Hello All:
This is a cross-posted essay from H-URBAN. Apologies for any
duplications. I thought it might interest ECOFEMers--anyone working
on ecofeminst design & cities? Any comments on this?
Stefanie
------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
The City and the Natural Environment
Joel A. Tarr
Carnegie Mellon University
While cities and their metropolitan areas interact with and shape the
natural environment, it is only recently, as Martin Melosi and Christine
Rosen have observed, that historians have begun to systematically
consider this relationship. Geographers and urban designers such as Ian
Douglas, Spencer W. Havlick, and Ann Spirin, however, had previously
laid foundations for this work. Just as urban history developed as a
field in reaction to a growing societal focus on and awareness of urban
problems, so has urban environmental studies grown with the evolution of
the environmental movement. During our own time, as Ian McHarg was one
of the first to demonstrate, the tension between natural and urbanized
areas has increased, as the spread of metropolitan populations and urban
land uses has reshaped and destroyed natural landscapes and
environments. The relationship between the city and the natural
environment has actually been circular, with cities having massive
effects on the natural environment, while the natural environment, in
turn, has profoundly shaped urban configurations.
Americans founded cities in locations where nature offered various
attractions, such as on coastlines where the land's contours created
harbors, on rivers and lakes that could be used for transportation,
water supplies, and waste disposal, and in fertile river valleys with
extensive food and animal resources. Rather than being passive, the
natural environment frequently played an active and even destructive
role in the life of cities. Urban history is filled with stories about
how city dwellers contended with the forces of nature that threatened
their lives, their built environments, and their urban ecosystems.
Nature not only caused many of the annoyances of daily urban life, such
as bad weather and pests, but it also gave rise to natural disasters and
catastrophes such as floods, fires, and earthquakes. In order to
protect themselves and their settlements against the forces of nature,
cities built many defenses including flood walls and dams, earthquake
resistant buildings, and storage places for food and for water. At
times, such protective steps sheltered urbanites against the worst
natural furies, but often their own actions -- such as building on flood
plains and steep slopes, under the shadow of volcanoes, or in
earth-quake prone zones -- exposed them, as Theodore Steinberg has
recently written, to danger from natural hazards.
Cities have always placed demands on their sites and their hinterlands.
In order to extend their usable territory, urban developers often
reshaped natural landscapes, leveling hills, filling valleys and
wetlands, and creating huge areas of made land. On this new land, they
constructed a built environment of paved streets, squares. malls,
houses, factories, office buildings, and churches. In the process they
altered urban biological ecosystems for their own purposes, killing off
animal populations, eliminating native species of flora and fauna, and
introducing new and foreign species. Thus urbanites, as Ann Spirin has
written, constructed a built environment that replaced the natural
environment and created a local micro climate, with different
temperature gradients and rainfall and wind patterns than those of the
surrounding countryside.
City populations require food, water, fuel, and construction materials,
while urban industries need natural materials for production purposes.
In order to fulfill these needs, as William Cronon has brilliantly
shown, urbanites increasingly had to reach far beyond their boundaries.
In the nineteenth century, for instance, the demands of city dwellers
for food produced rings of garden farms around cities and drove the
transformation of distant prairies into cattle ranches and wheat farms;
and, the many horses quartered in cities required feed, consuming the
products produced by thousands of acres. In the twentieth century, as
urban population increased, the demand for food drove the rise of large
factory farms. The subject of the flow of food and other such
commodities into 19th century cities and its subsequent marketing,
however, still has to find its historian. Cities also require fresh
water supplies in order to exist -- engineers, acting at the behest of
urban elites and politicians, built waterworks, thrust water intake
pipes ever further into neighboring lakes, dug wells deeper and deeper
into the earth looking for groundwater, and dammed and diverted rivers
and streams to obtain water supplies for domestic and industrial uses
and for fire-fighting. In the process of obtaining water from distant
locales, cities often transformed them, making deserts where there had
been fertile agricultural areas. The most dramatic story of such water
theft involves Los Angeles, as graphically told by Norris Hundley, Jr.,
William Kahrl and others. .The acquisition of protected water shed
areas and the building of reservoirs often involved, as Fern Nessin has
shown for Boston's Quabban Reservoir (built 1928), the flooding of many
towns and farms.
City entrepreneurs and industrialists were actively involved in the
commodification of natural systems, putting them to use for purposes of
urban consumption. The exploitation of water power from rivers and
streams in New England, for instance, provided power for manufacturing
cities, but, as Theodore Steinberg has argued, it also sharply altered
river dynamics, destroying fish populations and depriving downstream
users of adequate and unpolluted supplies. For materials to build and
to heat the city, loggers stripped millions of acres of forests,
quarrymen tore granite and other stone from the earth, and miners dug
coal to provide fuel for commercial, industrial and domestic uses.
Urbanites had to seek locations to dispose of the wastes produced by
their construction, manufacturing and consumption. They were, as I have
written, seeking an "ultimate sink" for the wastes, but often ended up
polluting downstream locales. Initially, they placed wastes on sites
within the city, polluting the air, land, and water with industrial and
domestic effluents and modifying and even destroying natural biological
systems. In the post-Civil War period, as cities grew larger, they
disposed of their wastes by transporting them to more distant locations.
Thus, cities constructed sewerage systems for domestic wastes to
replace cesspools and privy vaults and to improve local health
conditions. They usually discharged the sewage into neighboring
waterways, often polluting the water supply of downstream cities. In
order to avoid epidemics of waterborne disease such as typhoid and
cholera, downstream cities sought new sources of supply or used
technological fixes, such as water filtration (1890s) or chlorination
(1912), but the choices were not simple. Industrial wastes also added
to stream and lake pollution, and urban rivers often became little more
than open sewers.
