Urbanizing nature : actors and agency (dis)connecting cities and nature since 1500 9780367110864, 0367110865

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Urbanizing Nature

What do we mean when we say that cities have altered humanity’s interaction with nature? The more people are living in cities, the more nature is said to be ‘urbanizing’: turned into a resource, mobilized over long distances, controlled, transformed and then striking back with a vengeance as ‘natural disaster’. Confronting insights derived from Environmental History, Science and Technology Studies or Political Ecology, Urbanizing Nature aims to counter teleological perspectives on the birth of modern ‘urban nature’ as a uniform and linear process, showing how new technological schemes, new actors and new definitions of nature emerged in cities from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Tim Soens is Professor of Medieval and Environmental History at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Dieter Schott is Professor for Modern History at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. Michael Toyka-Seid is Research Associate at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. Bert De Munck is Professor in the History Department at the University of Antwerp, Belgium.

Routledge Advances in Urban History Series Editors Bert De Munck

Centre for Urban History, University of Antwerp

Simon Gunn

Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester

This series showcases original and exciting new work in urban history. It publishes books that challenge existing assumptions about the history of cities, apply new theoretical frames to the urban past, and open up new avenues of historical enquiry. The scope of the series is global, and it covers all time periods from the ancient to the modern worlds. Cities and Creativity from the Renaissance to the Present Edited by Ilja Van Damme, Bert De Munck and Andrew Miles Migration Policies and Materialities of Identification in European Cities Papers and Gates, 1500–1930s Edited by Hilde Greefs and Anne Winter Urbanizing Nature Actors and Agency (Dis)Connecting Cities and Nature Since 1500 Edited by Tim Soens, Dieter Schott, Michael Toyka-Seid and Bert De Munck For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Advances-in-Urban-History/book-series/RAUH

Urbanizing Nature Actors and Agency (Dis)Connecting Cities and Nature Since 1500 Edited by Tim Soens, Dieter Schott, Michael Toyka-Seid and Bert De Munck

First published 2019 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Soens, Tim, editor. Title: Urbanizing nature : actors and agency (dis)connecting cities and nature since 1500 / edited by Tim Soens, Dieter Schott, Michael Toyka-Seid, and Bert De Munck. Description: New York : Taylor & Francis, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018046898 (print) | LCCN 2018054345 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429024726 | ISBN 9780367110864 Subjects: LCSH: Urban ecology (Sociology)—Europe— History. | Urbanization—Environmental aspects—Europe— History. | Cities and towns—Europe—History. | Human ecology—Europe—History. | Nature—Effect of human beings on—Europe—History. Classification: LCC HT243.E85 (ebook) | LCC HT243.E85 U74 2018 (print) | DDC 307.76094—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046898 ISBN: 978-0-367-11086-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-02472-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Figuresviii Series Editors’ Prefacex BERT DE MUNCK AND SIMON GUNN

Acknowledgmentsxiv PART I

Introduction1

Introduction: Did Cities Change Nature? A Long-Term Perspective

3

TIM SOENS, DIETER SCHOTT, MICHAEL TOYKA-SEID AND BERT DE MUNCK

PART II

Nature Into Urban Hinterlands27   1 Long-Term Transitions, Urban Imprint and the Construction of Hinterlands

29

SABINE BARLES AND MARTIN KNOLL

  2 Concepts of Urban Agency and the Transformation of Urban Hinterlands: The Case of Berlin, Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries

50

CHRISTOPH BERNHARDT

  3 A Place in Its Own Right: The Rural-Urban Fringe of Helsinki From the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present MARJAANA NIEMI

65

vi  Contents PART III

Nature as Urban Resource87   4 Urbanizing Water: Looking Beyond the Transition to Water Modernity in the Cities of the Southern Low Countries, Thirteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

89

RIC JANSSENS AND TIM SOENS

  5 Cities Hiding the Forests: Wood Supply, Hinterlands and Urban Agency in the Southern Low Countries, Thirteenth to Eighteenth Centuries

112

PAULO CHARRUADAS AND CHLOÉ DELIGNE

  6 Energizing European Cities: From Wood Provision to Solar Panels—Providing Energy for Urban Demand, 1800–2000

135

DIETER SCHOTT

  7 Re-use and Recycling in Western European Cities

157

GEORG STÖGER

PART IV

Nature as Urban Challenge177   8 Hydraulic Experts and the Challenges of Water in Early Modern Times: European Colonial Cities Compared

179

KAREL DAVIDS

  9 Stockholm’s Changing Waterscape: A Long-Term Perspective on a City and Its Flowing Water

197

EVA JAKOBSSON

10 Air Pollution as Urban Problem in France, From the Mid-nineteenth Century to the 1970s

217

STÉPHANE FRIOUX

PART V

Visions of Urban Nature239 11 Urban Fringes: Conquering Riversides and Lakeshores in the Nineteenth Century—Examples From Austrian and Swiss Medium-Sized Cities CHRISTIAN ROHR

241

Contents vii 12 Twentieth-Century Wastescapes: Cities, Consumers, and Their Dumping Grounds

261

HEIKE WEBER

13 The Roots of the Sustainable City: The Visible Waters of the City in Modern Mainz and Wiesbaden

290

MICHAEL TOYKA-SEID

PART VI

Concluding Essay311 14 Beyond Cities, Beyond Nature: Building a European Urban Stratum

313

CHRIS OTTER

Contributors329 Index333

Figures

1.1 Distinction between ‘hinterland’ and ‘Umland’ in the work of Eugene van Cleef 1.2 Theoretically reserved zone (arrondissement) for wood supply of Paris in the Seine basin as defined in 1785 2.1 Map of the Berlin region around 1780 4.1 Monumental neighborhood well with pump (demolished in 1882) at the Antwerp Veemarkt, watercolor by Jozef Linnig, 1849 4.2 Neighborhood pump at the Bontwerkersplaats in Antwerp, photo Léon Keusters, c. 1935 4.3 Continuity and change in water supplies: neighborhood pump with ‘tap’ connected to ‘modern’ network of piped water, Antwerp, early twentieth century (?) 5.1 Map of the Low Countries, showing the principal cities and the different political principalities 5.2 Map of the ‘Belgian’ forest cover at the end of the eighteenth century based on the Ferraris map 5.3 Le livre des Déduis du roi Modus et de la Reine Ratio: manuscript of the fifteenth century probably made in Brussels 5.4 The lumber port of Liège around 1549 5.5 Lumberjacks cutting down tree rows 7.1 Pre-modern recycling practices persisted especially among the urban poor, as this photography of a chiffonnier’s premises in a Parisian shantytown by Eugène Atget shows, 1910s 7.2 GDR press photo displaying the state-driven collection of glass, paper and scrap metal in Eastern Berlin, 1974 8.1 Entrance of the canal of Nochistongo, constructed in the seventeenth century as part of the drainage system of Mexico City 8.2 Plan of the town of Batavia in the middle of the seventeenth century

33 43 55 95 98 107 116 118 120 122 125

163 170 185 187

Figures ix 9.1 Stockholm panorama. Lithograph by Carl Johan Billmark 1868 198 10.1 Comparison between the ‘topographical conditions of industrial fogs’ respectively in the Meuse Valley (A) and in Lyon (B) 229 10.2 Chart drawn after an airplane fog observation in the Lyon area 230 11.1 The city of Wels according to the copperplate print by Matthäus Merian, Frankfurt, 1649 243 11.2 The city of Wels shortly before the urban expansion onto the former floodplains began 246 11.3 The city of Wels in 1895, shortly before the two disastrous floods of 1897 and 1899 246 11.4 Johann Schauer’s personal visions for a new bourgeois villa quarter in the former floodplains 247 11.5 The Volksgartenstraße in Wels during the flood of 1899248 11.6 The provisional opening of the new steel and stone bridge across the Traun River in 1901, celebrated as a public fair 249 11.7 The city center of Lucerne—maps from 1840 to 1848 251 11.8 Lucerne and Lake Lucerne: view from the Schweizerhof Hotel across the new Schweizerhofquai embankment and Schwanenplatz square, colored lithograph, around 1860 252 11.9 Lucerne during the flood of June 1910. View across the Schweizerhofquai embankment with Saint-Leodegar church in the background. 254 12.1 View from the Emscher River, noticeable in the front of the photograph, toward the Emscherbruch central landfill site 265 12.2 Waste workers, scavengers, dogs and a waste truck on the Monte Scherbelino, around 1930. In the smaller photograph, a worker is watering the dump. 270 12.3 Waste trucks, lorries and caterpillars on the ZDE, West Germany’s model sanitary landfill, 1974 273 12.4 The Monte Scherbelino as seen from the air 277 12.5 Park benches, playgrounds, walking paths and greened hilly spaces invited Frankfurt’s inhabitants to explore the artificial Monte Scherbelino hill 277 12.6 Photograph from the first public inspection of the cordoned-off Monte Scherbelino, 2012 283

Series Editors’ Preface

This book is part of a series, conceived and composed in the context of the Scientific Research Community (WOG) ‘Urban Agency. Setting the Research Agenda of Urban History’ (2011–2015). The network was launched by the Centre for Urban History at the University of Antwerp and supported by the most important centers for urban history in Europe, including the Centre for Urban History at the University of Leicester, the History Department at TU Darmstadt, and the Centre for Historical Research into Urban Transformations (HOST) at the Free University of Brussels.1 The network set out to analyze what we first called the ‘urban variable’. The idea was to examine the urban nature of major societal transformations, focusing in particular on the question whether and how the city really matters. Do cities have an agency of their own or can all historical transformations ultimately be reduced to the agency of actors and actor groups within cities, or, indeed, to historical forces beyond cities—like the unfolding of capitalism? It was clear from the outset that the answer generally given to this question is deeply rooted in the European history of the discipline itself. Both urban studies and urban history are steeped in a type of sociology in which the views on urbanization are fundamentally entangled with narratives of modernity. Urbanization is considered a major force in the development of capitalism and economic innovation, and in the emergence of constitutional democracies, liberalism, rationalism, individualism, and so on. This is obvious, of course, with Max Weber, who firmly embedded the advent of rationality and modern forms of citizenship in the (medieval) city. In his wake other sociologists too have explicitly or implicitly connected urbanization to modernity. Georg Simmel famously argued that an urban environment stimulated individual freedom and autonomy, alongside calculation and indifference. And today, Harvard economist Edward Glaeser argues that cities make us ‘richer, smarter, greener, healthier, and happier’, as is summarized in the subtitle of one of the editions of his bestseller Triumph of the City.2

Series Editors’ Preface xi To be sure, views have not always been so optimistic. Lewis Mumford for instance criticized modern forms of urbanization because cities bred social problems, and both Emile Durkheim and Simmel are of course notorious for their idea that cities generate psychological problems. But for all these authors, whether optimistic and pessimistic, urbanization was akin to modernization. And from Weber and Mumford to the ideal type of European city of Bagnasco and Le Galés, the European urban experience has exerted a magnetic hold, serving as a model by which other global forms of urbanity have been judged—and often found wanting. In recent times, however, a series of developments have shaken this confidence in the centrality of the European urban experience to the modern world. While Europe’s urban centers have been shaped by their encounter with other extra-European territories and urbanisms since at least the late Middle Ages, often in relationships of asymmetrical power, urbanization is now largely a non-European process, which has moreover been shown to be subject to ‘global’ economic and technological forces. One way of dealing with this would be to focus on urbanization processes outside Europe, so as to become acquainted with contexts in which urbanization was not connected to industrialization and the intrusion of market forces, or with growing individualism and liberalism. Examples of the first situation can surely be found on the African continent, while the latter situation is arguably widespread in China and perhaps also Latin America. Studying urbanization in these contexts has the potential to dislodge our ingrained ideas of the connection between urbanization and ‘modernity’. However, another way of tackling the problem is a renewed focus on European urban history with special attention to the way in which urbanization and modernity have become entangled in discourses and practices. This is the choice we have made for the books in the series Challenges in European Urban History. Our goal is to ‘provincialize’ European urban history, to borrow a phrase from Dipesh Chakrabarty. Chakrabarty coined this phrase in his call to qualify European narratives of modernity and to de-universalize the historical coming about of such abstractions as the public sphere, the nation-state, capital, and the individual. The urban and urbanity can easily be added to this list. Closer to urban history we were inspired by such books as The Rule of Freedom of Patrick Joyce and The Victorian Eye of Chris Otter. Infused by, respectively, Foucauldian notions of power and governance, and Science and Technology Studies, both books have each in their own way argued that the modern free, self-disciplining and self-reflexive individual is a product of the modern (nineteenth-century) city (in England). Yet rather than seeing the modern individual as the necessary outcome of the urban form, both modern individuality and subjectivity and the urban form are simultaneously shown to be implicated in a broader complex of socio-political and socio-technical practices. For Joyce, the building of

xii  Series Editors’ Preface sewers and new avenues, which created the conditions for the emergence of the free and reflexive self, was itself part of a new set of techniques of rule and governance. Nor is this to be seen as a predictable and straightforward process. In Otter’s phrasing, material systems produce certain spectra of possibility. We might say that the discourse and practice of polite conduct and civility make more sense in a park, museum or boulevard than a communal privy; a certain set of probabilities is etched into their stones.3 Of course, both Joyce and Otter’s books are still in a way trapped in modernity narratives—however complex and reflexive the history of modernity has become in their rendering. One reason for this is their exclusive focus on nineteenth-century Britain, with which they inadvertently invoke a certain center-periphery dichotomy. In order to complement and qualify their views, the volumes in the new series will include case studies from both the early modern period and northern, central and southern Europe. In addition, we will adopt a long-term view, consistently bridging early modern and modern history, so as to be able to assess also the impact of earlier stages of urbanization, as well as earlier forms of industrialization and proletarianization, long-term processes of state formation and bureaucratization and so on. In this vein, it was decided that a close collaboration between the Centre for Urban History in Antwerp and the Centre for Urban History in Leicester would make a great deal of sense. While the expertise at the Centre for Urban History in Antwerp mostly covered the pre-industrial period (and cities on the continent), the Centre in Leicester is focused on modern cities (more often British and postcolonial cities). In addition to bridging that gap, it was decided to focus on four specific research questions: (1) whether the urban context has an impact on creativity and economic innovation; (2) how cities and urban environments help to create ‘nature’; (3) what are the material and technological aspects in regulating access to cities; and (4) how power materialized in cities through governance and civil society. This has resulted in four books which address the issue of ‘urban agency’ in their own way. Each book adopts a thoroughly reflexive attitude in which the very concepts and paradigms reigning in urban history and urban studies are themselves questioned from an historical perspective. This is why we return to Foucauldian notions of power and governmentality, which not only hold the promise to understand the emergence of liberal forms of governance and individuality while at the same time qualifying the narratives of modernity involved, but also necessitates a reflexive attitude and a questioning of the role of the human sciences—up to and including the traditions we all work in today. The latter holds true also for Science and Technology Studies and Actor-Network Theory, which invite

Series Editors’ Preface xiii us to consider the complexity of the connections between culture and nature and between systems of meaning and materiality. While refusing to give primacy to either the material or the cultural or human, agency is seen here as emerging in highly contingent and relatively unstable ‘assemblages’ of human and non-human elements. Perhaps more than any other historical reality cities can be seen as such assemblages. Viewed as such, their agency is in any case not addressed in a reductive manner. Not only can cities no longer be seen as the simple incubators of modernity as was the case in the Weberian tradition, but they can also not be considered the simple expression or materialization of monolithic forces beyond their confines. The latter has typically been the case in the critical (Marxist) tradition, in which cities were—and often still are—described as materialized capital, with urbanization developing in tandem with capitalism. While the connections between market forces and urbanization are of course real, cities cannot be reduced to conveyers of the agency of capital. Nor, for that matter, would the analysis of capitalism be furthered if we would ultimately reduce the agency of urban actors and actants to capitalism as an ‘unmoved mover’ of sorts. For all this, the general editors of this series have invited volume editors and authors to analyze the intricate connections on the urban level of, on one hand, human and cultural elements and, on the other, material and technical aspects. This is not, to be sure, to exclude economic and political forces within and beyond cities, but to understand better how they worked. Through the concept of governmentality and a more ‘realist’ attitude toward the technicalities and materialities of power, we hope to yield a better understanding of both the power relations in which urban actors and actor groups are involved and the impact the urban had as a spatial, technical and material reality. Bert De Munck and Simon Gunn

Notes 1. For a complete list of the partners, see Centre for Urban History [online] Available at: https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/research-groups/centre-urban-history/ research-publications/networks/scientific-research-community/ [Accessed 2 November 2018] 2. Glaeser, 2012, p. 4. 3. Otter, 2002, p. 4.

Acknowledgments

This volume originates from the close collaboration of urban and environmental historians at the University of Antwerp (Belgium) and the Technische Universität Darmstadt (Germany). In 2013 researchers from both universities successfully applied for an ESF Exploratory Workshop on the Urbanization of Nature (EW13–138), which eventually took place in Darmstadt, from 20 till 22 March  2014. The very first drafts of what would become the chapters of this volume were discussed at a second meeting in Antwerp, from 26 till 28 February 2015. Apart from the European Science Foundation, we want to thank the Flemish Science Foundation FWO for financial support (through the Scientific Research Community Urban Agency: Setting the Research Agenda of Urban History as well as the universities of Antwerp and Darmstadt. Furthermore, we would like to thank Imke du Ry (Academic Language Services) for proofreading, Fleur Mees for the uniformization of texts and references, an anonymous reviewer for the careful assessment and enthusiast recommendation of the manuscript, and Routledge publishers as well as the Series Editors for accepting this volume as part of the Routledge Advances in Urban History.

