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American Cities & Technology, Chapter 5: Technologies of Water, Waste and Pollution
Urban populations_____________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________. “Urban metabolism” is the phrase that Joel Tarr used to describe the processing of such inputs and outputs through systems: “the supply of water and the disposal of wastewater or sewage; the generation and disposal of industrial wastes; and the collection and disposal of solid wastes and garbage from food and consumer products”. The_______________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________. However, as industrialization and even more rapid urbanization occurred during the nineteenth century, waste and refuse [garbage] came to be understood as problems of urban life. Initially, it was a matter of the “metabolism” of individual cities, regardless of effects elsewhere. Indeed, it is difficult to generalize about water supply, waste, and pollution in the USA because their handling was so locationally, politically and temporally specific. In many cases, European methods were adopted, though adapted to local context of application.________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________, matters. The story of water supply, waste and pollution is both highly local and “environmental” in the broadest sense. In colonial times, water for urban inhabitants was drawn from local wells, springs, streams or cisterns, and this continued to be the case well into the nineteenth century. The central supply of piped water was introduced early only in the largest, most rapidly expanding cities of the new nation. There, its introduction tendedto be crisis-driven:_________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________. Philadelphia, New York City, Richmond, St Louis, and Pittsburg had public waterworks by the end of the 1830s. Baltimore and Boston followed in the 1840s. By 1860, the sixteen largest US cities had central water-supply systems… Where central water-supply development was undertaken before the Civil War, the ________ _____________________________________________________________________________. The growing requirement of industry for supplies of clean water was also a stimulus. The increase in water supplies brought a concomitant increase in the amount of waste for disposal; the used water had to go somewhere. Where local wells or springs supplied residents, ______________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________. Though this was not an issue where central supplies were drawn from remote sources, the dramatically higher per capita consumption, which occurred universally, meant that cesspools were overwhelmed by the increased amount of effluent. Natural seepage could not deal with the extra load. If householders did not empty the cesspools more frequently, at considerable cost, there were overflows. Another recourse was to direct waste to storm drains or open gutters. These options were not just unpleasant: the prevailing anti-contagionist theory, developed by English sanitarians in the 1840s, that diseases were caused by foul air arising from putrefying matter meant that they also gave rise to serious health worries. Figure 5.3 Privies and pumps, Pittsburg, 1909. The privy _______________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _______________________ by scavengers who were either private or under contract to town authorities. In some areas, farmers worked as scavengers to secure fertilizer. Often urged on by the sanitarians, many towns saw water itself as a possible new technological solution to the problem of the unprecedented volume of waste. Disposal by “water-carriage”- that is, by the construction of sewer systems- as had been done from the 1840s in England and in Hamburg, was the technology adopted. Like water supply systems _______________________________________ _________________________________________ expertise. The installation of sewerage systems in turn brought about further problems, to which technological solutions were eventually sought. Typically, ____________________________ ____________________________________________________________. When the anti-contagionist theory of disease was still prevalent, it was urged that this practice had no consequences for cities further downstream or that were affected by the prevailing ocean currents because the sewage was rendered harmless by oxygenation and dilution in the large volumes of water. Surprising to contemporaries, deaths from epidemic disease (typhoid being a particularly sensitive indicator), did not fall in number of cities downstream of the major cities with sewerage systems. This was primarily because they were located downstream of other major cities with sewerage systems… Even after the germ theory was accepted, however, and bacteriological techniques were developed to evaluate water quality, _____________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________. Most cities had, like Chicago, built combined street-drainage and sewerage systems. Sewage treatment was particularly costly for such cities because of the large volume of water to be treated; cities that had built separate sewers for run-off and sewage, or sewers that dealt with sewage, were in a better position. ____________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________, to guarantee their purity. Alongside the installation of central water supplies and municipal sewerage systems in the last two decades of the nineteenth century went a transformation of how refuse [garbage] was perceived – from a nuisance to a health hazard requiring solution… Rubbish was commonly piled up in streets and alleys, or tipped [dumped] on to vacant land or into waterways. And the problems of disposing of the dung and carcasses of horses consequent on a horse-drawn urban transport system should not be underestimated. By the 1890s, the “nuisance” became impossible to ignore. In ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ in many cities.
