Health and the Urban Environment

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.