Synopses & Reviews
Immersed in their on-demand, highly consumptive, and disposable lifestyles, most urban Americans take for granted the technologies that provide them with potable water, remove their trash, and process their wastewater. These vital services, however, are the byproduct of many decades of development by engineers, sanitarians, and civic planners.
In The Sanitary City, Martin V. Melosi assembles a comprehensive, thoroughly researched and referenced history of sanitary services in urban America. He examines the evolution of water supply, sewage systems, and solid waste disposal during three distinct eras: The Age of Miasmas (pre-1880); The Bacteriological Revolution (1880-1945); and The New Ecology (1945 to present-day).
Originally published in 2000, this abridged edition includes updated text and bibliographic materials. The Sanitary City is an essential resource for those interested in environmental history, environmental engineering, science and technology, urban studies, and public health.
Winner of:
George Perkins Marsh Prize from the American Society for Environmental History Urban History Association Prize for the best book in North American Urban History
Abel Wolman Prize from the Public Works Historical Society
Sidney Edelstein Prize from the Society for the History of Technology
Review
“Melosi has written an intellectual and technologically oriented account of the efforts of urban leaders to foster control of the built environment and enhance the health of citizens. Scholars in urban and environmental history will begin their future work with Melosi's book, and they will consult it regularly. Here is a book that practitioners will read, assign, and debate.”
—Journal of Urban History
Review
“A substantial work of scholarship that provides a highly useful history of the development and consequences of urban water, sewer, and solid waste infrastructure in the United States. Extensively referenced, heavily illustrated, and well written, it should be a standard on the subject for many years.”
—Technology and Culture
Review
“A monumental work, the outcome of well over a decade of research by an important scholar. A milestone in public works history. It is likely to become the first work to which future scholars interested in the sanitary technologies in America will turn.”
—ISIS
Synopsis
An invisible infrastructure defines a significant portion of the American urban experience, affecting everything from the quality of the water we drink to the frequency of our trash collection to the pressure of the flush in our toilets. In The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present, Martin V. Melosi studies water supply, wastewater, and solid-waste-disposal systems in U.S. cities from the colonial era to the present day. Along the way, Melosi discusses not only changing technologies and the expanding population but also growing public health awareness and ecological theories. He shows how the social beliefs and scientific understandings that emerged over time influenced how Americans have viewed waste and sanitation in urban life and how they came to accept workable solutions to the problems of sanitation, water delivery, and waste removal.
Ambitious and comprehensive, The Sanitary City incorporates an exhaustive supply of sources, from popular accounts and journalism to scholarly histories in the fields of technology and urban growth to congressional reports and legislative studies. It will appeal to scholars, students, and professionals in environmental history, urban studies, the history of science and technology, public health, and American government.
About the Author
Martin V. Melosi is Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen University Professor of History and director of the Center for Public History at the University of Houston. He is the author or editor of fourteen books, including Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform and the Environment, and Effluent America: Cities, Industry, Energy, and the Environment.