Part I

Introduction

Introduction Did Cities Change Nature? A Long-Term Perspective Tim Soens, Dieter Schott, Michael Toyka-Seid and Bert De Munck The City Is Nature Cities—like society and culture generally—have often been seen as sites of human activity that are opposed to nature. This conceptual division between nature and culture, and hence between nature and the city, is probably one of the most prominent features of ‘modernity’ as it emerged from the seventeenth century onwards. In literature, science and policymaking nature began to be thought of as something out there, something which could be isolated, measured, managed, and controlled (Glacken, 1967, pp. 461–499). Since the 1980s and 1990s such a conceptual distinction between society and nature has been challenged in many areas of the social sciences. Constructivism and postmodernism saw nature, just like culture, as no more than a social construct, a discursive invention (Sörlin and Warde, 2009, pp. 8–9). In Nature’s Metropolis—the seminal work of William Cronon on the environmental history of Chicago and the American West—it is shown that both the urban-rural and the urbannature dichotomy have to be superseded to understand how the rise of a great city transformed a vast region, from the endless grain fields in the plains to the most distant woods (Cronon, 1991, pp. 18–19). The woods in the far north of Wisconsin proved as urban as the wood-paved streets of downtown Chicago, which for their part remained as natural as the water of Lake Michigan. A few years later, the same author launched a vigorous attack on the very idea of ‘wilderness’ as a place opposite to culture, denouncing pristine nature as a historical—and profoundly urban— construct, which in no way could be deemed superior to more visibly constructed ‘natures’ such as gardens (Cronon, 1996). Other authors have depicted cities as ‘organic machines’ (adapting a concept originally introduced by White (1995) for rivers in industrial societies), ecotechnological (Hughes, 2004) or envirotechnical landscapes (Pritchard, 2011), each of them arguing against the nature-culture dichotomy, and in favor of a ‘hybrid’ idea of the city. Most of the contributors to this volume would indeed agree that their object of study—be it urban water, urban air, urban bodies or the

4  Tim Soens et al. city as a whole—is such a hybrid, partly natural and partly social. The hybridity of urban air, for instance, results from the way it is perceived, measured, controlled and regulated by humans and human technologies (Frioux, this volume). This hybridity of urban air is perhaps best visible when discussing, for instance, the deadly industrial fogs that haunted industrial river basins in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it is as true for the clear blue sky in a mountain resort. Nevertheless, demonstrating hybridity is not the aim of the historian. The ubiquitous presence of water in the Stockholm archipelago can be considered a socio-natural hybrid in the sixteenth century as much as today, but of course this hybridity might have taken a completely different form, as the precise configuration of humans, water and land has changed profoundly over the past centuries (Jakobsson, this volume). Turning socio-natural hybridity into an analytical concept which can be applied in historical analysis, Verena Winiwarter et al. (2013, pp. 108– 109, building on early work by Fischer-Kowalski and Weisz, 1999; Schatzki, 2003) recently advanced the concept of ‘socio-natural sites’, which they called ‘nexuses of arrangements and practices’—the practices being ‘routinized types of behaviour’, ‘doings and sayings’ and the ‘arrangements’ the material imprints of these practices. Both practices and arrangements are socio-natural hybrids themselves, configurations of humans and the material world which do not evolve independently from one another. From such a perspective, the city can be conceived as an assemblage of individual socio-natural sites, in which human practices materialize into more permanent arrangements, using technologies and infrastructures. Admitting that the city is nature also allows for a type of history which is not just about humans altering the physical environment but admits natural forces as a historical driving force throughout the urban past. Looking again at the water of Stockholm analyzed in this volume by Eva Jakobsson, we see that for over eight centuries these waters have been modified directly by humans, with the aim of enhancing flood protection, transport facilities, or the quality of the scenery. Nor was the water just something constant ‘out there’ waiting to be modified by men. This water also shaped urban livelihoods, and the way it did so evolved over time, partly in response to human alterations in the water system, but partly also as a result of hydrological and geophysical dynamics beyond the direct control of man. In the case of Stockholm, land elevation— currently about 0.4 meters per century—constantly reworked the urban waterscape and hence the city. New and unforeseen ‘wild nature’ can originate even in the most controlled urban environments (although this ‘wild nature’ is, of course, as hybrid as the rainforest). The waste landfills discussed by Heike Weber in this volume offer an excellent example, and so do many abandoned—and sometimes toxic—industrial sites (see also Jørgensen et al., 2013).

Introduction 5

Cities Also Changed Nature Even though cities are as ‘natural’, or as ‘hybrid’, as the rainforest in respect of their composition and embeddedness, most authors would agree that cities also altered humanity’s interaction with nature. ‘When cities appeared in the landscape’, Donald Hughes argues, ‘a new split between culture and nature entered human minds’ (Hughes, 2009, p. 48). This split, which Hughes traces to the earliest urban civilizations of Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley, consists of a profound reorganization of the regional ecosystem, which had to generate surpluses of food, fuel and building materials flowing toward the city. The idea of ‘flows’ as an essential feature of urbanization is echoed in much of the literature on either the urban ecological footprint or the urban metabolism. Since the work of Wackernagel and Rees (1996, 2008), the ecological footprint is usually calculated as the area of land needed to produce the inputs (food, water, raw materials, etc.) consumed by a city and to absorb the city’s outputs. By definition, the urban footprint exceeds the urban territory by far. In 2002, London even had a footprint three hundred times the size of its territory. The analysis of material and energy flows to and from the city is also central to the studies of the urban metabolism. While the concept of metabolism—the chemical transformations within living organisms—had already been used by Karl Marx, the concept was applied to cities for the first time in the 1960s by Abel Wolman. Today, there is a wide range of studies mapping the social metabolism of regions or cities and their evolution over time (see Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl, 2007; Barles, 2010; Weber, 2012). While one can distinguish between different ‘socio-metabolic regimes’, based on the energy base of a society (see the following), one can also argue that cities are socio-ecological systems with a specific metabolism, one which is characterized by permanent ‘externalization’ (Barles and Knoll, this volume). The ‘life’ of the city depends on a never-ending flow entering the city, transformed in and by the city, and released from the city. This giant mobilization of nature as flows of resources is without doubt a vital component of the way cities changed nature. The contributions in the volume present various examples of such metabolic externalization by European cities, ranging from the deep forests in Alpine mountain regions, which were opened up by large-scale infrastructural development, including tunnels through mountains or canals for logging, and suddenly became subject to clear-cutting and wood cultivation for rather distant urban markets (Schott, this volume), to the waters of Lake Mälaren near Stockholm, controlled, manipulated and treated for hydropower or drinking water (Jakobsson, this volume). Looking at cities and nature through the prism of metabolic urbanization has proven to be very fruitful, but it also generates some problems. First of all, the process becomes almost self-evident. As the mobilization of resources is a

6  Tim Soens et al. by-product of urbanization itself, the actors and driving forces behind the process remain largely hidden. Whether resources are allocated through the market, the state or direct provisioning by citizens seems almost irrelevant, as the results would be extremely similar. However, this is not necessarily the case. The whole process of ‘metabolic urbanization’ is imbued with power and asymmetrical relationships. As Eric Swyngedouw notices, the idea of an urban metabolism based on externalization not only presupposes a reorganization of the relations between humans and nature, but also a ‘hierarchic’ reorganization of these relations, privileging the city and certain actors within the city. Furthermore, the whole idea of metabolism conceptualizes nature as a store of resources which can be traded as commodities in an exchange economy. As a result, ‘the urbanization of nature is largely predicated upon a commodification of parts of nature while, in the process, producing new metabolic interactions and shaping both symbolic and material socio-natural interactions’ (Swyngedouw, 2006, p.  36). Therefore, revealing the asymmetries of actors and power relations behind the metabolic urbanization of nature is one of the fundamental challenges of this volume. Furthermore, even when accepting metabolic externalization (see above) as a basic feature of urbanization, the process did not remain constant over time. Major changes occur in the degree and geographic range of externalization, not only depending on the scale of the city but also on the amount of internal ‘recycling’ of resources and on the size of the hinterland which produces the input or receives the output of the city (Barles and Knoll, this volume). Quantitative and qualitative changes that occurred over time might be related to urban population growth or changes in energy regimes but these changes also took place in very specific historical conditions with variations in time and space, and they were put into effect by very real historical actors. Unraveling these processes of change is another ambition of this volume. Finally, the urbanization of nature cannot be limited to the mobilization of flows of resources. Cities have changed nature in other ways too. According to Samuel Hays (1998, p. 70), ‘the city is the focal point of increasing human congestion with its accompanying changes in urban environmental circumstance [. . .]. Cities generated increasing loads on the wider environment which, in turn, established the tension in larger environmental conditions. The city is also the starting point for new attitudes about the wider environment’. The birth of new ideas and new narratives with regard to urban nature also occupies a central place in this volume. For instance, in his contribution Christian Rohr analyzes how new ideas about risk interacted with changing property rights to land and new romantic ideals of bourgeois living on panoramic spots to pave the way for the territorial expansion of cities into the traditional floodplains of rivers, with huge flood problems as a result. The discovery of nature—in this case the scenic river—as something out there which can

Introduction 7 be appreciated, but also has to be controlled (through technology) hints at essential features of a process which is often labeled as ‘modernity’, and whose birth is usually located in the city.

Looking Beyond Modernity Even though urbanization has had an impact on nature since the Neolithic Revolution, modernity still constitutes a major turning point in most long-term analyses of city-nature relationships, distinguishing the ‘pre-modern’ or ‘organic’ city and the ‘modern’ or ‘industrial’ city. This gap is also reflected in historiography, with most literature concentrating on one of the two epochal stages of urban development (see the overview in Platt, 1999; Schott, 2014 offers a rare exception, discussing thousand years of European urbanization from an environmental perspective). Modernity is, of course, a vague concept. In discussions of urban nature, it can be seen as the product of three interrelated processes: the transition in energy regimes toward fossil and mineral fuels; the separation of society and nature and the development of a technological relationship with nature. The most visible watershed is without doubt the transition from an organic economy based on biomass, to a mineral or inorganic economy based on a combination of fossil fuels and minerals. This energy transition—which occurred more or less in tandem with the industrial revolution—is often conceived as a transition in (socio-)metabolic regimes, defined as ‘socio-ecological systems sharing a common energy metabolism, that is, common sources and conversion technologies of energy’ (Kraussmann et al., 2010; see also Sieferle, 2001; Barles, 2010; Billen et al., 2012). Industrialization and use of fossil fuels, due to the much higher energy density, allowed an unprecedented increase in scale and impact of urbanization. Whereas economic production and hence urbanization remained contained within well-defined physical environmental margins in the organic economy, the age of coal and oil allowed for unprecedented and seemingly unlimited growth. In 2014, there were 488 cities exceeding one million inhabitants, twenty-eight of which were megacities of ten million or more. In the eighteenth century there were only two cities—Edo, present-day Tokyo, later followed by London— with more than one million inhabitants (World Urbanization Prospects, 2014, p. 13; Clark, 2013, pp. 11–12). Providing minimal levels of food, drinkable water, fuel, and health to an ever-expanding urban labor force and liberating an equally expanding urban bourgeoisie from the nuisances of stink, smoke, and filth, asked for new solutions. In the ‘modern’ city such solutions usually came in the disguise of ‘networked’ infrastructures. The ‘networked city’ is defined by Dieter Schott in this volume as the result of ‘a successive build-up of comprehensive systems of technical infrastructures, serving for the provision of water,

8  Tim Soens et al. gas, electricity, the disposal of sewage, for urban transport and communication’ (see also Schott, 1999 and 2004; Coutard and Rutherford, 2016). The networked city is the ultimate celebration of the technological approach to nature that became prevalent in the modern city, and which leads Chris Otter (this volume), for instance, to equal urbanization with the rise of the ‘Technosphere’. This ‘Technosphere’ may be defined as the global sum of all large-scale networked systems, which, according to Peter Haff (2014), both escape intentional human control and provide the basic conditions for human (and animal and plant) life: current human populations could not survive outside the Technosphere. As such, the Technosphere is both an extension of, and a parasite on, the modern Biosphere (Williams et al., 2015, p. 208). The development of infrastructural networks undoubtedly changed the urban interaction with nature. Consider, for instance, the energy provisioning of cities, discussed in this volume by Paulo Charruadas and Chloé Deligne, and also Dieter Schott. In a wood-dependent city, energy was visible and its manipulation was extremely labor intensive. Sometimes it required a collective effort of the entire urban community, such as the yearly ‘Wäldchestag’ of the city of Frankfurt, when the citizens gathered in specific places in the municipal woods, and received their allotted share of wood, cut by municipal woodworkers. By the sixteenth century, such direct provisioning of energy had of course become exceptional. Wood was provisioned through the market which lengthened the supply chains considerably. Within the city, however, wood still had to be carried to houses and stores, sawn, brought up from cellar or sheds to the stoves and fire places within the house and, after burning, ashes and unburnt cinders had to be removed. An apparent dematerialization only occurred with the introduction of gas and electricity networks which brought energy directly into urban households and to the heating and cooking equipment in these households; requiring almost no effort and largely invisible, it did, however, carry a cost, which soon started to be calculated by unit of consumption. Of course, electricity and gas were derived from material sources as well, but to the consumers they certainly appeared less material compared to the old stocks of wood and coal stored in the house. Such a process of ‘dematerialization’ brings us to the third aspect of modernity: the ‘modernity project’, as defined by the history of science, social and cultural studies, in which the rise of ‘nature’, as conceptually separated from society and subject to human knowledge and control, takes center stage. According to Bruno Latour (1993a), modernity can be summarized as a purifying process in which the myth of autonomous subjects with an independent existence apart from objects and matter is constructed. The ultimate goal of Latour and adherents of the ActorNetwork Theory thus becomes denouncing the artificial distinction between the human and the non-human, culture and nature, and point to the historical contingency of these categories. The modernity project was

Introduction 9 fatally flawed, as Nature and Society cannot be separated, and are bound together in permanent co-evolution. Nevertheless, the idea of nature being separated from humans provides a compelling narrative. Take, for instance, the example of drinking water, discussed in this volume by Janssens and Soens. For most urbanites in medieval and early modern cities the provisioning of drinking water was part of centuries-old neighborhood sociabilities surrounding water wells, fountains or pumps: people were entitled to use water from shared or common infrastructures, cleaned and maintained these infrastructures together, and decided collectively upon their future. Lifting water from the access point and transporting it home was labor intensive and very ‘material’. Networks of piped water dematerialized water (as the heavy lifting of buckets was no longer needed). Furthermore, the endless stream of water flowing through the network, measured and calculated per unit, might have entailed a certain ‘disenchantment’: the presence of drinking water within the urban house became obvious, dull, uninteresting. Finally, water also became a private resource, a commodity sold through the market. Thus far the theory. In practice, there are many reasons to question the usefulness and the linearity of a strict ‘gap’ between the pre-modern and the modern city, either based on a transition in energy regime, on networked infrastructures, or on a strict separation of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. First of all, historians have pointed to the importance of a preceding stage in which new ideas could germinate. The eighteenth century is considered as some kind of Sattelzeit (transitional phase), when the utilitarian view of nature was fully developed, thus creating the intellectual preconditions for the industrialized exploitation of natural resources in the subsequent period (Knoll, 2006, p. 81 citing Bayerl, 2001). Even the use of fossil fuels as the dominant form of energy did not arrive overnight. After all, London was fueled by coal from the sixteenth century onwards (Brimblecombe, 1987; Cavert, 2016) and the urban civilization of the Dutch Golden Age was fueled not by wood, but by peat, a source of energy which was only renewable over a very long time span (hundreds of thousands of years) and hence can be situated somewhere in between ‘organic’ and ‘fossil’ fuels. On the other hand, transformations were often slow and old practices proved very resilient. Waste recycling by urban households—the flagship of the ‘closed’ metabolism of the preindustrial city—might have been replaced by the collecting and dumping of waste on municipal landfills, but on these sanitary landfills communities of scavengers made a living from searching and sorting waste in a very ‘premodern’ way, and this at least until the 1960s in Europe, and still today in many other parts of the world (Weber, this volume). Even the Frankfurter Wäldchestag survived as a festive day in the folklore of the city (Schott, this volume). On the other hand, ‘abstract’ conceptions of nature sometimes popped up long before the industrial revolution. Systems of piped water existed since antiquity and from the thirteenth

10  Tim Soens et al. century onwards new systems were installed in many European cities, from Siena to Bruges. Such hydraulic networks first supplied municipal— or monastic—fountains and wells, but in the later Middle Ages increasingly serviced private households as well (Kucher, 2005; Janssens and Soens, this volume). Thus, instead of looking for linear transitions and their ‘preparing stages’, we should highlight the many non-linear processes of ‘urbanizing nature’, the multiple temporalities and turning points, but also the long-term continuities and ‘simultaneities’ of practices, technologies and narratives, and even the examples of reversal or regression, as seen, for instance, in the collapse of ‘modern’ technologies. A long-term approach covering both the pre-modern/pre-industrial and the modern age, is particularly helpful in moving away from such linear modernity narratives in which the transition to fossil fuel regimes, the development of networked technologies, or the dissociation between nature and culture, are considered natural and self-evident, toward a more complex story of multiple transitions and layered transformations. One way to achieve this goal is to look at the actors and the driving forces behind major changes in city-nature relationships over the past five centuries. Transformations in urban nature need to be explained starting from their specific historical contexts, and the specific actors involved in their design and implementation. Whether discussing an early sixteenth-century or a late nineteenthcentury city, new infrastructures, policies, and ideas, invariably result from an interaction between different actors operating in specific historical contexts and configurations of power.

