This essay introduces a special issue that explores the history of cities in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe from an environmental perspective. After examining the origins and aims of urban environmental history, it traces the relationship between this approach and kindred fields of study. The authors argue that although North American historiography has played an important role in the development of European urban environmental history, other influences, both intellectual and historical, have proved no less significant in shaping the ways that Europeanists approach the natural and built environment. The case studies in this issue, which examine Austria, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, exemplify the vitality and diversity of current scholarship in European urban environmental history.
Christine M. Rosen and Joel A. Tarr, “The Importance of an Urban Perspective in Environmental History,” Journal of Urban History20 (1994): 299-310.
2.
Martin V. Melosi , “The Place of the City in Environmental History,” Environmental History Review17, no. 1 (Spring 1993 ): 1-23; Donald Worster, “ Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History ,” Journal of American History76, no. 4 (1990): 1087-1106.
3.
Rosen and Tarr, “Importance of an Urban Perspective ,” 301.
See “Les réseaux techniques urbains,” Les Annales de la Recherche urbaine 23-24 (July-December 1984 ), and Joel A. Tarr and Gabriel Dupuy, eds., Technology and the Rise of the Networked City in Europe and America (Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 1988). On the relationship between urban history and environmental history in the United States, see Joel A. Tarr, “Urban History and Environmental History in the United States: Complementary and Overlapping Fields,” in Christoph Bernhardt, ed., Environmental Problems in European Cities in the 19th and 20th Century ( Münster: Waxmann, 2001).
6.
Peter Brimblecombe and Christian Pfister, eds., The Silent Countdown: Essays in Environmental History (Berlin: Springer, 1990). Contributors included, among others, Peter Brimblecombe, Engelbert Schramm, and Franz-Josef Brüggemeier.
7.
Christoph Bernhardt, ed., Environmental Problems in European Cities in the 19th and 20th Century (Münster : Waxmann, 2001); Christoph Bernhardt and Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud, eds., The Modern Demon: Pollution in Urban and Industrial European Societies (Clermont-Ferrand : Presses Universitaires Blaise-Pascal, 2002); and Dieter Schott, Bill Luckin, and Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud, eds., Resources of the City: Contributions to an Environmental History of Modern Europe (Aldershot : Ashgate, 2005). To contact this network, please write to massard.guilbaud@wanadoo.fr
8.
Dieter Schott was appointed professor in modern history with a focus on “urban and environmental history” by the Technical University of Darmstadt, and Massard-Guilbaud, whose work has always dealt with cities, was selected to occupy the first chair in France specifically devoted to environmental history, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
9.
For a recent survey on environmental history in Europe, see Verena Winiwarter, ed., “Environmental History in Europe from 1994 to 2004: Enthusiasm and Consolidation,” Environment and History10, no. 4 (2004): 501-30.
10.
Mark Cioc, Björn-Ola Linnér, and Matt Osborn, “ Environmental History Writing in Northern Europe,” Environmental History5 (July 2000 ): 396-406, esp. 399-401.
11.
Joachim Radkau , Natur und Macht: Eine Weltgeschichte der Umwelt (Munich: Beck, 2000). For other global histories of the environment, see J.R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); and Clive Ponting, A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations (New York: St. Martin's, 1991). On methodology, see Helmut Haberl, Karl-Heinz Erb, and Fridolin Krausmann , “How to Calculate and Interpret Ecological Footprints for Long Periods of Time: The Case of Austria, 1926-1995,” Ecological Economics38 (2001): 25-45.
12.
Ilja Mieck , “`Aerem corrumpere non licet': Luftverschmützung und Immissionschütz in Preußen bis zur Gewerbeordnung 1869,” Technikgeschichte34 (1967): 36-78; idem, “ Berliner Umweltprobleme im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Ingolf Lamprecht and Kurt Eberhard, eds., Umweltprobleme einer Gross-Stadt: Das Beispiel Berlin (Berlin: Colloquium, 1990); Dieter Schott, ed., Energy and the City in Europe: From Preindustrial Wood-Shortage to the Oil Crisis of the 1970s (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1997); idem, Kommunale Energiepolitik, öffentlicher Nahverkehr und die `Produktion' der modernen Stadt; Darmstadt-Mannheim-Mainz, 1880-1918 (Darmstadt: Wissenchaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1999); Franz-Josef Brüggemeier and Thomas Rommelspacher, Blauer Himmel über der Ruhr: Geschichte der Umwelt im Ruhrgebiet, 1840-1990 (Essen: Klartext, 1992); Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, Das unendliche Meer der Lüfte: Luftverschmutzung, Industrialisierung und Risikodebatten im 19. Jahrhundert ( Essen: Klartext, 1996); and Bernhardt, Environmental Problems in European Cities.
13.
Peter Brimblecombe , The Big Smoke: A History of Air Pollution in London since Medieval Times (London: Methuen, 1987); Bill Luckin, “Town, Country, and Metropolis: The Formation of an Air Pollution Problem in London, 1800-1870,” in Dieter Schott, ed., Energy and the City in Europe: From Preindustrial Wood-Shortage to the Oil Crisis of the 1970s (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1997), 77-91; idem, “Pollution in the City ,” in Martin Daunton, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain: Volume 3; 1840-1950 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 207-28; and idem, “`The Heart and Home of Horror': The Great London Fogs of the Late Nineteenth Century,” Social History28, no. 1 (January 2003 ): 31-48. Several years earlier, Bill Luckin also published Pollution and Control: A Social History of the Thames in Nineteenth Century (Bristol : Adam Hilger, 1986). Stephen Mosley, The Chimney of the World: A History of Smoke Pollution in Victorian and Edwardian Manchester (Cambridge: White Horse Press, 2001); and idem, “Fresh Air and Foul: The Role of the Open Fireplace in Ventilating the British Home, 1837-1910 ,” Planning Perspectives18, no. 1 (2003): 1-21.
