirations
 
For our first meeting, we will not be discussing a common text. Instead, this session will allow us to meet one another, establish goals for our working group, and share our favorite titles on health and the urban environment.