Unraveling the Actors. Who Decides? What Is Steering Urban Nature? A great deal of literature on urban environments and their history tends to conceive of cities as socio-environmental systems. Although such a systemic approach helps us to understand the complexity and the coherence between each individual component of the system, it also risks reducing the interaction between cities and nature to an abstract product of demography, resources and technologies. In this volume, such a systemic approach is replaced by an actor-perspective. We aim to look at the actors responsible for changes in the city-nature nexus, as well as the socio-political and socio-natural configurations in which these actors operate. Huge divergences exist not only in the scale, shape and density of cities, but also in the socio-natural layout of a city: the mix of human actors and non-human ‘actants’ as well as the power relations which bind them together. In this volume, ‘agency’ is questioned in several ways. The first crucial question is rather straightforward: ‘Who decides?’ Already in 1990 Martin Melosi asked: ‘Who were the primary decision makers? Politicians?

Introduction 11 Bureaucrats? Business leaders? Engineers? Civic leaders?  .  .  . How did advocates of new urban technology . . . act as a “carrier” of that technology or some technical knowledge from city to city?’ (Melosi, 1990, pp.  60–61, cited by Frioux, this volume). Changes in the urban environment cannot be explained without taking into account the ambitions and strategies of urban actors. Furthermore, differences between cities in the development of environmental policies, infrastructures or awareness, might often be explained by strictly local power contexts. In this volume, Dieter Schott gives the example of the competition between gasworks and electricity around 1900. It was thought that the new technology of electricity would replace the ‘older’ gasworks, but in most German cities gasworks did not disappear. On the contrary, they experienced a new boom after the introduction of electricity, thanks to the commercial and lobbying efforts of the gas producing companies which successfully promoted cooking and heating with gas. Naturally, human actions—either by individuals or collectivities— cannot be studied independently from the context in which they operate: the organization of the urban economy, its political layout or the predominant narratives governing the urban interaction with nature. The history of urban recycling and re-use, analyzed in this volume by Georg Stöger, can only be understood when taking into account related evolutions in both production costs, household income formation and consumer preferences. Urban and non-urban actors interfering in this process, for instance by regulating secondhand trade, or waste disposal, operate in a specific setting, which has been shaped over time. Thus, in European cities, recycling had become subject to all kinds of formal and informal markets from an early stage on. With Douglas North and institutional economics we could ask whether such commercialization was fostered by an early rise of legally sanctioned private property rights, and if such commercialization based on private property rights was indeed a distinguishing feature of the European interaction with nature as a whole. Many contributions in this volume do not stick to the classic distinction between structure and agency, the latter confined to the ‘intentional actions of human beings’ as Max Weber or Anthony Giddens defined it. Such a concept of agency has been seriously challenged in recent decades. First of all, the very idea of human ‘free will’ is seriously questioned by the neurosciences and is increasingly difficult to use as a reason for restricting agency to humans, rather than also granting it to animals or plants (Bernhardt, this volume). According to Actor-Network Theory and a lot of recent work in Science and Technology Studies, the concept of agency should be enlarged to include non-human ‘actants’, such as organic and inorganic materials of all sorts. In fact, any type of activity has to be considered as a ‘networked’ activity, occurring amid socionatural, socio-technical and socio-material arrangements from which they cannot be isolated. Henceforth, human activity and agency can

12  Tim Soens et al. neither be reduced to being the result of natural and material conditions, nor be abstracted from them. Every change in the material context (e.g., the introduction of centralized sanitation in a city) not only affects the urban environment, but also the relationship between people. As a result, any agency—either of human ‘actors’ or non-human ‘actants’—is a networked agency, inseparably embedded in a network of relationships with the surrounding world (Asdal, 2003, drawing on Latour, 1993a; Farías and Bender, 2010). Potentially, this perspective has important consequences for urban history in general and our ideas about agency in the city in particular. The city is turned into a hybrid ‘conglomerate’ of human and material components, each of them permanently codefining the other and therefore possessing a networking type of agency. At its most extreme, such a diffusion of agency risks the blurring of historical understanding, as everything is always codetermining everything. The unraveling of the individual actors and actants certainly becomes more challenging, yet also more necessary than ever. Transcending the classical definition of agency as intentional human action automatically raises the problem of non-human agency. Can we attribute agency to urban animals, pollutants, rain or rivers? While rejecting the idea of an ‘autonomous’ agency of non-human actants (and human actors as well), most authors would be willing to attribute a kind of ‘networked’ agency to the non-human. Modern environmental history, says Stéphane Frioux (this volume, paraphrasing William Cronon), is about ‘upgrading natural elements to the rank of co-actors and codeterminants of historical processes’. The water surrounding the European colonial cities of Mexico City, Batavia or Philadelphia ‘was not just conditioned by human action; it was also a powerful non-human actor in its own right’ (Davids, this volume). It now remains to be questioned whether such a new ‘enlarged’ concept of agency also affects our ideas on the agency of cities when dealing with nature.

The City as—Hegemonic—Actor? Throughout this book, several, often complementary, approaches to the historical agency of cities when dealing with nature are developed. A first perspective, perhaps the most traditional one, consists of looking at cities, or rather municipalities, as political players, which, through planning and development of urban space, shape and transform urban nature. In European history, cities mostly constitute a separate sphere of political action, either being formally independent from any overarching political constituency—as in the model of the city-state—or at least enjoying a certain level of autonomy within a larger political unit such as a national state. This urban political autonomy, embodied by a city council and its mayor, might even distinguish Europe from many other parts of the world, as argued by Max Weber (1921) and many others in his

Introduction 13 wake. Today, city councils and mayors are often attributed a great deal of agency in addressing major societal challenges, not least in the sphere of the environment. They might even be the most adequate level of decisionmaking in a globalized world, as argued by Benjamin Barber in his widely debated book If Mayors Ruled the World (2013).1 While city councils and mayors have been a permanent feature of European cities throughout the past five centuries, their sphere of action with regard to urban nature has fluctuated significantly over time. With respect to energy provisioning in the pre-modern Low Countries, Paulo Charruadas and Chloé Deligne (this volume) find it very hard to distinguish the political and juridical action of city councils from the dynamics of the urban market. Some cities did develop woodland preservation strategies early on, but only when neatly aligned to commercial interests. More comprehensive urban policies with respect to forests and woodlands can be found in the German empire, and, for instance, in the city of Venice, for which the preservation of forest ‘resources’ became a crucial political issue already in the sixteenth century (Appuhn, 2009). Yet non-urban political players— kings, dukes and bishops—also developed very similar woodland preservation policies during the same early modern period (see for instance Paul Warde, 2006, on southwest Germany). City-oriented environmental policies do not need to be pursued by municipal councils alone: state actors can equally develop policies radically centered on cities. This is most apparent for a capital city like Berlin, which was still a middle-sized city in the seventeenth century but expanded rapidly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its spectacular growth entailed the environmental metamorphosis of an entire region, though the actors steering the process were more likely bound to the Prussian state—ranging from railway companies to the ministry of war and the royal landscape planner, Peter Josef Lenné—than to the Berlin city council (Bernhardt, this volume). Apart from the direct ‘political’ agency of cities, their councils and political elites, urban agency can also be approached as a discursive strategy, pursued by human urban actors who deliberately attribute agency to cities as a rhetorical strategy in order to persuade others of their plans, or to implement their personal vision of urban nature. Already in the eighteenth century, Rousseau depicted the city as ‘humankind’s grave’—places which were insalubrious in both a physical and a moral sense (cited by Frioux, this volume). Such a negative idea of the city subsequently generated a great number of policies and efforts to overcome this problem and counteract the negative impact of urbanity on human livelihoods. A third perspective starts from the hybridity of cities, taken as partly natural and partly social. In such a view, cities, while built and crafted from the stuff of nature, cannot themselves be reduced to material entities, but should also be seen as living organisms, whose existence and reproduction is predicated on the importation of food, energy and raw materials, and the exportation of products and waste—next (and as

14  Tim Soens et al. a condition) to the physical presence and reproduction of human life. Seen from this perspective, nature is very much implicated in urban life and, consequently, urban agency. Through their historical configuration of human and non-human elements, cities might develop a specific ‘dynamic’, which in turn profoundly influenced the human production of nature. This ‘intrinsic logic of cities’ has been defined by Martina Löw (2012, p. 310) as the ‘hidden structures of a city, as locally habitualized, mostly tacit processes of meaning constitution and their material embeddedness’. In other words, it concerns local ‘stocks of knowledge and bodies of expression’, which influence people in their practices. Such an intrinsic logic might seem at odds with more ANT-inspired concepts of urban agency, as they presume the existence of superstructures (or supernarratives) that operate more or less autonomously from the co-evolving networked configuration of humans and nature in a city. Nevertheless, unraveling such an intrinsic logic helps to understand the specificity of each urban configuration. In his micro-study of the different ways in which two German cities bordering the river Rhine (Mainz and Wiesbaden) interacted with open water, Michael Toyka-Seid (this volume) shows how the former city was much more oriented toward the river, whereas the latter—historically not contingent with the river—tended to ‘neglect’ its newly won relation with the river in favor of natural springs, which had turned the city into a historic spa resort. Thus, the interaction of the geographic and hydrological conditions, the urban past, and the self-definition of the city, all had a clear impact on urban policies with regard to water. Finally, the degree to which cities can be considered actors changing the co-evolution of society and nature also depends on the way specifically urban-oriented plans, practices and arrangements prevailed over other interests and other actors. Seen from this perspective, urban agency with respect to nature fluctuated with the economic or political power cities could yield over their hinterland. Such urban hegemony was most clear in city-state configurations, whereby a dominant city gained direct territorial control over a large hinterland, one in which society and ecology could be rearranged to serve the interests of the dominant city (Schott, 2014, see also Barles and Knoll, this volume). Venice is naturally the primary example of this. However, a similar rearrangement in the function of a central city could also be achieved by other actors, for instance in the case of capital cities such as Berlin and Paris, whose hegemonic role in the arrangement of a broad surrounding territory was by and large a product of the expansion of the central state (Bernhardt, this volume). The development of networked infrastructures—from water supplies and sewerage to railways and electricity grids—clearly prioritized urban interests. The infrastructures linked town and countryside but in a very hierarchical way. As Dieter Schott argues in this volume: ‘while cities were definitely improving in terms of healthiness, safety and liveability between 1850

Introduction 15 and 1900 [. . .] the surrounding countryside, from which cities drew their resources and onto which they deposited their gaseous, liquid and solid waste materials, clearly deteriorated’. Only in a second stage were these ‘urban’ infrastructures also exported to the countryside, where they further materialized the urban-oriented transformation of living. The actors behind the construction of networked infrastructures were not necessarily ‘urban’ themselves and ranged from international companies investing in water supplies or horse tramways all over nineteenth century Europe (and abroad) to engineers working for state administrations. Only in the period 1890–1930 did most European countries see a strong interventionism by city councils, which assumed control over water and gas supplies—an evolution which has been labeled ‘municipal socialism’ (Schott, this volume). In recent years, remunicipalization of urban water and power supplies once again became an issue after decades of largescale privatizations, in which many European cities had seen their infrastructures incorporated by supranational companies (Melosi, 2016).2

Technology Linking Urban Nature and Power In this volume, a lot of attention is paid to technologies and infrastructures. In each investigation of a ‘socio-natural site’ in this volume, technologies and infrastructures help to materialize human practices into more permanent arrangements. An increasing and incremental use of technologies is considered a vital element in the urbanization of nature, allowing Mikael Hard and Thomas Misa (2008) to conceptualize cities through the presence of an elaborate ‘urban machinery’.3 In a similar way, Chris Otter argues that the urbanization of nature in fact equals the rise of a ‘Technosphere’ (see above). The historical depth of such an ‘urban technosphere’ remains to be questioned. As regards environmental technologies, the pre-modern city cannot any longer be dismissed as belonging to a ‘pre-paradigm’ period—where an indifference toward cleanliness was only compensated through the economic value of excretion as fertilizer, enabling a degree of laxness toward sanitation and a proliferation of practices without any overarching technological schemes (Abeysuriya et al., 2010; quoting Lewis Mumford, 1961). Both in the sixteenth and in the nineteenth centuries new technological solutions were introduced to tackle urgent environmental challenges as perceived by urban stakeholders at that point in time. Nevertheless, close links remain between modernity and technology. First of all, the Enlightenment period heralded a new kind of interplay between science and technology, which allowed to conceptualize and materialize the ‘nature’ of a ‘natural’ element like water. While filters removed impurities, the hardness of water would be calculated and softened through the addition of lime and soda (because soft water was deemed better for pipes, kettles and the hydraulic infrastructure). By the end of the nineteenth century, standards related

16  Tim Soens et al. to purity were developed and debated, paradoxically highlighting the idea that water, as a natural element, has a history as well (Otter, 2010, p. 48; Kaïka, 2005). Second, modernist thought was and still is linked to the idea that the ultimate solution to every problem is a technological one. To cite but one, very provocative example: in 2015, the Ecomodernist Manifesto provided a very positive reappraisal of modernist thought regarding nature, claiming: ‘A good Anthropocene demands that humans use their growing social, economic, and technological powers to make life better for people, stabilize the climate, and protect the natural world’ (Asafu-Adjaye et al., 2015). Third, technology might have been partly responsible for shaping the modern urban individual. According to Patrick Joyce (2003), Chris Otter (2008) or Stefan Höhne (2015), the material and socio-technical outlay of the cities is fundamentally related to, and produces specific forms of, subjectivity and therefore of human agency. Urban technologies related to water, light, traffic and so forth are said to have shaped the modern liberal and self-reflexive individual in the course of the nineteenth century. In several ways a focus on technology is essential, therefore, to understand the problem of agency with regard to urban nature. Engineers, urban planners, politicians, but also urban households and enterprises, might all use technological devices and larger infrastructures to change the urban interaction with nature. Several chapters of this volume investigate why and how certain socio-technical and knowledge arrangements (either big centralized encompassing systems or simple tools and implements) became hegemonic in framing, defining and controlling an aspect of the relationship between humans and their biophysical environment. The successful introduction of a certain technology is seldom a question of proven efficiency in coping with a given environmental challenge, but rather mostly a combination of prevailing scientific and technological paradigms coupled with the expectations and strategies of particular (human) actors (Schott, 2004). In this volume Stéphane Frioux gives the example of the development of the Ringelmann Chart or Ringelmann Scale around 1900—a rather simple device to visually measure air pollution. The device allowed the problem to be perceived and to develop solutions for it. As such the Ringelmann chart was indispensable to the first smoke abatement policies that were developed in France in the very same years. The Ringelmann measurement perfectly fitted localized regulation and a localized world of negotiation between local authorities and local captains of industry, and so it continued to be used even after new methods of measurement became available after World War II. CO2 and SO2 measurements only gained importance in the 1970s to counter the ‘modern’ environmental movement and its protest against air pollution. This case-study perfectly illustrates why it is never self-evident that older and rival technologies—or knowledge configurations—should disappear. Probably the best-known example in urban environmental history is the

Introduction 17 invention and application of bacteriology, as studied by Bruno Latour in his Pasteurization of France (1993b). In Latour’s view, bacteriology offered a new socio-natural configuration of disease, perceiving living creatures as boxes of micro-organisms. However, its triumph over the older miasma theory was not due to any kind of discovery of the ‘true functioning of nature’, but rather because of the powerful alliance between Pasteur and his fellow-believers, the material settings in which they operated (the lab) and, of course, the germs themselves, which were the natural ‘actants’ capable of withstanding the ‘trials of strength’ operated on them. This alliance or network proved superior to the alliance of his opponents. As more and more actors and actants were recruited into Pasteur’s network, the hegemony of bacteriology was assured, which in turn changed the organization of medical science, the medical profession and health policies. In Foucauldian interpretations, technological systems reconfigure and help to consolidate values and power relations which are ‘embedded’ in them by the human actors who designed and implemented them— technology allows urban elites and planners to ‘govern at a distance’. Through their impact on the urban environment, technological systems also help to produce and reproduce social inequalities and power relations in the city. The obligatory removal of household waste organized by a town council liberated the urban middle classes from an unwanted product, but deprived the poor of a source of income (excrements to be used as fertilizer, rag collecting for resale). In risk-prone regions, using capital-intensive technology to counter natural disasters such as flooding or earthquakes, usually privileges the wealthier areas of the cities, either directly or indirectly, as the real estate market will push poorer people toward the least protected areas. On the other hand, environmental technology is often used as an active tool to address social problems, not seldom imposed from the top in order to discipline the lower classes. Chadwick, in his famous 1842 report on sanitation, was very explicit in this: by cleaning the city, more poor people would be healthy and could earn a decent living through working (Hamlin, 2003, cited by Schott, this volume). This ‘stabilization’ of social values through technology is not necessarily permanent. In their discussion of the Antwerp water supplies, Janssens and Soens (this volume) show how the values embedded in neighborhood wells, which tended to materialize neighborhood solidarities, changed over time as neighborhoods disintegrated socially and the urban upper classes began to dissociate themselves from the wells. The history of urban water wells also indicates that users and ‘consumers’ could alter the meaning and functioning of infrastructures, even if they did not participate in their design or formal management. Even in the modern age, controlling nature was not just the realm of ‘experts’, even though the rise of the ‘expert’ as a separate social group with a separate kind of ‘expert-knowledge’ is often seen a crucial feature of the

18  Tim Soens et al. modernist interaction with nature (for example Mitchell, 2002). Recent ‘environmental governance’ literature enlarges the group of stakeholders in the analysis to a much wider community of people affected in one way or another by the fate of the resource in question (Olsson and Head, 2015; for water, see also Taylor and Trentmann, 2011). From such a point of view, ‘expertise’ could be an attribute of very different actors. In his discussion of hydraulic ‘expertise’ in European overseas colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Karel Davids (this volume) argues that the growth of a ‘science of water’ in Europe from the seventeenth century onwards did not lead to an overall hegemony of one particular group of theoretically trained ‘experts’. While ‘engineers’ gained importance in one city, local administrators or noblemen might dominate public debate on hydraulic infrastructures in others. In other words, the local context—political, economic ‘and’ natural—remained essential. Such contextualized approaches to technological innovations also show that technologies and infrastructures did not just consolidate the aims and ambitions of their initial planners. Instead, while needs and desires co-evolve with technological possibilities and practices, technology is fundamentally interwoven with the ‘nexuses of practice and materiality through which people coexist’ (Schatzki, 2003, p. 90). Technology itself can be granted a—networked—form of agency, which becomes clear when looking at path dependencies and so-called technological lock-ins generated by the incremental accumulation of technology in (urban) society (David, 1985). The diffusion of air-conditioning over the past decades enabled urban growth in desert-like areas lacking the water (and food) resources to sustain such development, while by the time the environmental constraints became clear, millions of people had already moved in. Air-conditioning not only became integrated into the habits of daily life, from office work to sleeping, but soon became indispensable to these practices (Shove et al., 2013). In a similar way, the residential development of the Austrian floodplain areas investigated by Christian Rohr in this volume, might have been shortsighted and dangerous, because it relied on capital-intensive infrastructures which could not live up to their claim of offering total flood protection. However, after more than a century of occupation, evacuating the floodplain areas of the city would be virtually impossible. If most contributors in this volume would therefore happily attribute a certain ‘agency’ to technology, this would be a ‘networked’ kind of agency, one which produced different results in different socio-natural configurations. The inherent conflict between the ‘universal’ aspirations of technologies and the local socio-natural context in which they are installed becomes particularly clear when technologies are transferred from one region to another, as in the case of European water management infrastructures installed in colonial cities overseas (Davids, this volume).