14.
See, for example, W.G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1955); Oliver Rackham, The History of the Countryside (London: Dent, 1986); Joan Thirsk, The English Rural Landscape (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon, 1983). One geographer whose work has covered a wide range of environmental history topics, although he does not focus specifically on cities, is John Sheail . See his Nature Conservation in Britain: The Formative Years (London: Stationery Office, 1998), and An Environmental History of Twentieth-Century Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan , 2002).
15.
Christopher Hamlin, A Science of Impurity: Water Analysis in Nineteenth Century Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); idem, Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain, 1800-1854 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Harold L. Platt, Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Peter Thorsheim, Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006).
16.
GenevièveMassard-Guilbaud, “De la `part du milieu' à l'histoire de l'environnement ,” Le Mouvement Social200 (July-September 2002): 64-72.
17.
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, introduction to Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations29 (1974): 3.
18.
J.R. McNeill , “Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History,” History and Theory42 (December 2003): 5-43.
19.
Donald Worster , “Appendix: Doing Environmental History ,” in Donald Worster, ed., The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 291-92; and Alfred W. Crosby , “The Past and Present of Environmental History,” American Historical Review100 (October 1995): 1177-89.
20.
Alain Corbin , The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, translated by Miriam L. Kochan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986 ; French ed., 1982); and idem, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750-1840, translated by Jocelyn Phelps (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994; French ed., 1988). For an insightful examination of the issues raised in such controversies, see Kristin Asdal, “The Problematic Nature of Nature: The Post-Constructivist Challenge to Environmental History ,” History and Theory42 (December 2003): 60-74.
21.
McNeill, “ Observations,” 29. See also Michael Bess, Mark Cioc, and James Sievert, “Environmental History Writing in Southern Europe,” Environmental History5 (October 2000): 545-56, esp. 548.
22.
André Guillerme , The Age of Water: The Urban Environment in the North of France, A.D. 300-1800 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1988); idem, “ Chaleur et cauffage: l'introduction du confort à Paris sous la Restauration ,” History of Technology14 (1992): 16-53.
23.
But see Eagle Glassheim, “Ethnic Cleansing, Communism, and Environmental Devastation in Czechoslovakia's Borderlands, 1945-1989,” Journal of Modern History, 78 ( 2006): 65-92.
24.
Juan Martínez-Alier and Klaus Schlüpmann, La ecologia y la economia (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica , 1991); Xavier Cussó, Ramon Garrabou, and Enric Tello, “Social Metabolism in an Agrarian Region of Catalonia (Spain) in 1860—1870: Flows, Energy Balance and Land Use,” Ecological Economics , 58 (2006): 49-65.
25.
See, for instance, Simone Neri Serneri, Natura, industria e società: Per una storia dell'ambiente in età contemporanea (Siena: Ciscam, 2000).
26.
Marjetta Hietala , Services and Urbanization at the Turn of the Century: The Diffusion of Innovations (Helsinki: Finnish Historical Society, 1987); Schott, Die Vernetzung der Stadt; Tapio S. Katko, Water! Evolution of Water Supply and Sanitation in Finland from the mid-1800s to 2000 (Helsinki: Finish Water and Waste Water Works Association, 1997). On the convergence of environmental history and the history of technology, see Jeffrey K. Stine and Joel A. Tarr, “ At the Intersection of Histories: Technology and the Environment,” Technology and Culture39, no. 4 (1998): 601-40.
27.
Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970 (New York: Viking, 1989), 459-70.
28.
See the concise but excellent summary of this in Dieter Schott, “Urban Environmental History: What Lessons Are There to Be Learnt?” Boreal Environment Research9, no. 6 (2004): 519-28.
29.
29. See notes 6 and 7.
30.
Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud , “Culture, technique, gestion de l'espace: Une histoire sociale de la pollution industrielle dans les villes françaises, 1789-1914” (habilitation thesis, Université Lumière Lyon 2, 2003); and André Guillerme, Anne-Cécile Lefort, and Gérard Jigaudon, Dangereux, insalubres et incommodes: Paysages industriels en banlieue parisienne, XIXe-XXe siècles (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2004). Although the latter book deals primarily with the place of industry in the Parisian suburbs, readers interested in industrial pollution will find much information in it. See also Estelle Baret-Bourgoin, La ville industrielle et ses poisons: Les mutations des sensibilités aux nuisances et pollutions industrielles à Grenoble, 1810-1914 (Grenoble : Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 2005).
31.
Pioneering works on urban noise include Olivier Faure and Olivier Balaÿ, Lyon au XIXe siècle: l'environnement sonore et la ville ( Lyon: Centre Pierre Léon, 1992); Olivier Balaÿ, L'espace sonore de la ville au XIXe siècle ([Bernin]: À la croisée, 2003); and Michael Toyka-Seid, “ Noise Abatement and the Search for Quiet Space in the Modern City,” in Dieter Schott, Bill Luckin, and Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud , eds., Resources of the City: Contributions to an Environmental History of Modern Europe (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2005), 215-29.
32.
Readers interested in waste treatment may see the recent book by Sabine Barles, L'invention des déchets urbains: France, 1790-1970 (Seyssel : Champ Vallon, 2005); many more references can be found in Resources of the City, which has a detailed index.
33.
Bill Luckin, “Environmental Justice, History and the City: The United States and Britain, 1970-2000,” in Resources of the City, 230-45.
34.
Maureen A. Flanagan, “Environmental Justice in the City: A Theme for Environmental History,” Environmental History5, no. 2 (2000).