The air and the land also became "sinks" for waste disposal. In the
late-nineteenth century, bituminous (or soft) coal became the preferred
fuel for industrial, transportation, and domestic use in cities such as
Chicago, Pittsburgh and St. Louis. But while providing an inexpensive
and plentiful energy supply, bituminous coal was also very dirty. The
cities that used it suffered from air contamination and reduced
sunlight, while the cleaning tasks of householders were greatly
increased. The story of smoke pollution and attempts at control has
been well told by David Stradling in his recent dissertation. Industry
also used land surfaces for disposal of domestic and industrial wastes,
and open areas in and around cities were marked with heaps of garbage,
horse manure, ashes, and industrial byproducts such as slag from iron
and steel-making or copper smelting. Such materials were often used to
fill-in "swamps" (wetlands) along waterfronts. Craig Colten's series of
Illinois case studies provide valuable information on industrial waste
disposal, as do Hugh Gorman's and Andrew Hurley's recent articles on
brownfield sites.
In the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reformers began
campaigning for urban environmental cleanups and public health
improvements. Women's groups, as Maureen Flanaghan and Suellen Hoy
write, often took the lead in agitating for clean air, clean water, and
improved urban "housekeeping," showing a greater concern than men with
such quality of life and health-related issues. Many progressive
reformers, according to the work of Paul Boyer, Stanley Schultz, and
William Wilson, believed that the moral qualities of good citizenship
were related to environmental improvements and to exposure to nature.
Reformers pushed for reduction of pollution and for construction of
urban parks and playgrounds as a means to acculturate immigrants and
upgrade workingclass citizenship as well as to provide elite
playgrounds. Coalitions of enlightened businessman, reformers, and
urban professionals such as engineers and public health officials
spearheaded drives for improvements in water supply and sanitary
services. The replacement of the horse, first by the electric trolleys
and then by the automobile and motor truck, as a prime means of power
for urban transport, brought about substantial improvements in street
and air sanitation. Campaigns for clean air, however, as Harold Platt
and Christine Rosen have written in regard to Chicago, and reduction of
waterway pollution, as I have written, were largely unsuccessful. On
balance, urban sanitary conditions were probably somewhat better in the
1920s than in the late-nineteenth century, but the cost of improvement
often was the exploitation of urban hinterlands for water supplies,
increased downstream water pollution, and growing automobile congestion
and pollution.
During the post World War II decades, as Samuel P. Hays has written,
city environments suffered from heavy pollution loads as they sought to
cope with increased automobile usage, pollution from industrial
production, new varieties of exotic chemical pesticides and herbicides
such as DDT, and the wastes of an increasingly consumer-oriented
economy. Cleaner fuels and smoke control laws largely freed cities
during the 1940s and 1950s of the dense smoke from which they had
previously suffered. Improved urban air quality resulted largely from
the substitution of natural gas and oil for coal as urban fuels and the
replacement of the steam locomotive by the diesel-electric. However,
great increases in automobile usage in areas such as Los Angeles and
Denver produced the new phenomena of photo-chemical smog, and air
pollution replaced smoke as a major concern. Another improvement that
proved temporary involved the replacement of the open dump and the pig
farm by the sanitary landfill as a disposal place for urban garbage in
the 1950s, '60s and '70s, as discussed by Martin Melosi.. By the 1970s,
however, it had become clear that the sanitary landfill often had
substantial polluting qualities. In addition, some metropolitan areas
ran out of land for landfills, beginning an expensive search for
non-polluting and environmentally sound alternatives.
During these decades, the suburban out-migration, which had begun in
the nineteenth century with commuter trains and streetcars and
accelerated because of the availability and convenience of the
automobile, now increased to a torrent, putting major strains on the
formerly rural and undeveloped metropolitan fringes. To a great extent,
suburban layouts, as Adam Rome has emphasized, ignored environmental
considerations, making little provision for open space, produced endless
rows of resource-consuming and polluting lawns, contaminated groundwater
with septic tanks, and consuming excessive amounts of fresh water and
energy. The growth of the edge or outer city since the 1970s, reflected
a continued preference on the part of Americans for space-intensive
single-family houses surrounded by lawns, for private automobiles over
public transit, and for greenfield development. Without greater land
use planning and environmental protection, urban American will, as it
has in the past, continue to damage and to stress the natural
environment.
The core cities themselves, especially in areas of the east and midwest
where industries have vacated the regions and urban populations have
decreased, suffer from the environmental burdens imposed by vacant,
abandoned, and derelict sites. Many of these sites had formerly been
used by industries and are contaminated, as Craig Colten, Hugh Gorman,
and Andrew Hurley have discussed, with toxic wastes, which often require
costly procedures to remove. Vacant lots and derelict structures in
urban neighborhoods plagued by population loss and by poverty, also
impose a human cost. In some of these cases, issues of environmental
equity are involved. Even though today's environmental regulations
prevent some of the environmental abuses of the past, without reclaiming
these urban brownfields and improving urban neighborhoods many cities
will continue to bear the burden of the environmental sins of the past.
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Dr. Stefanie S. Rixecker
Department of Resource Management
Lincoln University, Canterbury
PO Box 56
Aotearoa New Zealand
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Fax: 64-03-325-3841
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************************************
Dr. Stefanie S. Rixecker
Department of Resource Management
Lincoln University, Canterbury
PO Box 56
Aotearoa New Zealand
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Fax: 64-03-325-3841
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