Introduction 19

A ‘Manifesto’ for the History of Urban Nature The question of how cities change nature is dealt with through a wide spectrum of disciplines, covering Urban Ecology, Science and Technology Studies, Environmental Sociology, Political Ecology and such like. With this book, we hope to demonstrate the added value of a historical approach that approaches the urbanization of nature as a contextual problem rather than a universal one. The urbanization of nature unfolds across centuries at a different pace in different cities. Such a long-term contextual perspective helps to understand path dependencies, transitions and continuities and to unmask linear ‘modernity’ narratives. When reading the case studies and conceptual reflections in this volume from this perspective, the following ‘manifesto’ for the history of urban nature can be formulated:4 1. ‘The’ city did not change nature because ‘the’ city did not and does not exist. What exists are specific—historic—urban contexts, in which each type of agency is a networked one, derived from a specific configuration of human and non-human actors and actants. 2. However, at some points in history, the city might have existed as an imaginary category, and from this imaginary idea of a ‘city’ (and of ‘nature’), policies were conceived and technologies applied, ‘as if the city (and nature) existed’. Time and again, these universal aspirations might conflict with the specific configurations of real cities. 3. Such a contextualized—historical—approach to urban nature benefits from a networked perspective on agency, which stresses that all human actions are networked, intrinsically entangled in a web of relationships with other humans and the components of a material and natural context. A city and its inhabitants are permanently coevolving with nature, and all changes and actions are embedded in such co-evolution. 4. When looking in detail, the variation between cities is considerable, even within the relative coherent space of western and central Europe. Each city—especially in a context of long-term spatial continuity of cities—has a specific, century-long tradition of interacting with nature, which impacts how problems are dealt with. Hence, variations and changes in urban nature can only be explained when starting from the specific context in which they were affected. 5. It is a challenge for future research to do a similar exercise for cities in other parts of the world. In a broader comparison, European cities might stand out through their relative political autonomy (although of course this fluctuated over time and space), traditions of collective leadership, but also their relatively dense configuration which suited the application of centralized technological infrastructures. 6. Environmental historians have greatly benefited from the systemic approaches developed in social-environmental studies. Much

20  Tim Soens et al. attention has been paid to systemic shifts such as the transition in energy regimes from organic to fossil and mineral fuels. However crucial such evolutions were, the contributions in this volume demonstrate that these fundamental transformations are never selfevident or automatic. Even transitions in energy regimes have their own trajectory in each city, driven by different actor-networks with different ambitions, operating in a different socio-natural context. Furthermore, old practices, technologies and ideas often coexist for centuries with new ones, which turns the story of urban nature into a story of simultaneity and multiple transformations, rather than a linear progress toward ‘modernity’. 7. A focus on actors operating in time- and place-specific socio-natural configurations, radically closes the gap between the pre-modern and the modern period: the enquiry is useful for both periods and the processes of decision-making, agency and transformation are surprisingly similar. This only becomes clear when adopting a long-term perspective. 8. Unmasking the universality of the city, nature and technology through contextualization is only possible when a variety of different test-cases are available to then be compared and confronted. History has the big advantage of offering a wide range of cities, each with its specific spatio-temporal and socio-natural context. Through this unique potential for contextualization, history might become the ‘main laboratory [. . .] available in the social sciences to analyze longterm societal developments’ also in the field of urban nature (Van Bavel, 2015, p. 70). In this volume, the case studies which have generated these reflections are structured around four big topics, each questioning the evolving role of the urban in shaping and transforming the relationships between nature and society. The second part—Nature Into Urban Hinterlands—looks at the fabrication of urban hinterlands. ‘Hinterland’ is considered a crucial concept in the definition of urban nature. It conceptualizes the conversion of land, water, food, materials, energy outside the direct territory of a city into ‘resources’ for the city, which can thence be mobilized in flows directed toward the city. The focus on ‘hinterlands’ allows to explore the symmetrical and asymmetrical relationships between the urban and nonurban, as well as the way urban actors tried to steer these relationships to their advantage and the advantage of the city. It also connects to an important body of literature on ‘urban metabolism’ and the co-evolution of cities with their physical environment. The transformation of water, energy, plants and raw materials into ‘resources’ flowing from a hinterland to the city is an essential feature of the urbanization of nature. The third part of the volume—Nature as Urban Resource—hence focuses on the way individual resources are

Introduction 21 produced and mobilized toward urban ‘consumers’, as well as their circulation within the city and their eventual release from the city. Based on case studies dealing with water, energy, paper and textiles, we aim to reveal long-term changes and continuities in flows of resources, as well as the technological systems developed to control these flows. The urban transformation of nature also generates—real or perceived— threats, which have to be managed and controlled. The modern ‘risk society’ as defined by Ulrich Beck (1992) is very much an urban society. However, a long-term perspective on the way cities and urban actors have dealt with environmental challenges might nuance or even contradict teleological narratives of risk as by-product of urban modernity. In order to do so, the chapters in the fourth part of this volume— Nature as Urban Challenge—engage with recent literature on the role of experts and the construction of expertise, as well as the rise of networked technologies, and top-down introductions of ‘environmental engineering’. Finally, the fifth part of the volume—Visions of Urban Nature— concentrates on the dissociation of cities from nature, the negotiation of the place of ‘nature’ in the city, and the efforts to bridge the gap between cities and nature. The chapters in this part explore and connect the literature on wastelands and urban sustainability, questioning the development of discourses and practices. Here too, the central focus is on long-term changes and the quest to reveal the agency and actors shaping these changes. The enquiry pursued in this volume issues directly from an Exploratory Workshop funded by the European Science Foundation and organized in Darmstadt (Germany) from 20 to 22 March 2014. Discussions were continued during a workshop in Antwerp (Belgium) from 26 to 28 February  2015. The initiative was taken by the Centre for Urban History in Antwerp and the Centre for Urban Research (Stadtforschung) at Darmstadt University of Technology. It resumes and re-actualizes the research agenda underpinning the biannual roundtable meetings in Urban Environmental History that were held from 1998 to 2008 (Bernhardt, 2001; Bernhardt and Massard-Guilbaud, 2002; Schott et al., 2005), and links this to a wider project on Urban Agency over the past five centuries funded by the Flemish Research Foundation.5 The enquiry was never meant to be a synthesis of European urban environmental history, but in recent years some in-depth volumes have been published which might serve as such (Douglas, 2013; Schott, 2014 and the environmental chapters or paragraphs in Clark, 2009, 2013).

Notes 1. Barbers’ almost apolitical and technocratic agency of mayors—permanently reconciling different stakeholders and interests and hence advancing the ‘common wealth’ of the citizens and the world (which is deemed to be identical),

22  Tim Soens et al. is highly criticized. Apart from the obvious democratic deficit (decisions by urban mayors affect millions of people who never had the chance to vote for them), a ‘neutral’ technocratic rule of mayors might serve the interests of multinational companies, now released from national regulations and restrictions. 2. Martin Melosi (2016) counts at least 180 cases of remunicipalization of urban water supplies in thirty-five countries over the past fifteen years, including European cities, but also a lot of Latin American ones. Interestingly, municipal control remained much stronger in the United States. 3. Or alternatively: cities are spaces in which ‘technologies to some extent shape human behavior and affect human wellbeing’ (Hard and Misa, 2008). 4. Compare the ten-point manifesto for urban political ecology formulated by Heynen et al., 2006, pp. 11–13. 5. See also the Series Introduction and https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/researchgroups/centre-urban-history/research-publications/networks/scientific-researchcommunity/ [Accessed 2 November 2018].

References Abeysuriya, K., Mitchell, C. A. and Willetts, J. R., 2010. Urban sanitation through the lens of Thomas Kuhn. In: M. Rangarajan, J. A. Padua and J. R. McNeil eds. Environmental history: as if nature existed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 65–84. Appuhn, K., 2009. A forest on the sea: environmental expertise in renaisance Venice. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Asafu-Adjaye, J. et al., 2015. An ecomodernist manifesto. Online access: www. ecomodernism.org/. Asdal, K., 2003. The problematic nature of nature: the post-constructivist challenge to environmental history. History and Theory, 42 (4), pp. 60–74. Barber, B., 2013. If mayors ruled the world: dysfunctional nations, rising cities. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Barles, S., 2010. Society, energy and materials: What are the contributions of industrial ecology, territorial ecology and urban metabolism to sustainable urban development? Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 53 (4), pp. 439–455. Bayerl, G. 2001. Die Natur als Warenhaus. Der technisch-ökonomische Blick auf die Natur in der frühen Neuzeit. In: R. Reith and S. Hahn eds. UmweltGeschichte. Arbeitsfelder, Forschungsansätze, Perspektiven. Vienna and Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, pp. 33–52. Beck, U. 1992. Risk society: towards a new modernity. London and Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Bernhardt, C. ed., 2001. Environmental problems in European cities in the 19th and 20th century. Münster: Waxmann. Bernhardt, C. and Massard-Guilbaud, G. eds., 2002. The modern demon: pollution in urban and industrial European societies. Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal. Billen, G., Garnier, J. and Barles, S., 2012. History of the urban environmental imprint: Introduction to a multidisciplinary approach to the long-term relationships between Western cities and their hinterland. Regional Environmental Change, 12 (2), pp. 249–253. Brimblecombe, P., 1987. The big smoke: a history of air pollution in London since medieval times. London: Routledge.

Introduction 23 Cavert, M., 2016. The smoke of London: energy and environment in the early modern city. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, P. ed., 2009. European cities and towns: 400–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clark, P. ed., 2013. The Oxford handbook of cities in world history. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coutard, O. and Rutherford, J., 2016. Beyond the networked city: infrastructure reconfigurations and urban change in the North and South. London and New York: Routledge. Cronon, W., 1991. Nature’s metropolis: Chicago and the great West. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company. Cronon, W., 1996. The trouble with wilderness: or, getting back to the wrong nature. Environmental History, 1, pp. 7–28 (reprinted in Cronon, W., 1996. Uncommon ground: rethinking the human place in nature. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company). David, P. A., 1985. Clio and the economics of QWERTY. American Economic Review, 75, pp. 332–337. Douglas, I., 2013. Cities: an environmental history. London: I.B. Tauris. Farías, I. and Bender, Th. eds., 2010. Urban assemblages: how actor-network theory changes urban studies. London and New York: Routledge. Fischer-Kowalski, M. and Haberl, H., 2007. Socioecological transitions and global change: trajectories of social metabolism and land use. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Fischer-Kowalski, M. and Weisz, H., 1999. Society as hybrid between material and symbolic realms: toward a theoretical framework of society-nature interaction. Advances in Human Ecology, 8, pp. 215–254. Glacken, C.,1967. Thraces on the Rhodian Shore: nature and culture in western thought, from ancient times to the end of the eighteenth century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Haff, P., 2014. Humans and technology in the Anthropocene: six rules. The Anthropocene Review, 1 (2), pp. 196–219. Hard, M. and Misa, T. J. eds., 2008. Modernizing European cities: technological uniformity and cultural distinction. In: idem. Urban machinery. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT press, pp. 1–22. Hays, S. P, 1998. Explorations in environmental history. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Heynen, N., Kaika, M. and Swyngedouw, E., 2006. Urban political ecology: politicizing the production of urban natures. In: idem. In the nature of cities: urban political ecology and the politics of urban metabolism. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1–20. Höhne, S., 2015. The Birth of the urban Passenger: Infrastructural subjectivity and the Opening of the New York City Subway. City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action, 19 (2–3), pp. 313–321. Hughes, J. D., 2009. An environmental history of the world: humankind’s changing role in the community of life. London and New York: Routledge. Hughes, T., 2004. Human-built world: how to think about technology and culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jørgensen, D., Jørgensen, F. A. and Pritchard, S. B. eds., 2013. New natures: joining environmental history with science and technology studies. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

24  Tim Soens et al. Joyce, P., 2003. The rule of freedom: liberalism and the modern city. London and New York: Verso Books. Kaïka, M., 2005. City of flows: modernity, nature, and the city. Oxon: Routledge. Knoll, M., 2006. Urban needs and changing environments. Regensburg’s wood supply form the early modern period to industrialization. Bulletin of the German Historical Institute Washington D.C., Supplement 3, pp. 77–101. Krausmann, F. et al., 2010. From the frying pan into the fire: industrialization as a socio-ecological transition process. In: J. McNeill et al. eds. Environmental history: as if nature existed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kucher, M., 2005. The use of water and its regulation in Medieval Siena. Journal of Urban History, 31, pp. 504–536. Latour, B., 1993a. We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B., 1993b. The pasteurization of France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Löw, M., 2012. The intrinsic logic of cities: towards a new theory on urbanism. Urban Research and Practice, 5 (3), pp. 303–315. Melosi, M., 1990. Cities, technical systems and the environment. Environmental History Review, 14, pp. 1–2 and pp. 45–64. Melosi, M., 2016. Environmental challenges: water. In: The city as global political actor. UCSIA Conference 9–11 March  2016, Unpublished Conference Paper, Antwerp. Mitchell, T., 2002. Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mumford, L., 1961. The city in history: its origins, its transformations, and its prospects. Boston: Mariner Books. Olsson, L. and Head, B., 2015. Urban water governance in times of multiple stressors: an editorial. Ecology and Society, 20 (1), p. 27. Otter, C., 2008. The Victorian eye: a political history of light and vision in Britain, 1800–1910. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Otter, C., 2010. Locating matter: the place of materiality in urban history. In: T. Bennett and P. Joyce eds. Material powers: cultural studies, history and the material turn. London: Routledge, pp. 38–59. Platt, H., 1999. The emergence of urban environmental history. Urban History, 26 (1), pp. 89–95. Pritchard, S., 2011. Confluence: the nature of technology and the remaking of the Rhône, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schatzki, T. R., 2003. Nature and technology in society. History and Theory, 42, pp. 82–93. Schott, D., 1999. Die Vernetzung der Stadt: Kommunale Energiepolitik, öffentlicher Nahverkehr und die “Produktion” der modernen Stadt. Darmstadt, Mainz, Mannheim 1880–1918. (Reihe “Edition Universität”). Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Schott, D., 2004. Urban environmental history: what lessons are there to be learnt? Boreal Environment Research, 9, pp. 519–528. Schott, D., 2014. Europaïsche Urbanisierung (1000–2000): Eine umwelthistorische Einführung. Köln, Weimar, Wien and Böhlau: UTB GmbH. Schott, D., Luckin, B. and Massard-Guilbaud, G. eds., 2005. Resources of the city: contributions to an environmental history of modern Europe. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Introduction 25 Shove, E., Walker, G. and Brown, S., 2013. Transnational transitions: the diffusion and integration of mechanical cooling. Urban Studies, 19, pp. 1–14. Sieferle, R. P., 2001. The Subterranean forest: energy systems and the industrial revolution. Cambridge: The White Horse Press. Sörlin, S. and Warde, P., 2009. Nature’s end: history and the environment. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Swyngedouw, E., 2006. Metabolic urbanization: the making of cyborg cities. In: N. Heynen, M. Kaika and E. Swyngedouw eds. In the nature of cities: urban political ecology and the politics of urban metabolism. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 21–40. Taylor, V. and Trentmann, F., 2011. Liquid politics: Water and the politics of everyday life in the modern city. Past and Present, 211, pp. 199–241. Van Bavel, B., 2015. History as a laboratory to better understand the formation of institutions. Journal of Institutional Economics, 11 (1), pp. 69–91. Wackernagel, M. and Rees, W., 1996. Our ecological footprint: reducing human impact on the Earth. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers. Wackernagel, M. and Rees. W., 2008. Urban ecological footprints: why cities cannot be sustainable—and why they are a key to sustainability. In: J. Marzluff and W. Endlicher eds. An introduction to urban ecology as an interaction between humans and nature. New York: Springer, pp. 537–555. Warde, P., 2006. Ecology, economy and state formation in early modern Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, H., 2012. Urbanization and the environment: a plea for looking at materialities, resources, and urban ‘Metabolisms’. Informationen zur Modernen Stadtgeschichte, 2, pp. 28–35. Weber, M., 1921. Die Stadt. Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 47, pp. 621–772. White, R., 1995. The organic machine: the remaking of the Columbia river. New York: Hill and Wang. Williams, M. et  al., 2015. The anthropocene biosphere. The Anthropocene Review, 2 (3), pp. 196–219. Winiwarter, V., Schmid, M. and Dressel, G., 2013. Looking at half a millennium of co-existence: the Danube in Vienna as a socio-natural site. Water History, 5 (2), pp. 101–119. World Urbanization Prospects, 2014. World urbanization prospects: 2014 revision. highlights. New York: United Nations. https://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/Pub lications/Files/WUP2014-Highlights.pdf (last accessed 22 May 2017).