For a variety of reasons, urban politicians and developers turned to technologies of water supply and waste management during their struggles to manage rapidly growing cities driven by the values of private enterprise. In much the same way as they became dependent on the existence of transport networks, inhabitants of US cities in the late nineteenth century became dependent on the provisions of water supply and waste infrastructures as well… Crucial to the process of infrastructural development was a growing perception, fostered by coalitions of businesspeople, industrialists and sanitation reformers, that __________________________ _____________________________________________________________________. American Cities & Technology, Chapter 6: Technology and the Governance of Cities
Both the nature of urban government and the way that technology was involved in it changed considerably from the late nineteenth century onwards. The _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ _________. In some cases, technologies were deployed as part of this process; in others, the process affected technology, or technology to some extent stimulated the process. For example, the technologies of street lighting and fire-fighting became essential tools of city governance, while the development of large-scale, networked transport and utilities infrastructures in the nineteenth century involved city authorities in making numerous, incremental decisions that amounted to what might be seen as a piecemeal planning. Public __________________________________________________________. Rushlights or oil lamps were used in the eighteenth century, as urban nightlife- both for commerce and for entertainment- became more common. In the nineteenth century, manufactured gas made it possible for factories and shops to stay open later; this resulted in more people being on the streets after dark- traditionally a threatening time. At the same time, city authorities organized new, networked systems of street lighting using more reliable manufactured gas, generally through franchises to private contractors. It made good business sense too; good_________ ____________________________________________________________________________ ______________________.
Competition from electricity began in 1880s, when electric arc-lamps were introduced for lighting the city streets and some large public buildings, such as theaters and department stores… However, it was the introduction by Edison of his system for the generation and distribution of electricity for incandescent street lighting from the early 1880s that brought real competition to gas. For Edison directly targeted the gas-lighting market and patterned his electricity system on the central generation and distribution of gas. The __________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________.
Fire was a fearsome feature of city life ______________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _______. Dealing with fire was a major issue for city authorities. JK Freitag, from whose 1912 handbook Fire Prevention and Fire Protection as Applied to Building Construction, vividly described the consequences of fire for the built environment: “it has been estimated that we burn up during every normal week of the year, 3 theaters, 3 public halls, 12 churches, 10 schools, 2 hospitals, 2 asylums, 2 colleges, 6 apartment houses, 3 department stores, 2 jails, 26 hotels, 140 flats and stores, and 1600 homes.”
Regulations to control various aspects of the built environment in order to prevent fires or to mitigate their effectswere important means of dealing with the ever-present threat. Monkkonen argues that such regulations were a service rather than a constraint because they were aimed at the common good. Most cities, including pre-1871 Chicago, had local ordinances defining fire limits- areas within which the construction of wooden buildings was forbidden… Although they were becoming prominent during the late 1870s and 1880s for the tall buildings of New York and Chicago, fireproof construction methods based on metal and terracotta were not adopted universally. In New England, in the final year of the century, “slow burning construction”, adapted from textile-mill construction techniques, was used, especially in factories. Because of the comparative expense, the USA rarely adopted British iron and brick construction for factories, with the exception of those running highly inflammable processes such as sugar-refining works or gas-works. Slow-burning construction ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________cisterns topped up by pumps from nearby water sources, sprinklers and hydrants. The strategy was that slow-burning construction would allow time for fire-fighting devices to be deployed, so that fires could be contained and quickly extinguished. Good watch systems and alarms were essential to this strategy. The most visible manifestations of the requirements of fire-fighting in the built environment were:_______________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________, that were especially constructed to serve the needs of the fire-fighters… The first viable steam-engines for fire-fighting in the USA were manufactured in Cincinnati in 1852. Over the following two decades, ___________________ ____________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________ _________________, displacing the sometimes rowdy volunteer companies.
After the USA became a nation, the layout of most cities was planned by survey in advance of settlement, to define parcels of land that could be sold. Federal surveyors implementing the Land Ordinance of 1785 set the basic grid co-ordinates, and___________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________ ________. Beyond that, however,except for the location of a few key public buildings, there was seldom stipulation of how land should be used; as preceding chapters have shown, ____ ____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________- often with little regard for the pressures that such development put on the environment… The development of planning up to the Second World War moved from designing the basic layout of cities, to piecemeal improvements of specific civic areas, to___________________________________________ _____.