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At a green crossroads: recent theses in urban environmental history in Europe and North America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2012

STÉPHANE FRIOUX
STÉPHANE FRIOUX*
Affiliation:
UMR CNRS Laboratoire de Recherche Historique Rhône-Alpes / Université de Lyon, ISH, 14 avenue Berthelot, 69363 Lyon, Cedex 07, France
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Extract

Since the path-breaking work of prominent North American historians such as Joel Tarr and Martin Melosi, as well as more recent roundtables in Europe, urban environmental history is now a mature research field, at the intersection of various related approaches. Time has passed since a leader of environmental history, William Cronon, could write that ‘cities in particular deserve much more work than they have received’. In this field, urban history necessarily crosses with environmental history, but also with the history of technology and social and cultural history; whilst its scholars not only emanate from a traditional historical background, but also from geography, science and engineering. Urban environmental historians, as they are referred to here, have duly established the importance of studying the relationships between ‘nature’ (including non-humans) and humans in and around cities. This ‘nature’ is a complex and shifting entity: recent doctoral studies have, for instance, documented rivers transformed by human action, weeds growing in the spatial and social margins of cities and tidal wetlands progressively filled in and built upon. The recently completed Ph.D.s reviewed in this essay see the built environment more as a hybrid of natural elements, like water, plants, animals and human action. Aided by the environmental lens, the scope of the urban historian has also been broadened by studying the ways in which residents’ lives were transformed by the invention, spread and environmental impact of new technologies, as well as the political responses to environmental crises.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 39 , Issue 3 , August 2012 , pp. 529 - 539
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 See, for example, Tarr, J.A., The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron, OH, 1996)Google Scholar; Melosi, M.V., The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Washington, DC, 1999)Google Scholar; Schott, D., Luckin, B. and Massard-Guilbaud, G. (eds.), Resources of the City. Contributions to an Environmental History of Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2005)Google Scholar; Brüggemeier, F.-J., Cioch, M. and Zeller, T. (eds.), How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich (Athens, OH, 2005)Google Scholar.

2 Cronon, W., ‘Modes of prophecy and production: placing nature in history’, Journal of American History, 76 (1990), 1131CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 This helps explain why industrial pollution remains a popular topic amongst historians: Thorsheim, P., Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain Since 1800 (Athens, OH, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mosley, S., The Chimney of the World: A History of Smoke Pollution in Victorian and Edwardian Manchester (London, 2008)Google Scholar; Massard-Guilbard, G., Histoire de la pollution industrielle: France, 1789–1914 (Paris, 2010)Google Scholar.

4 Tarr, J.A. and Rosen, C. Meisner, ‘The importance of an urban perspective in environmental history’, Journal of Urban History, 20 (1994), 299–310Google Scholar; Massard-Guilbaud, G. and Thorsheim, P., ‘Cities, environments, and European history’, Journal of Urban History, 33 (2007), 691–701CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 For example, Mauch, C. and Zeller, T. (eds.), Rivers in History (Pittsburgh, 2008)Google Scholar.

6 A published version is available: Weeds: An Environmental History of Metropolitan America (Pittsburgh, 2010).

7 Falck's approach thereby shines a new spotlight on the history of the late twentieth-century notion of ‘shrinking cities’. See Oswalt, P. (ed.), Shrinking Cities, vol. I (Berlin, 2005)Google Scholar; Oswalt, P. (ed.), Shrinking Cities: Interventions, vol. II (Berlin, 2006)Google Scholar.

8 Melosi, The Sanitary City, p. 276.

9 An abridged version has since been published: Le laboratoire des pollutions industrielles. Paris, 1770–1830 (Paris, 2011).

10 Melosi, M.V. and Pratt, J. (eds.), Energy Metropolis: An Environmental History of Houston and the Gulf Coast (Pittsburgh, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Cronon, W., Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991)Google Scholar.

12 This has also subsequently been published as In Nature We Trust. Les paysages anglais à l’ère industrielle (Paris, 2010).

13 In France, Elsa Devienne is currently preparing a Ph.D. thesis on ‘Beaches in the city: the making of Los Angeles urban beaches, 1927–1972’, EHESS, Paris.

14 One of the seminal works is Hurley, A., Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution Gary, Indiana, 1945–1980 (Chapel Hill, 1995)Google Scholar.

15 Mosley, S., ‘Common ground: integrating social and environmental history’, Journal of Social History, 39 (2006), 915–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Masard-Guilbard, G. and Mosley, S. (eds.), Common Ground: Integrating the Social and Environmental in History (Newcastle, 2011)Google Scholar.

16 For example Massard-Guilbaud, G. and Rodger, R. (eds.), Environmental Justice in the City. Historical Perspectives (Cambridge, 2011)Google Scholar.