Part II

Nature Into Urban Hinterlands

1 Long-Term Transitions, Urban Imprint and the Construction of Hinterlands Sabine Barles and Martin Knoll

Introduction There are at least two ways to consider the urbanization of nature and to explore its history. The first one addresses the question of urbanization itself and of the processes by which ‘natural’ places were transformed into ‘urban’ ones in relation to various aspects, including the way those involved in these processes considered nature. This involves looking at the city as an environment. The second one considers the city as a particular place with its specific actors, organization, people and so forth, and questions its relation to nature and the biosphere as a whole. This involves looking at the city in the environment. This chapter deals with the latter, the authors being aware that the two are interconnected. It aims at giving a general overview of city-nature relationships and longterm urban socio-ecological trajectories on the basis of two main concepts: urban metabolism and urban hinterland. Metabolism refers to the material and energy flows necessary to sustain human life and human activities. We proceed from the observation that one of the main characteristics of cities lies in the externalization of their metabolism. Cities depend on supply and emission areas that are mostly located outside of their boundaries, and the environmental imprints of cities hence can extend to distant parts of the world. Supply and emission areas are functionally related to cities and represent their hinterland. However, both urban metabolism and urban hinterland differ from one city to another and were subject to changes and transitions during the last few centuries. The present chapter will connect this historical variety to the question of urban agency as set out in the introduction to this book. Tracing the history of who decided on the way an urban metabolism was organized and how urban hinterlands were outlined— and changed—means isolating material forces as well as rather abstract categories of human agency (capital, economics, politics, culture) and particular human actors (monarchs, landlords, city magistrates, tradesmen, engineers). The difficulties of doing so increase with the complexity of globalizing hinterlands.

30  Sabine Barles and Martin Knoll

Metabolism: From Biology to Socio-ecological Studies A good way to start the analysis of the history of city-nature relationships is to look at their material dimension through the notion of urban metabolism. Applied to human societies, ‘metabolism’ refers to the material and energy flows necessary to sustain human life and human activities as a whole. These flows enter the social system as resources and are transformed in various ways; some of them become stocks (for instance the built environment), others leave the system, often as emission released in air, water and soil. The term ‘metabolism’ mostly belongs to the life sciences, and was defined during the second half of the nineteenth century (it seems to first appear in French as métabolisme) as the range of chemical transformations occurring in living organisms; these transformations are necessary for the maintenance of life itself. Its first use in social science was contemporaneous with its apparition in biology. It was central in Marx’s and Engels’s writings (Fischer-Kowalski, 1998; Foster, 2002; Sywngedouw, 2006), but it more or less disappeared again from the beginning of the twentieth century up to the 1960s, when environmental concern led to a renewed interest in material and energy flow analysis and to the birth of industrial, urban, and then social and territorial ecology (Barles, 2010). The sanitary engineer Abel Wolman (1965) seems to be the first scientist to have applied the word ‘metabolism’ to cities; he was followed by ecologists such as Eugene Odum (1983) and Paul Duvigneaud (1974) who referred to the ‘ecosystem urbs’. Applying the notion of metabolism to human societies is both controversial and tricky. Controversial, because it raises the question of the nature of human societies: Using a biological term usually applied to cells and organisms could lead to the debatable conclusion that societies are no more than organisms; tricky, because it generates problems such as the limits to the social system, the socio-natural dimension of material and energy flows, the ways of characterizing them, et cetera. Nevertheless, we hypothesize (1) that material and energy flow analysis is a good way of entering the question of society-nature interactions and that it does not necessarily imply considering human societies as organisms or discussing the organicity of human societies, (2) that it is necessary to take into account the socio-natural dimension of these flows, resulting in (3) the need for an interdisciplinary approach to social metabolism. Socio-Ecological Studies (SES) in particular develop such approaches. SES stress the transformation of societies’ metabolisms and have led to the conceptualization and identification of socio-ecological regimes, trajectories and transitions (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl, 2007). SES generally define three main metabolic regimes: the fire regime, the agrarian regime and the industrial regime (De Vries and Gouldsblom, 2002). Considering the period covered by this book, we will concentrate on the last two. The agrarian regime is based on solar energy and primary energy is

Long-Term Transitions 31 mainly provided by biomass, and land use is therefore of major importance. The industrial regime is based on fossil fuels. It is characterized by the decoupling of primary energy production and land use, by physical growth—that is, an increase in metabolic flows and stocks—and by huge environmental impacts (Krausmann et al., 2008). The transition from one regime to another began in the eighteenth century.

The Singularity of Urban Metabolism Cities play a particular role in society’s metabolism and simultaneously have a specific metabolism of their own. From a socio-ecological point of view, it is possible to argue that one of the main characteristics of cities is the externalization of their metabolism (Barles, 2015). Towns emerged historically from the possibility of some of their inhabitants to free themselves from subsistence production, which allowed them to develop other activities, especially trade. Towns therefore reflect social and spatial specializations. As for their metabolism, external flows at first involved food, as well as flows related to heating and the preparation of food (or what has been called ‘energy’ since the nineteenth century). As a consequence, the environmental imprints of cities necessarily can be found beyond city limits and even far from these limits in different parts of the world, according to their supply and emission areas (Billen, Garnier and Barles, 2012; Barles, 2015). The degree of physical externalization can vary in space and time, but this remains the first way of differentiating cities from other human territories or socio-natural sites. The intensity of flows involved in cities is all the more important since they are places of industry and/or exchange, importing and exporting raw materials and processed goods. Furthermore, we can view the social metabolism as the result of the interweaving of natural processes—physical, chemical and biological— and human techniques. These techniques also mobilize natural processes which they superimpose on existing processes that they seek to transform, correct or support. The term ‘technique’ is used here in its anthropological meaning as ‘effective traditional acts’ (Marcel Mauss). ‘Technique’ is broader than technology, which is technique based on a scientific discourse (or logos). A technique may manifest itself in many ways, ranging from a simple gesture to complex infrastructures (and beyond). Infrastructure is no longer an extension of the body as a tool, but a detached technical object, which has a certain degree of independence, as it is separated from the human body by one or more intermediaries. With an eye on understanding the specificity of towns from a socio-ecological point of view, the technical dimension of their metabolism is particularly important, as most of the energy and materials they involve come from (or go) elsewhere. ‘Infrastructures’—a term that is relatively young, as it dates from the end of the nineteenth century (Barles, 2015; Bélanger,

32  Sabine Barles and Martin Knoll 2013)—have played a major role in this respect, at least since the birth of cities. Together with the social organization of metabolism (its governance, for instance, through markets in their various guises), the technical and physical dimensions are thus fundamental. The externalization of an urban metabolism, linked to its infrastructural dimension, leads to what we could qualify as the urbanization of the extra-urban landscape, at least to the extent that the countryside outside towns is transformed according to urban needs. This results in particular socio-natural sites (Winiwater et al., 2013), in urban dependencies, and in out-infrastructures, as these are shaped by the remote needs of cities. Erik Swyngedouw rightfully considers ‘environmental change and urban change as fundamentally interconnected processes’ (Swyngedouw, 2006, p.  34). Indeed, the influence of a town on its surrounding territories, which do not belong to it, is reflected in its impact on natural milieux— through the colonization of nature (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl, 1997). In addition, this has consequences and implications for associated human societies—through the urban appropriation of resources. Obviously, the concept of ‘metabolic urbanization’ raises questions about the relations between cities and their supply and emission areas in terms of power, decision-making and control. Whatever the regime— agrarian or industrial—cities have a very particular metabolism, in biogeochemical, physical, technical, and social and political terms. Examining and understanding this diversity is key in historical research.

Hinterland The second concept which needs further exploration is ‘hinterland’. In a very first attempt, and according to what has already been introduced above, ‘urban hinterland’ can be defined as the extra-urban spatial precipitate of all flows of matter, energy and information, generated, organized or re-directed within an urban metabolism. Having its origin in German, the term is used in several languages and has had a rather long career as a technical term in geography. The precision of the concept ‘hinterland’ has been in question for a long time (for example: Mecking, 1931). American geographer Eugene van Cleef considered that ‘hinterland’— like Umland—cannot be defined exactly, as these ‘terms apply to human activities primarily and hence are conditioned on many circumstances’ (van Cleef, 1941, p.  311). Van Cleef further argued that many—as he put it—‘nongeographic elements’, such as ‘freight rates, political influences, the “happenstance” of convenient or inconvenient transportation schedules, nationalistic rivalries, linguistic contrasts, social antagonisms, and trade restrictions’ and so forth, all affect the boundaries of ‘hinterland’ regions. Van Cleef also drew a distinction between relatively stable, so-called natural or physical hinterlands and hinterlands defined as economic domains. Many human conflicts, he concluded, arise from the lack

Long-Term Transitions 33 of coincidence between the former and the latter. Most recently Gilles Billen, Josette Garnier and Sabine Barles raised the question whether the concept still makes sense at all in the face of today’s globalized and interconnected world (Billen, Garnier and Barles, 2012, p. 250). Tracing the term’s definitions and literary uses over time reveals its semantic breadth as well as a certain repertoire of frequently appearing criteria. In Johann Georg Krünitz’s Oekonomische Encyklopädie, a German encyclopedia with special emphasis on economics and technology, published in 242 volumes from 1773 to 1858, the category is used in two different ways. One is related to agricultural land of limited productivity (in contrast to a more fertile Vorder-Land), the other is used to characterize the spatial setting of a harbor town, where ‘hinterland’ marks the region surrounding the city and the more remote stretches of land upstream but accessible by inland navigation.1 The nineteenth-century German language dictionary initiated by the philologists Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm refers to a ‘hinterland’ as an area situated—in the shadow of a capital city and dependent on this town in terms of its economy or political life.2 Other propositions have been made that try to combine physical features with criteria such as accessibility, trade or urban centrality—criteria related to human agency. Van Cleef’s twofold distinction is to be mentioned here (Figure 1.1): the first between a continuous and discontinuous ‘hinterland’ and the second between ‘hinterland’ and ‘Umland’, the latter defining a city’s immediate environs and having

Figure 1.1 Distinction between ‘hinterland’ and ‘Umland’ in the work of Eugene van Cleef Source: Van Cleef, E., 1941. Hinterland and Umland. Geographical Review, 31 (2), pp. 308–311 © John Wiley & Sons—Journals.

34  Sabine Barles and Martin Knoll been adopted as a foreign word by the French geographer André Allix (1889–1966). It was the sociologist Lewis W. Jones, who in 1955, in his description of ‘hinterland’, highlighted the aspect of raw material production for an urban center of consumption. Having surveyed contributions from rural sociology and human ecology he came to the following assumptions. First, that there ‘are geographic areas in which raw materials producing functions of the economy are carried on: agricultural, extractive, and collecting enterprises’; and second, that in ‘these areas the ratio of producers to land production units is small, which is another way of saying that there is a low density of populations and high land-to-man ratios’ (Jones, 1955, p. 42). Jones underlines that the logical distinction between urban center and hinterland cannot be limited to the economic dimension but that social and cultural characteristics are necessary parts of the picture too (Jones, 1955, p. 42). However, the importance Jones attributes to the material dimension, and especially to the city’s provisioning with resources, is of particular importance for the discussion of city-hinterland relations, and guides our chapter. Jones was certainly not the first to highlight the relevance of raw materials. As early as 1826, and mirroring the economic realities of the solar-based pre-fossil-fuel era, the economist Johann Heinrich von Thünen, in his treatise The Isolated State, sketched an ideal-type model relating concentric zones of different options for agricultural land use to an urban center of consumption (Schott, 2014, pp.  65–67). In fact, in the medieval and early modern development of Europe’s complex urban landscape, the aim of gaining control over such regions of resource provision could be seen as one of the driving forces behind the urban acquisition of territorial power extra muros (Scott, 2014, pp. 237–241). After all, the variety of different angles to the ‘hinterland’ category surveyed above might strengthen doubts about the precision of the concept. The social and economic historian Howard B. Clarke has plausibly pleaded for an analytical plurality of hinterlands. He suggested ‘that towns (and cities) had different types of hinterland and that the hinterlands of towns with very long histories changed over the course of time’ (Clarke, 2014, p. 197). Following Clarke, we will leave aside more general notions of hinterland such as the geopolitical one, defining hinterland as a world region under hegemonic control of an imperial power, or geographical ones, such as a ‘back country’. Instead, we conceive of hinterlands as peri-urban constellations with the following characteristics: 1. We consider hinterland to be a concept describing areas functionally related to cities, respectively to the urban metabolism. This functional relation is subject to historical change. 2. Due to ever growing transport distances in the globalized economy it is increasingly difficult to detect the multitude of places scattered

Long-Term Transitions 35 around the world which constitute a city’s hinterland. However, it remains important to recognize these spatial precipitates, in order to avoid the cultural-turn-driven ‘trend towards immateriality’ (Otter, 2010, p.  38) in the historical analysis of urban development and urbanization processes. 3. Quite similar to other concepts used in historical and social sciences and applied to the history of urbanism, such as ‘metabolism’ or ‘imprint’, ‘hinterland’ is a metaphor. The analytical value of metaphors is that they guide the understanding of rather abstract phenomena. One of the analytical values of the hinterland category is that it enables to locate, in a material way, the concepts of ‘metabolism’ and ‘imprint’. Neither of these, like ‘hinterland’ itself, can be understood without defining a concrete geophysical reality, i.e., without determining ‘where’ material and energy flows come from and go to, and ‘where’ an imprint is effective. 4. The distinction between export and import hinterlands, grounded in economics, can be adopted for a socio-ecological balancing of different kinds of input and output hinterlands. In analogy to this distinction we can differentiate between supply areas, emission areas, and diffusion areas.

Hinterland as the Spatial Precipitate of the Externalization of an Urban Metabolism To summarize, we agree to use the metabolism metaphor as an analytical concept related to cities. We see the externalization of their metabolism as characteristic for cities and we consider hinterland to be the spatial and/or functional precipitate of this externalization. Doing so, tracing long-term changes in city-hinterland relations, means to deal with the question of what keeps the metabolism working and what kinds of processes and strategies of externalization can be detected. This addresses demographic and social processes, (infra)structures/material arrangements, agreements, politics and trade. In the course of history, cities became more differentiated in terms of function (residential town, harbor town, mining town, artisanal town, trading town, industrial town, fortress town, tourism town), in terms of size (metropolis, average town, small town), in terms of geographic location (along a navigable river, within a plain, on the maritime shoreline, in a mountainous region, etc.) and in terms of legal status (city within a territorial state, city republic). Each of these types developed different needs and different externalization strategies. At the most basic level, urban metabolic needs vary in terms of quantity and quality according to the population of the city (e.g., how many animal and human mouths to feed?) and according to its activities (e.g., an industrial city needs raw materials). These needs can of course be

36  Sabine Barles and Martin Knoll partly the result of the geographical and ecological context of the city which explains why a specific type of city—a mining city for instance— developed on a specific location. Another point concerns what we could call the geometry of the hinterland—a simple idea at first sight, but one that captures numerous aspects of city-resources interactions. We can oppose the proximity to the remoteness of the hinterland and observe a great deal of variation between European towns, even at the same moment in time, especially concerning food and fuel. This adds to the fact that some particular resources are by their very nature remote— the silk and the spice routes are very good examples of this kind of remoteness. While being well aware that ‘Medieval and early modern cities in their systems of supply display, at least in embryo, many of the dynamics that underlie the modern “global economy” and the same was true of their role in environmental change’ (Keene, 2012, p. 279), we can observe a general historical trend, especially from the eighteenth century onwards, toward a splintering/dispersion of urban hinterlands, in connection to spatial specialization (for instance the separation of cattle raising from arable farming), globalization, and to the use of resources that are located all around the world—and far from Europe—like fossil fuels and ores. Alternatively, it is important to keep in mind that even in most recent times, when transport technologies have pushed cities’ hinterlands, in terms of provision and distribution, toward a global scale, the urban imprint in the towns’ immediate vicinities— or Umlands—still remains (or is becoming even more) of a material dimension (housing, urban sprawl, roads/infrastructure). Thus, the notion of environmental imprint can be related to the urban hinterland: While hinterland refers to the area that contributes to urban supply or discharge, the environmental imprint gives an estimate of their environmental impacts. Together with these aspects, important characteristics of the hinterland lie in the question ‘who decides?’, i.e., who drives the urban metabolism? The city? The state? The hinterland itself (as an organized territory)? The market? The answer would of course often be ‘a combination of these’, but extreme situations exist where one stakeholder controls nearly all of the system—or at least the flows of one particular resource. In the end we could say that the hinterland, as well as the city-hinterland relationships, reflect two socio-ecological dimensions: one concerns the colonization of nature by a particular human organization (a city) and the way the city deals with nature in this respect; the second concerns resource appropriation by cities and the way cities deal with their supply territories in terms of power, resource allocation and so forth. In the following sections we try to draw the main lines of a typology of urban metabolism and urban-hinterland relations using well-researched case studies as examples.

Long-Term Transitions 37

Space and Flows: Variations and Change In terms of flows, demography is of course a major issue. It must be noted that, before the general urban growth that began during the eighteenth century, European urban dynamics were uneven (Chandler, 1987): some towns shrunk (as also happened at the end of the twentieth century). Rome, which dramatically declined from several hundred thousand inhabitants in ancient times to forty thousand around 1500 is a good example. Other cities experienced an increase in population from the fifteenth century on that provoked a growth in their metabolic flows. London, which decreased from eighty thousand to thirty-five thousand inhabitants between 1300 und 1400, but subsequently experienced a tremendous rise in population from seventy thousand inhabitants around 1500 to some five hundred thousand around 1700, is an example of the peculiar character of the latter process (Nicholas, 2003, p. 20). As historians of demography and migration well know, such demographic shifts at the urban level are only possible when people move from the countryside (or other cities) to the city. This is therefore related to the evolution of the hinterland as such. Yet another important issue concerns food intake in terms of energy content and composition, considered as both driver and consequence of agricultural production. Although reliable figures are scarce, it seems that food intake remained close to subsistence on average (given that famine was not rare) at the European level up to the end of the eighteenth century, but then increased (Flandrin and Montanari, 1996, pp. 584 and 744). In this respect, it is crucial to also consider the share of meat in food intake, as meat consumption implies higher levels of primary energy consumption and larger agricultural areas than plant-based food: In this respect, huge differences exist in Europe. For instance, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, per capita meat consumption in Vienna was one third higher than in Paris (Gierlinger, 2015). As a result, Vienna’s supply area—its food hinterland—was larger than Paris’ supply area, as more plant biomass had to be produced in order to feed the animals that were consumed in the Austrian capital. At the European level, the overall trend is toward a reduction of the share of cereals in food intake—from 70 percent in terms of calories at the end of the Middle Ages (Keene, 1998) to less than 40 percent today (De Boer et al., 2006). Regional differences tended to disappear during the twentieth century, as the share of meat in urban diets increased everywhere, including in Mediterranean cities (Lassaletta et al., 2013). Feed is also a particular component of urban metabolism, and was linked to the animal presence in cities and to transport systems up to World War II. Wheat production was a major constraint around cities that had to host numerous horses. Urban horse numbers in Europe peaked in the early twentieth century. In British cities, for example, as late as 1924 some 923,000 horses were kept (Atkins, 2012, p.  79; for

38  Sabine Barles and Martin Knoll Paris, see: Barles, 2012). Regarding food and feed, the urban metabolism and its remote consequences are also strongly linked to regional agricultural systems: Here again, major differences exist in Europe according to pedoclimatic (soil and climate) conditions and regional techniques, especially before the twentieth century. Paris’ surroundings, within a radius of one hundred kilometers (Middle Ages) (Keene, 1998), two hundred kilometers (end of the eighteenth century), and three hundred kilometers (end of the nineteenth; Billen, Barles, et al., 2012), were able to provide a large share of the food needed by the capital, whereas cities like London, Ghent and Antwerp depended on larger or more remote supply areas from an early stage onwards (Thoen and Van Cruyningen, 2012). The fertilizer revolution had a major impact on agricultural production and urban food supply areas, especially since the second half of the twentieth century:3 The area needed to feed an urbanite decreased dramatically thanks to increasing yields, from nearly one hectare per Parisian at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to 0.15 hectare today, despite the increasing part of meat in urban diets (Chatzimpiros, 2011). The availability of industrial fertilizer also provoked a regional specialization between agriculture and cattle-breeding, increasing the difference between regions and cities. Overall, the environmental impact of food production increased, resulting in a smaller (in surface) but deeper (in impact) environmental imprints. Energy is an essential dimension of urban metabolism. Up to the eighteenth and even the nineteenth century, most European cities were consuming firewood and sometimes charcoal in order to provide heat, to cook, and for industrial purposes. Watermills and windmills, despite their usefulness, were quantitatively of minor importance in the urban energy mix: they provided only 0.3  percent (for wind) and 0.8  percent (for water) of the energy in England and Wales in the middle of the sixteenth century (Warde, 2007; Wrigley, 2010). Here again differences exist. One of them lies in the use of coal, and in the rhythm of the shift from wood to coal. In France, and especially in Paris, wood shortages were resolved, up to the end of the eighteenth century, by extending the wood supply area—the wood hinterland—which was itself possible thanks to the spread of wood floating and the related transformation of river systems. Paris was strongly linked to the Seine basin at the time, not only for food but also for wood provision. Coal appeared on the Parisian scene during the nineteenth century, providing 50 percent of the energy mix around 1850 (Kim and Barles, 2012). On the contrary, London began its energy revolution as early as the fifteenth century—and even before. Coal represented 50 percent of the energy mix around 1700 in England and Wales (Warde, 2007). The ends of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were marked by the diversification of energy sources: hydraulics, hydroelectricity, petroleum, natural gas, nuclear energy.

Long-Term Transitions 39 On average, European energy consumption decreased from 1500 (22.4 GJ/cap/year) to 1700 (17.4 GJ/cap/year) (Malanima, 2013, p. 99).4 The variations in energy mix explain to some extent the variations in consumption, in connection with urbanization, lifestyle changes and industrialization. As mentioned by Wrigley (2010, p. 38), energy consumption did not differ a lot from one country to another during the sixteenth century, although the Netherlands, where the extensive use of peat since the late Middle Ages increased energy availability, had a higher level of consumption: 25 GJ/cap/year in the early sixteenth century compared to 20 GJ/cap/year in England (Malanima, 2013, p. 113). At the beginning of the eighteenth century, it reached 30 GJ/cap/year in England and Wales, but only 25 GJ/cap/year in Paris, amounting to 100 GJ/cap/year and 30 GJ/cap/year respectively around 1860, while Italian consumption was only 20 GJ/cap/year (Wrigley, 2010; Kim and Barles, 2012). At the end of the twentieth century, Parisian consumption reached 150 GJ/cap/year, not unlike the average European consumption (Kander et al., 2013, p. 5). To put it in a nutshell, energy availability increased, and so did consumption, at a different pace across Europe. In the long run, the geography of energy supply was completely transformed by the new sources of energy, and urban energy supplies were progressively embedded in a global assemblage of various networks (Schott, this volume). Energy supply distance increased dramatically, from two hundred kilometers (average) during the eighteenth century, to three hundred kilometers at the end of the nineteenth century and four thousand kilometers at the beginning of the twenty-first century in the case of Paris (Kim and Barles, 2012). Only under very particular circumstances did the energy supply remain partly local, examples being Iceland (hydropower, geothermal energy) and Norway (hydropower, fossil fuels). The use of fossil and fissile (i.e., nuclear) fuels challenges the very notion of hinterland, which became progressively subterranean, as stressed by Rolf Peter Sieferle when he referred to the ‘Subterranean forest’ (Sieferle, 2001), a term first used by late seventeenth century author Johann Philipp Bünting (Bünting, 1693) promoting black coal as alternative fuel. However, by harvesting these subterranean forests, the environmental imprint of energy became atmospheric through pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions, thus adding to other long-term ecological legacies of old energy sources, such as transformed forest ecosystems, ground-lowering due to peat and coal extraction and so forth. Urban water flows and water circulation profoundly changed too, together with water uses and urban population. Urban transformations related to water and energy provision, transportation and industry have contributed to the shape of waterscapes and water cycles in various ways

40  Sabine Barles and Martin Knoll over time. Writing about the Senne and Brussels before the industrial revolution, Chloé Deligne said: One could say that the waterways of the region functioned mainly for the benefit of the city: Brussels hydraulic territory, meaning the zone within which its effects, both attractive (market) and repulsive (pollution), were felt, extended well beyond its territorial limits. (Deligne, 2012, pp. 24–25) After the age of stagnant waters—roughly from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries if we consider the North of France (Guillerme, 1984; Janssens and Soens, this volume)—the search for flowing and abundant waters began. In most cases, water supply areas remained closer to the city than those for energy or food supply, but cities have made their own watersheds, sometimes thanks to interbasin transfers. Athens is an extreme example of a city dependent on a distant water hinterland (Stergiouli and Hadjibiros, 2012), to the point that the city partly shaped the Greek waterscape and the regional water cycle. A way to picture this is to refer to water imprint, i.e., the runoff area needed to supply a city with water.5 In the case of Barcelona, it amounted to 1.1 square kilometers during the eighteenth century, 47.5 at the end of the nineteenth century, and a peak of 310 during the 1970s; after which it decreased to 266 square kilometers. This was respectively 1, 47, 307 and 206 percent of the city area (Tello and Ostos, 2012). Paris’ water imprint covered nineteen square kilometers at the end of the eighteenth century (55 percent of the urban area and 0.02 percent of the Seine watershed), 2,440 square kilometers at the end of the nineteenth century (515 percent of the urban area and 3 percent of the Seine watershed) and 10,180 square kilometers at the beginning of the twenty-first century (358  percent of the urban area and 13  percent of the Seine watershed). This is made possible by urban out-infrastructures. The urban influence on waterscape and water cycle is even greater if one considers wastewater management and the regulating of rivers (see for instance Castonguay and Evenden, 2012).

Who Decides? In August  2003, the Herald Tribune reported in highly anthropomorphic language on a large-scale power blackout, which affected some fifty million people in the US and Canada, stating that ‘the grid’s heart fluttered [. . .] complicated beyond full understanding, even by experts [the grid] lives and occasionally dies by its own mysterious rules’ (Bennett, 2010, pp. 24–25). Political scientist Jane Bennett chooses the event and its mediatized representation as a testimonial to the occurrence of distributed human and non-human agency in technical networks (Bennett, 2010, p. 21). However, urban historians tend to feel more comfortable in

Long-Term Transitions 41 explaining the function and dysfunction of these arteries and nerve cords of urban metabolism by clearly identifying human actors. In fact, tracing the question over time as to who decided on the way urban metabolism was organized and how urban hinterlands in this respect were framed— and changed—means detecting material forces (geo- and hydromorphology of a site, climate, precipitation regimes) as well as rather abstract categories of human agency (capital, economics, politics, culture) and specific human actors (monarchs, landlords, city magistrates, tradesmen, engineers). Of course, with ever more complex globalizing hinterlands (Dogahy, 2012), the difficulties in identifying relevant ‘actors’ increase. Tom Scott’s typology of medieval and early modern European city states might be of interest here, as he suggests four development patterns in the relation between cities and regions (Scott, 2014, pp.  236–237): A first pattern contains cities like Cologne, Augsburg or St. Gallen, which never acquired considerable territories of their own but through capital accumulation and economic strength—often based on long-distance trade—were able to economically dominate their hinterlands, enforcing provision on a contractual basis. A second group of cities, such as the leading cities in the southern Low Countries, were able to back their economic domination by jurisdictional means. A third group, like Genoa with Sardinia and Corsica as its ‘hidden’ contados, controlled limited, displaced or scattered territories due to geographical constraints. Finally, a fourth group, containing several Hanseatic cities, systematically acquired territorial control where considered economically necessary and often only based on temporary rights such as leases. Also dealing with European cities in pre-industrial times, Joachim Radkau tried to solve the puzzle of urban fuel wood supply—as he put it—by introducing different types of access and control to urban resources, such as cities in communal possession of large forests, where resource management was a task of communal administration and policies (Schott, this volume). In cities with the opportunity to provide themselves with wood carried over water both private traders and public administration organized transport and distribution, while craftsmen were an important group of actors and legal instruments such as staple rights effective and contested tools. In mining towns the city’s privileged access to wood was often related to the economic interests of territorial rulers in the exploitation of these resources, while residential towns in the emerging territorial states could rely on the political power of the rulers for organizing their supply (Radkau, 1997, pp. 48–61). The city of Besançon belonged to the two first categories depicted by Radkau: it owned several thousands of hectares of forests enabling it to supply its population with wood at the beginning of the seventeenth century. This was a matter of conflict when Franche-Comté was ceded to France in 1678, as the French state controlled most of the rivers and forests. Only around 1740 did the conflict end, with the forests remaining

42  Sabine Barles and Martin Knoll in possession of the city. But the resource was insufficient, so Besançon had to negotiate with the royal forest administration in order to benefit from a reserved supply zone in which all wood would be dedicated to urban provisioning. The only exception in the reserved area concerned the wood necessary to the local population for heating and cooking. In 1751, it covered 36,400 hectares of forests, comprising those belonging to 244 villages (Vion-Delphin, 1991). Paris had been in a similar situation since the Middle Ages, with a reserved zone that expanded in the Seine basin, especially around the Yonne (tributary of the Seine) and its tributaries, which could be considered as an energy region when floating was developed in the sixteenth century. Paris’ prerogatives were so important that the city controlled the whole of the wood sector (from the first commercial transaction in the forests to the last one in the city) and water and river management in its arrondissement, the area in which its prerogatives applied. The arrondissement comprised every forest that was technically able to supply Paris, i.e., where floating was made possible. As a result, local communities sometimes resisted any such river works that would have connected their forests to Paris: this was the case in the Aube Basin for example, where blacksmiths were logically opposed to Parisian intrusion into what they considered as their resources. Wood scarcity led to a strict definition of the arrondissement, for instance in 1415 and, at a time of huge crisis, in 1785: it comprised all the forests located on a twenty-four-kilometer-wide (six lieues) strip along the Seine and its tributaries (48 kilometers in total), that is to say, almost all the wood resources in the Seine Basin (Figure 1.2). In this case, as in the one of Besançon, supply areas can be considered as urban extraterritorialities since urban authorities exerted their power and control on these remote zones, replacing (at least partly) the national level of government, and restricting local rights related to forests, water and wood (Barles, 2017). Nuremberg, a German city of some twenty-eight thousand inhabitants around 1500 and which gained the position of Europe’s foremost producer of semi-finished and finished metalware from the late fourteenth century on (Eiden and Irsigler, 2000, pp. 53–55), chose a twofold strategy to develop and manage an energy region for its own requirements. Based on the landownership of urban burghers extra muros (Krieger, 1985), the city magistrate succeeded in acquiring lordship over huge territories (whether by purchase or warfare) extending to some sixteen hundred square kilometers (Eiden and Irsigler, 2000, p. 53). Controlling these vast lands, the city not only forced out all wood-consuming trades from the region that could compete with the urban metal trades for fuel wood, but urban government also established a highly rationalized forest management, successfully introducing the seed of pinewood as early as 1368, thereby reforesting formerly devastated forests and profoundly changing the species composition of the forest cover in favor of fastgrowing pine and spruce (Schott, 2014, pp.  71–72). In sharp contrast

Long-Term Transitions 43

Figure 1.2  Theoretically reserved zone (arrondissement) for wood supply of Paris in the Seine basin as defined in 1785 Source: Commissioned by the authors, realized by Sylvain Théry, 20176

to the Nuremberg example another independent city in early modern Germany, Regensburg, never managed to acquire any territorial control over the regions necessary for its energy supply, a fact that over centuries imposed severe restraints on its urban development (Knoll, 2006). Tracing the changes in urban metabolism as they came into line with the switch to fossil fuels, urbanization and industrialization, one will find capital accumulation as a factor of increasing importance, as William Cronon’s pioneer study on Chicago demonstrates (Cronon, 1991). The food sector was particularly transformed in this way, and, despite multilevel agricultural and food policies, fell more or less out of public, and especially urban, control or governance. Private investments and profit-pursuing companies have also been among the drivers in the making of the ‘networked city’, erecting and managing infrastructures for water on tap, the supply of gas and electricity and mobility. The deficiencies of the private actors in many instances led to a communalization of these infrastructures—labeled as ‘municipal socialism’ (Hohenberg and Lees, 1995, p. 317) in historical research. Until very recently there was a struggle between market-driven and communal or nationalized strategies in urban public services. While wastewater disposal kept a regional character—even where sewage farms were no longer able to process the

44  Sabine Barles and Martin Knoll quantity and toxic quality of urban effluents for instance—solid waste disposal became a more and more globalized business. National policies outlining the framework directions for dealing with energy (e.g., deciding on subsidies for domestic coal mining, opting for or against nuclear energy), national and supranational grids (electricity, natural gas), and globalized markets with multinational companies controlling resource flows make it more and more complicated to identify actors organizing the urban metabolism of singular cities. Some flows and their resulting hinterlands have been outside any form of control or governance altogether. Concerning Brussels and its river at the end of the eighteenth century, Deligne (2012, p. 25) wrote: ‘Water defined a sort of “silent territory” with no administrative status’. This can be the result of the multiplicity of actors involved in flow management, as mentioned above, or to the loss of interest of a particular matter, leading to its apparent abandonment to natural processes. This has been the case in European cities for urban by-products like urine, feces, street sludge and garbage when they became worthless. This happened, for instance, between the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century as a consequence of the fertilizer revolution and the second industrial revolution (especially carbo-, then petrochemistry). At the end of the nineteenth century, Marseilles (France) was sending its street sludge to the plain of the Crau, seventy kilometers away from the city, where it was used as a fertilizer—meeting the goal of the Ministry of Agriculture, who wanted to make the Crau productive, of the local authority, who wanted to improve Marseilles’ salubriousness, and of private interests, those of the farmers as well as of the entrepreneur who had constructed the railway between Marseilles and the Crau and who was operating the service. Some years later, the agricultural use of sludge came to an end, and urban wastes were disposed of as landfill, near a railway station in the Crau, with huge environmental consequences and low levels of control (Barles, 2005). In the meantime, Marseilles discharged its wastewater into the Mediterranean sea without any treatment up to 1989. Other European cities also followed this pattern, resulting in an ungoverned and to some extent ignored polluted hinterland made of air, water and soil. At the end of the twentieth century, national and, above all, European regulation tried to change this situation, giving local authorities more power to control these flows. Nevertheless, the polluted hinterland still remains poorly governed, while being at the same time one of the most important manifestations of the urbanization of nature.

Conclusion Urbanization of extra-urban nature is one of the dimensions of urbanization itself: it is the result of the specificity of any urban metabolism, its externalization. It results in the creation of multiple hinterlands: all

Long-Term Transitions 45 these areas functionally interconnected with cities, in one way or the other providing their supply or receiving their emissions. The socio-ecological characteristics of these hinterlands differ across space and time in terms of area, proximity to the city, hinterland ecosystem transformation, government, regulation and control, with a general trend indicating a loss of control on the part of the cities (as public authorities) upon their metabolism to the benefit of supra-urban and multilevel actors with both a public and a private dimension, and remote loci of government. This historical change is in line with a functional and morphological pluralization of peri-urban areas considered as hinterlands. Urban sprawl, but also, for instance, tourism (as a temporal migration of urbanites consuming and emitting somewhere else, based on mobility infrastructures of everincreasing imprint) or the global diffusion of micro-plastics can be viewed as further steps in the process of the externalization of urban metabolisms. The ever more complex forms of the extra-urban imprint of cities, as well as the growing difficulties in drawing a clear distinction between urban and extra-urban landscapes, is a challenge for research and highlights the need to go beyond the planetary urbanization thesis (Brenner, 2013). The city and/or the urban are (nearly) everywhere, but in various ways and according to various configurations in terms of power and government. While a city always depends on natural resources, a related wheat field cannot be understood in terms of planetary urbanization alone. This process is always historically contingent, depending on ecological as well as human (political, economic, cultural, etc.) factors. Consequently, there is a need for in-depth, long-term case studies, in which socio-ecological and historical dimensions are connected.

Notes 1. For the former definition see Krünitz, 1773–1858, 53, p. 147: Art. ‘KriegsWirthschafts-Kunst’; 193, p. 48: Art. ‘Uebersiedeln’ and for the latter Ibid., 227, p. 344: ‘Völkerkunde’. 2. Grimm and Grimm, 1854–1961, 10 (1873), c.1510: Art. ‘Hinterland’: ‘Hinterland, n. der hinter einer Hauptstadt gelegene, von ihr wirtschaftlich oder politisch abhängige Landstrich’. 3. The discovery of fossil phosphates and potash mines, and, first of all, the HaberBosch process that allows extraction of nitrogen from the air to produce nitrogen fertilizers (and explosives) since the beginning of the twentieth century. 4. Note that this figure represents the total primary energy consumption, including food and feed. The other figures given in the text rely on a similar calculation. 5. The water imprint WI can be calculated according to the following equation: WI = WC/(RF × RO), where WC represents annual water consumption in cubic meters, RF represents annual rainfall in meters, RO represents the runoff coefficient (0 ≤ RO ≤ 1). All the figures given in this paragraph concern average yearly rainfall (it would be useful to consider drier years, but this is beyond the scope of this chapter). 6. On the map, the arrondissement is labeled ‘revised’ because the cartographic representation does not take into account the smallest rivers.

46  Sabine Barles and Martin Knoll

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48  Sabine Barles and Martin Knoll Keene, D., 1998. Feeding medieval European cities, 600–1500. Paper E-seminar (May 96-June 98). London: Institute of Historical Research. https://core.ac.uk/ display/9548918 (last accessed 22 May 2017). Keene, D., 2012. Medieval London and its supply hinterlands. Regional Environmental Change, 12, pp. 263–281. Kim, E. and Barles, S., 2012. The energy consumption of Paris and its supply areas from 18th century to present. Regional Environmental Change, 12 (2), pp. 295–310. Knoll, M., 2006. Urban needs and changing environments: Regensburg’s wood supply form the early modern period to industrialization. Bulletin of the German Historical Institute Washington DC, Supplement 3, pp. 77–101. Krausmann, F., Schandl, H. and Sieferle, R. P., 2008. Socio-ecological regime transitions in Austria and the United Kingdom. Ecological Economics, 65, pp. 187–201. Krieger, K. F., 1985. Bürgerlicher Landbesitz im Spätmittelalter: Das Beispiel der Reichsstadt Nürnberg. In: H. K. Schulze ed. Städtisches Um- und Hinterland in vorindustrieller Zeit, Sädteforschung series A, vol. 22. Cologne: Boehlau, pp. 77–98. Krünitz, J. G., 1773–1858. Oekonomische Encyklopädie oder allgemeines System der Staats- Stadt- Haus- und Landwirthschaft. Berlin: J. Pauli. Lassaletta, L., Billen, G., Romero, E., Garnier, J. and Aguilera, E., 2013. How changes in diet and trade patterns have shaped the N cycle at the national scale: Spain (1961–2009). Regional Environmental Change, 10, pp. 785–797. Malanima, 2013. Pre-industrial economies. In: A. Kander, P. Malanima and P. Warde eds. Power to people: energy in Europe over the last five centuries. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 35–127. Mecking, L., 1931. Die Grosslage der Seehäfen, insbesondere das Hinterland. Geographische Zeitschrift, 37 (1), pp. 1–17. Nicholas, D., 2003. Urban Europe, 1100–1700. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Odum, H. T., 1983. Systems ecology, an introduction. New York: Wiley-Interscience. Otter, C., 2010. Locating matter: the place of materiality in urban history. In: T. Benett and P. Joyce eds. Material powers: cultural studies, history and the material turn. London: Routledge, pp. 38–59. Radkau, J., 1997. Das Rätsel der städtischen Brennholzversorgung im ‘hölzernen Zeitalter’. In: D. Schott ed. Energie und Stadt in Europa: Von der vorindustriellen ‘Holznot’ bis zur Ölkrise der 1970er Jahre = Energy and the city: from preindustrial wood-shortage to the oil crisis of the 1970s. Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Beihefte 135. Stuttgart: F. Steiner, pp. 43–75. Schott, D., 2014. Europäische Urbanisierung (1000–2000): eine umwelthistorische Einführung. Köln: Böhlau Köln. Scott, T., 2014. The city-state in Europe, 1000–1600: hinterland, territory, region. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sieferle, R. P., 2001. The subterranean forest: energy systems and the industrial revolution. Cambridge: The White Horse Press. Stergiouli, M. L. and Hadjibiros, K., 2012. The growing water imprint of Athens (Greece) throughout. Regional Environmental Change, 12 (2), pp. 337–345. Swyngedouw, E., 2006. Metabolic urbanization: the making of cyborg cities. In: N. Heynen, M. Kaika and E. Swyngedouw eds. In the nature of cities: urban

Long-Term Transitions 49 political ecology and the politics of urban metabolism. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 20–39. Tello, E. and Ostos, V. R., 2012. Water consumption in Barcelona and its regional environmental imprint: a long-term history (1717–2008). Regional Environmental Change, 12 (2), pp. 347–361. Thoen, E. and Van Cruyningen, P. eds., 2012. Food supply, demand and trade: aspects of the economic relationship between town and countryside (Middle Ages–19th century). Turnhout: Brepols. Van Cleef, E., 1941. Hinterland and Umland. Geographical Review, 31 (2), pp. 308–311. Vion-Delphin, F., 1991. L’approvisionnement en bois de chauffage d’une capitale provinciale au XVIIIe siècle: le cas de Besançon. In: J. C. Biget, J. Boissière and J. C. Hervé eds. Le Bois et la Ville. Paris: Ecole normale supérieure de Fontenay and Saint-Cloud-GHFF, pp. 51–74. Warde, P., 2007. Energy consumption in England and Wales 1560–2000. Napoli: ISSM-CNR. Winiwarter, V., Schmid, M. and Dressel, G., 2013. Looking at half a millennium of co-existence: the Danube in Vienna as a socio-natural site. Water History, 5, pp. 101–119. Wolman, A., 1965. The metabolism of cities. Scientific American, 213 (3), pp. 179–188, 190. Wrigley, E. A., 2010. Energy and the English industrial revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2 Concepts of Urban Agency and the Transformation of Urban Hinterlands The Case of Berlin, Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries Christoph Bernhardt Introduction This chapter examines the concept of urban agency with respect to environmental history using the case of Berlin’s hinterland and waterscape from the early modern to the modern periods. As the concept of urban agency is just beginning to be explored the article starts by addressing some general questions. One key question will certainly be how the ‘actor or mechanism’ that triggers urban agency is conceptualized. Here two alternative assumptions are seen to be possible: •

If ‘the urban’ is identified with the collectivity of a city’s human population or their representatives (communitas) a traditional perspective on agency in a socio-political sense is addressed. • If ‘assemblages’ of humans and non-human species in urban settlements, together with institutions, knowledge and other elements, are identified as ‘urban actors’, then another, broader perspective is opened, which in a very general and preliminary way can be categorized as ‘socio-ecological’. Even if empirical studies in urban environmental history will have to integrate both perspectives, the second one constitutes a strong challenge as it demands to reflect on an expansion of the concept of agency beyond human actors. It must be admitted that leading environmental historians like Verena Winiwarter and Theodore Steinberg have denied the idea of a specific agency of nature (Winiwarter and Knoll, 2007, pp. 131–132). But as this question is not yet definitely decided and was repeatedly addressed in environmental history the paper starts by briefly examining relevant theoretical approaches in the field: While ‘ActorNetwork Theory’ (ANT) is certainly the most important approach, earlier concepts of ‘Urban Ecology’, ‘Urban Machinery’, ‘Urban Metabolism’ and some other partial concepts also provide useful insights into the problem.

Concepts of Urban Agency 51 With regard to the main challenge of identifying and discussing the mechanisms of a potential ‘non-human agency’ this paper presents ‘water’ as an interesting case. In a potential sociology of assemblages and non-human actors the liquid element could eventually be regarded as a powerful actant, as it is ubiquitous and shows a strong capacity for changing urban environments. Moreover, it fundamentally affects urban populations in many ways so that one might speak of a kind of co-evolution between water bodies, the city and its inhabitants. That is why the chapter will in its empirical sections discuss the role of water and water-related projects in the history of Berlin and its hinterland taking a long-term perspective (1700–1900).

A Brief Examination of Theoretical Approaches In a very general sense ‘agency’ can be defined as the power to change something or somebody. The classical concept of agency in the social sciences, as developed by pioneering figures from Max Weber to Anthony Giddens, understands ‘agency’ as being strictly connected to intentional actions of human beings which are mainly triggered by the complex social interactions and cultural orders of urban settlements (Louis Wirth). Some urban historians and planners have also discussed the question to what extent cities could be conceptualized as ‘imaginary collective actors’ (Saldern, 2003, pp. 26–27; Healy, 2002). But it was only recently that new concepts of agency started to integrate animals, plants, technical artifacts, institutions etc. in these reflections. The ‘Actor-Network Theory’ as developed by Bruno Latour and others represents what Latour called an anthropologie symmétrique in which artifacts principally dispose of a capacity for agency, at least in networks or collectivities of material, social and discursive actants (Latour, 1991, pp. 23–24; Kneer et al., 2008, pp. 10–11). Farias has tried to adopt the ANT as a ‘toolbox for Urban Studies’ and highlighted the work on urban infrastructures of Graham, Coutard and the Large Technical Systems (LTS) literature following Hughes as an important point of reference (Farias, 2010, pp. 2–4). This indicates that up to now ANT has mainly focused on more recent urban development and especially on the role of large technical systems which rapidly gained importance for modern societies from the early nineteenth century on (Schott, 2015). Belliger and Krieger, Gandy and others for example address the role of computers and the invasion of technical artifacts into the human body as indicators and examples of the emergence of new socio-technical assemblages (Belliger and Krieger, 2006, pp. 13–14; Gandy, 2006). With regard to the process of ‘urbanizing nature’ from pre-modern times on, the question arises to what extent the ANT approach is useful for periods in which large technical systems, in the sense that Hughes and others conceptualized them, were not yet developed. There seems to be some evidence that this is

52  Christoph Bernhardt possible. A study of John Law from the early years of the ANT debate showed the explanatory potential of ANT in the case of the governance of the Portuguese empire in the sixteenth century. In his analysis of imperial power over long distances Law, amongst other issues, discussed three classes of emissaries—documents, devices and trained people—and explicitly stressed the role of knowledge (Law, 1986). The discipline of ‘Urban Ecology’ is certainly another important approach in the debate on ‘urban agency’. In studies on the interrelation of social and environmental change in cities (Sukopp, 1990; Lachmund, 2013) interactions between urban climate, morphology and the growth of populations of animals and human beings work as a kind of catalyst. As a consequence, cities attract species and promote certain metabolic and socio-cultural processes. To give only one small example, scientists have shown that the higher average temperatures of cities compared to rural areas attract a growing number of birds which leave the countryside and breed in cities (Padova, 2007). Other species, such as beavers, foxes and wild boar, increasingly share this interest in urban environments, not to mention the immigration of new plant species (Netz, 2007; Sukopp, 1990, pp. 292, 307 and 329). The concept of Urban Ecology can help to analyze the co-evolution of urban environments and their inhabitants from a natural sciences perspective, as the ‘Socio-natural Site’ approach does from the social sciences perspective. Concepts of ‘Urban Machinery’, as discussed by Hard and Misa (2008) and others, also regard the city as a set of spaces in which ‘technologies to some extent shape human behaviour and affect human well-being’ (Hard and Misa, 2008, p. 8) They, too, underline the interdependencies of technological systems with the multiple levels of everyday practices, institutions and discourses that shape urban life. In a similar perspective, the theory of path dependency looks at the interaction of social practices and technologies (Melosi, 2005). Taking a long-term perspective, the concept of ‘Urban Machinery’ builds on older ideas of the city as an ‘organism’, as will be shown here. Before examining the case of Berlin two remarks should be made which are of importance for more than only the empirical research. Firstly, it should be remembered that urban agency is not exclusively executed by an urban population or its municipal authorities. Since early modern times, if not earlier, representatives of the central or national state were dominant actors for many processes that strongly shaped urban life and environment (Barles and Knoll, this volume). This was specifically the case in capital cities, but also true for provincial cities, if one thinks of railway companies, military infrastructure, legislation regarding trading and building policies. Secondly, social and environmental processes were very much intertwined with flows of capital. As William Cronon showed in his classical study on

Concepts of Urban Agency 53 Chicago, these capital flows are of eminent importance for the interventions of cities in their hinterlands, the organization of metabolic cycles of natural resources and for the control of very distant places (Cronon, 1992). This means that urban agency went far beyond the urban boundaries and the surrounding hinterland. In a similar way, the transfer of knowledge is of importance since it was imported over large distances and played a powerful role in all kinds of urban activities (see Davids, this volume). If urban settlements are basically understood as nodes of knowledge and communication, then flows of information and concepts of agency that go far beyond the urban boundaries become relevant.

Connecting Theoretical Approaches to Empirical Questions Obviously the approaches discussed up to now differ in the meaning and impact that they give various factors such as knowledge (John Law), capital (William Cronon and political ecology) or technologies (Thomas P. Hughes, urban machinery) as well as in the modes of interaction that they see at work between these factors. ANT in some way connects elements of these approaches in a more general theory and in the concept of ‘assemblages’. The following brief examination of the Berlin case tries to contribute to a debate raised by ANT and the questions of ‘urban agency’ by translating some key ideas of the different approaches into questions put to the empirical material. Some of these questions are: how did biological and hydrological processes influence or limit the human intervention in the landscape in different periods? In which ways did capital shape the transformation of the Berlin region and connect distant places to the urban population? And, in a more general sense, how did different ‘actants’ like water, landscape planners and sewage networks interact in different periods?

The Transformation of the Berlin Hinterland (1700–1850) The settlement of Germans in the region of Berlin-Brandenburg began in the ninth century but only took off from the twelfth century onwards. The early settlers met with strong and often hostile environmental conditions of endless swamps and primeval forests, which in a certain sense showed a strong ‘agency of nature’. In the course of the following centuries large parts of the woods were cleared and transformed into agricultural land and wild animals were killed in extensive campaigns orchestrated by the Prussian public authorities. In the eighteenth century the Berlin hinterland was literally ‘colonized’ as a result of initiatives of the Prussian state (Kühn, 2011, see

54  Christoph Bernhardt also Figure 2.1). From 1716 onwards, foreign immigrants (refugees from France, migrants from Bohemia and so forth) were allowed to establish a number of settlements on the urban periphery where they had to work in textile manufacture or the cultivation of mulberry plantations for the production of silk (Escher, 1985, pp. 109–112). The overall goal of the government was to make Berlin a center for the textile-based industries. In terms of regional power relations and urban agency it is important to note that several of the settlements were owned by the cities of Berlin and Potsdam and governed by their respective municipal authorities (Escher, 1985, pp. 110–111). From that time on the existence of Berlin and Potsdam increasingly relied on property rights and resources outside of the urban territory, which meant that its power and agency were based on external resources. This marked a clear difference from traditional forms of free trade along the ‘Thünen model’ (Cronon, 1992). A similar mechanism as for the textile worker settlements was in operation in the case of early iron industries in the Berlin region. These started to emerge some fifty kilometers East of Berlin in the valley of the Finow River which is called the cradle (Wiege) or nucleus of the Berlin industrial landscape. Here the Prussian kings Friedrich Wilhelm I (1713–1740) and Friedrich II (1740–1786) initiated a number of iron and steel works and established outposts around the city of Eberswalde (Seifert et al., 1998, pp.  17–21). Later on, large factories for the production of paper were founded. A number of these enterprises were owned by Berlin capitalists and banks who drew profit from their investment and turned the Finow Valley and Eberswalde into Berlin’s economic hinterland (Seifert et al., 1998, p. 17).

The Metabolism of Building Materials When from around 1800 the Berlin region attracted a rapidly growing number of immigrants the import of building materials from the hinterland was massively increased. A typical nineteenth century Berlin multistory house (Mietskaserne) was built using around 870,000 bricks, 396 pine trees and 3.7 cubic meters of steel and many other building materials, as empirical studies have shown (Kunstamt Kreuzberg, 1988). This enormous demand triggered the metabolic exchange of the capital with its hinterland. Chalk from Rüdersdorf (east of Berlin), clay for bricks and stoves from Glindow (west) and Velten (north) as glass from Baruth and Glashütte (south) were excavated, respectively processed in enormous quantities (Deutsche Gesellschaft and Kreuzberg Museum, 1994). These places formed a kind of building materials belt in a radius of around fifty kilometers around the center of Berlin. Thus, in the hinterland, the negative imprint of built-up Berlin could be found. If the building materials made the production of Berlin possible, the daily reproduction of its inhabitants depended on the import of food and

Source: Wikimedia Commons (PD-1923)

Figure 2.1 Map of the Berlin region around 1780

56  Christoph Bernhardt fuel. Consequently, the hinterland of Berlin delivered vegetables, fruit, milk, meat and many other products. The Oder region some seventy kilometers west of the capital city, which had been drained in the eighteenth century by a large project of land reclamation (Blackbourn, 2006) became well-known as the ‘vegetable garden of Berlin’. A  very strong imprint of the Berlin metabolism can be found in the brown coal region of Niederlausitz some seventy kilometers south of Berlin. From preindustrial times onwards large quantities of coal were transported to Berlin (Deutsche Gesellschaft and Kreuzberg Museum, 1994, pp. 37–39). In the early twentieth century the Niederlausitz coal region was connected by electric power lines to the capital city (1921). The GDR increased the excavation of coal even more so that around 1990 about 750 square kilometers, an area equivalent to the surface of Hamburg, had been devastated (Maier, 2002, p. 149).

Water in the Landscape and in the Urban Periphery: The Lenné Projects In the typical northern German lowlands the water bodies proved to be in some ways the ‘strongest actor’ in the landscape. It was by means of extensive programs of canal building and drainage from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries that the Prussian authorities ‘won provinces in peace’, as Prussian King Friedrich II (‘The Great’) put it with regard to the Oder River region east of Berlin (Blackbourn, 2006, pp. 21–70). From the micro scale of local interventions of settlers, and especially millers, to the central state authorities, the overall goal was to ‘tame’ the agency of the water in the landscape and, subsequently, to exercise a far-reaching control over the (urban) water cycles. As mentioned above, immigration to Berlin grew very rapidly after the rural population had been set free in 1811 by the groundbreaking Prussian reform of the feudal system. But the hinterland of the capital city was still very swampy and could not be used for settlements without major works of drainage. One of the key projects of drainage and town planning which prepared the ground for urban growth and industrialization was the development of the so-called Köpenicker Feld (today Berlin’s ‘Kreuzberg’ district). Around 1800 this area was still a marshy lowland and used for agricultural purposes and gardening. In 1825 Berlin building director Schmid devised a plan which proposed the strategic project of a canal that could replace the existing ditch called Landwehrgraben, drain the meadows and prepare the ground for construction. This local project would, as Schmid claimed, have a regional impact by lowering the water table down to that of the central area of Friedrichstadt where it would also improve the building sites. Furthermore, the new canal (Landwehrkanal) would be navigable and stimulate economic growth and the implementation of industrial enterprises (Reinisch, 1992, p. 45).

Concepts of Urban Agency 57 The plan failed, however, and the area was only developed through smallscale street planning and construction of local projects. Some years later the most famous royal landscape planner, Peter Josef Lenné, was commissioned by the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV to take up the project again. From the beginning he made very clear that canalizing the ditch of Landwehrgraben and connecting it to the Spree River by another channel was the key to developing the area. Lenné underlined that ‘these are the hydro-technical works of the project which indeed represent the spirit of the whole’ (quoted by Hinz, 1989, p. 180), since fundamentally changing the water courses and groundwater table in this area promised to have a strong impact on the urban and regional water regime: The project also affected the hydrological status of the Spree River, stimulated water traffic and facilitated large-scale building projects in the inner city, like the Berlin Dome. Building on this concept Lenné designed the new Landwehrkanal as a river-like curved waterway and the secondary Luisenstädtischer Kanal as the backbone of the new urban district. In 1840 Lenné designed a second plan for the whole city, the famous ‘Plan der Schmuck- und Grenzzüge von Berlin’. This plan envisaged two basins for navigation which were framed by a number of large public spaces and buildings, such as churches and hospitals (Günther et al., 1993, p. 182). At this time ‘water and landscape’ were right at the heart of town planning in Berlin, as can also be shown in Lenné’s plan from 1840 for other parts of the Prussian capital. At the western periphery of the city—today the area of Berlin’s main railway station opened in 2006—he projected a new urban landscape around Humboldt Harbour and the Spandau Canal. This vision culminated in the idea of a circle of canals at the periphery of Berlin which would frame the built-up urban area with green spaces and serve as an ‘urban pleasure ground’ for the citizens (Wenzel, 1989, p. 77).

Transfer of Knowledge and the Economy of Water The international transfer of knowledge played an important role in the transformation of the landscape around Berlin in many regards. Peter Josef Lenné, just before starting his career as the leading Prussian planner for the Berlin region, had traveled to England, as did most of Berlins urban experts in the nineteenth century. There Lenné studied the ideas of English landscape and park planning which he enthusiastically implemented into his designs for the German capital region (Kubitz and Kubitz, 1989, p.  98). Following this ideal, and using water as the key instrument of landscape architecture, he designed the parks of Charlottenburg, the main road axis between Berlin and Potsdam and many other places. In Potsdam, the reconstruction of the famous Lustgarten from 1818 onwards showed the powerful and complex economy of water: On the one hand, the level of this royal pleasure ground had to be raised in

58  Christoph Bernhardt order to avoid flooding by the Havel River; on the other hand, this operation was limited by the low average level of the groundwater table which forced the planner to use a minimum of building materials as these could not be transported on the waterway. At the same time the groundwater level damaged precious wooden areas. At the Bassinplatz, another prominent place in Potsdam, similar problems had to be solved, as stagnating water and foul ponds had to be filled in at great expense. In the case of the Charlottenburg park the drainage works swallowed two thirds of the entire budget for reconstruction (Hinz, 1989, pp. 95, 101 and 121).

The Water Table as a Line of Conflict and Power The level of the water table has constituted a major point of conflict since pre-industrial times, if one thinks for example about the thousands of lawsuits between millers and other water users (Saldern, 2009, pp. 175– 177; Bernhardt, 2013, p.  57). But this type of conflict did not disappear in the early days of industrialization and still played a decisive role in the large project of Lenné for the development of Köpenicker Feld. The idea of taking the water courses, green spaces and environmental visions as points of departure for the design of the urban landscape met with strong resistance from the powerful railway companies and from engineers employed by public authorities. Around 1840 a paradigmatic conflict arose concerning the projected level of the water table in the planning of the Landwehrkanal and of the groundwater table in the area of Köpenicker Feld. Lenné argued that the new canal needed a relatively high level to provide sufficient water for the trees and ponds in the park of ‘Tiergarten’. But a state commission of water engineers asked for a four feet lower water table in order to drain the ground for construction sites and so as to more efficiently discharge wastewater. The final compromise in this paradigmatic conflict between two modes of dealing with urban nature and urban settlement proved to be problematic. As a result, serious damage was done to the trees in the ‘Tiergarten’ and this prompted Lenné to resign from the Tiergarten authorities for whom he had worked for over thirty years (Hinz, 1989, pp. 170 and 195). In this case, water can be seen as a natural resource which was manipulated yet showed some kind of agency. At the same time, the struggles over the level of the water table reflected the contradictory interests and power relations of various actors involved. While Lenné represented an early nineteenth century concept of urban landscape planning, his opponents gave priority to the commercial interests of the emerging Berlin industrial society. The dominance of the capitalist entrepreneurs over the royal urban planning became very clear when around 1860 a large representative avenue (the so-called Generalszug), which had been designed by Lenné, had to be abandoned by his successor Hobrecht due to the interests of the powerful railway enterprises.

Concepts of Urban Agency 59 It should not be forgotten that redirecting the water courses and remodeling the urban water table needed the transport of enormous amounts of soil. For a small part of the reconstruction of the Tiergarten more than twelve thousand cubic meters were moved (Hinz, 1989, p. 148). Earthworks became the symbol of this period of European urban history. In Berlin around 1848 more than three thousand workers were employed on the canal projects of Landwehrkanal (started 1845), Luisenstädtischer Kanal (1848/52) and Spandauer Schifffahrtskanal (1847–1859). Most of them worked in the framework of job creation schemes which were set up in the context of the revolution of 1848. A number of riots and serious violent incidents are testimony to the general political tensions and conflicts in the public space at this time (Gailus, 1987, pp. 53–55; Kubitz and Kubitz, 1989, p. 124).

The Hydraulic Machinery In the nineteenth century, the re-arrangement of urban drinking and wastewater cycles was discussed in terms of nature seen as ‘working machineries’ (Kluge, 2000, pp. 33–35), with the city as ‘urban machinery’ or, as recent scholarly research put it, as ‘hydraulic machinery’ (Kluge, 2000, pp.  33–35 and 43). The original concept of Chadwick’s famous Sanitary Movement regarded the city and its hinterland as an organism which was based on a ‘venous and arterial system’ of water circulation (Simson, 1980, p. 24). ‘Organism, Circulation and System’ were the key terms of this vision of a healthy city (Kluge, 2000, p. 30). These concepts were in fact closely related to problems of non-human agency, as they identified the carrying capacity and the lifting force of water as key elements in this urban machinery. In a similar way, the concept of the ‘organic machine’ (R. White) discusses the agency of rivers (White, 1995). Thus, historical discourses around the ‘machine’ metaphor and on the re-ordering of the urban water cycles provide rich material for the question of ‘urban agency’. At the same time the strong interrelation of nature, knowledge and technology was very present in these discourses. When in the early nineteenth century urban sanitary problems became critical in the eyes of the contemporary public the predecessors of engineers like Lindley and Hobrecht began to collect large amounts of statistical data. Rainfall, urban geology and morphology, wastewater per capita and per day, as well as demographic calculations of population growth and so forth were identified as determining factors of sanitary problems and interventions (Kluge, 2000, p. 43). Statistical surveys went hand in hand with financial calculation. Thus, the Berlin professor for the economy of agriculture, Röder, to give only one example, estimated the value of Berlin wastewater as fertilizers in 1863 as 1,693 million taler per year (Gudermann, 2001, p. 154).

60  Christoph Bernhardt The new Berlin water-borne sewage systems, which were implemented from the early 1870s on, have often been described (Bernhardt, 2011; Hahn and Langbein, 1928). They re-organized the urban water cycles and their agency with the help of complex machinery which comprised four main elements: The wastewaters were (1) systematically piped, (2) pumped to the hinterland, (3) cleaned by irrigation and (4) discharged into the water courses and the groundwater. The networks of pipes showed sophisticated variations as to size and architecture. Twelve powerful pumping stations represented the heart of the machinery and pushed the water over many kilometers to the periphery. There a complex system of over- and underground technologies supported the cleansing process. In all parts and periods knowledge and experiment played a crucial role in the construction and management of the new sewage system. Already in the famous Chadwick report of 1842, the British engineer John Roe had presented some path-breaking technological innovations in the construction of sewers (Simson, 1980, p. 21). During the 1860s the Berlin public authorities undertook large programs to survey all aspects of wastewater discharge, tested the new concept on an irrigation area from 1869 onwards, and definitively implemented it in 1872 (Kley, 2006, p. 48). In 1920, 4,145 kilometers of sewage canals carried the wastewater to the twelve major pumps, which in turn pushed 188 million cubic meters of water through 540 kilometers of main pipes to the sewage farms (Berliner Entwässerungswerke, 1978, p. 24). There a complex system of pipes had been implemented into the ground and the surface had been adjusted in order to have a spatial balance in the irrigation of wastewater (Gudermann, 2001, p. 159).

Sewage Farms As a result, parts of the hinterland of Berlin were transformed into zones of sanitary and health care in a very broad sense: Besides wastewater treatment, also hospitals providing medical and social rehabilitation were established within the vicinity of the sewage farms. Deviant (so-called correctional) people like beggars, vagabonds, jobless persons and prisoners were forced to work there (Gudermann, 2001, p.  161). A  kind of small-scale suburban ‘heterotopian’ sanitary assemblage emerged at the periphery of the city where polluted waters and disadvantaged or ill urban citizens were concentrated. In the case of the sewage farm of Hobrechtsfelde in the north of Berlin, the irrigation of the capital’s wastewater helped to produce milk and meat for the neighboring large hospital complex of Buch. Other nearby institutions too, such as old people’s homes, a center for lung diseases, a hospital for children and a lunatic asylum were supplied from the sewage camps (Draeger, 2006, p. 29). Furthermore, Hobrechtsfelde soon became the slaughtering center of the Berlin hinterland and eighteen thousand animals were processed

Concepts of Urban Agency 61 yearly. Nearby, a joinery business, which was also located on the ground of the sewage farm, used the neighboring municipal woods to produce coffins for poor Berliners (Draeger, 2006, p. 30). The sewage farm model developed a specific logic of action which displayed a clear path dependency: Though it seemed to solve the wastewater problems of the modern metropolis the irrigation ground began to be overloaded with organic and industrial garbage from the mid-1920s on. From 1929 new sewage treatment plants were introduced in order to reduce the pollution of the land (Bernhardt, 2009; Berliner Entwässerungswerke, 1978, pp. 80–82). As a consequence of this ban on irrigating the wastewater, the land fell dry. Since their creation, these irrigated fields had become massively polluted with heavy metals and other harmful substances so that from the 1990s on, public authorities had to initiate large-scale programs of environmental rehabilitation (Hoffmann, 2006, pp. 60–61).

Conclusion This chapter has discussed some problems of urban agency using the example of water policies for Berlin and its hinterland since the preindustrial period. It showed the manifold interactions of the Prussian capital with its hinterland in terms of metabolic cycles, capital flows and schemes of water management. The case of landscape planning, as shown in the projects of famous landscape architect Peter Josef Lenné, and the waterborne sewage system can be read as two different models of urban agency: Lenné designed a kind of landscape in which a co-evolution of nature and city was intended and hydraulic regimes and vegetation played an important role. In contrast, the sewage system designed by James Hobrecht and others was much more determined by scientific knowledge and large-scale technologies and showed strong interdependencies between modern machinery, urban governance and collective behavior. Thus, with respect to the role of non-human actants in a potential ‘urban agency’, Hobrecht tried to seriously control the hydrologic dynamics of water flows while Lenné granted greater autonomy to hydro-biological processes. The empirical analysis of the Berlin case has shown a long-term evolutionary process in which three stages or types of urban agency and specific assemblages between natural, human and technological actants can be identified. In a first period before 1800, human settlements were established in a seemingly hostile and dangerous landscape with the help of only small-scale pre-industrial technologies. Here the ecological restrictions, like high water tables, swamps and dangerous animals strongly limited the human ‘conquest of nature’, even if the flows of capital increasingly facilitated the intervention in the landscape in different places. In a second period, which can be identified with the early

62  Christoph Bernhardt nineteenth century and the Lenné concept, traditional technologies were used on a large scale for a quickly growing urban population. As a result the whole Berlin region was gradually transformed for the creation of an early metropolitan area in which the flow of water bodies was still not completely controlled and in which Lenné promoted a kind of balance between the city and nature. In contrast, Hobrecht succeeded in managing the hydrological processes to a large extent, even if—and this might be called a fourth type or period—the powerful technological systems suffered serious crises and catastrophes in the long run. From a more general perspective we could discuss different subtypes of urban agency, e.g., one subtype in which organic processes show a certain stronger ‘intrinsic logic’ (Löw, 2012), and others where we find a kind of frozen, negative agency which is materialized in the persistence of large technical networks. These limit the options for starting new urban developments and are mainly analyzed in studies on urban path dependencies. As a result, it should have become clear that hydraulic forces and urban ecological processes showed some intrinsic logic. Whether they can be interpreted as ‘actants’ in a wider network of human and nonhuman elements, as conceptualized by ANT, is still open to discussion. On the other hand, it should not be overlooked that, in a very fundamental sense and a very different area of scientific research, the classical sociological concept of human agency is currently being challenged and is increasingly questioned. New insights from the neurosciences contest the idea of human agency as being directed by a ‘free will’ and underline the role of bio-chemical processes in the shaping of human agency (Roth and Strüber, 2014; Langewiesche and Birbaumer, 2017). The debates on these approaches and positions may eventually lead to a degree of convergence between the concepts of human and non-human agency.

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3 A Place in Its Own Right The Rural-Urban Fringe of Helsinki From the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Marjaana Niemi The rural-urban fringe has often been perceived as a zone in transition: a space torn between its rural past and its urban future—a ‘phase’ rather than a ‘place’. Spatial planning has played an important part in consolidating the perception. The primary aim of planning has been to create single-purpose spaces, and therefore the fringe with its fragmented urban and rural characteristics has come to be seen as a transient stage: ‘just something between town and country, with no intrinsic characteristics of its own’ (Gallent et al., 2006, pp. 76–78; Qviström, 2007). Furthermore, in current discussions it is frequently claimed that twenty-first-century fringe areas with their airports, motorway interchanges and shopping centers are devoid of historically determined identity—and therefore correspond to what the anthropologist Marc Augé has identified as ‘nonplaces’ (Gallent et al., 2006, p. 78; Augé, 2008, pp. 77–83). Scholars working in the fields of political science, geography, landscape studies and planning have recently taken an intense interest in questions concerning the rural-urban fringe, notably in providing more profound accounts of the phenomenon. Most scholars working on the theme have examined the fringe in the present-day context, and those few who have looked at the historical development have usually focused on the last 60–70  years (e.g., Gallent, 2006; Klausen and Røe, 2012; Qviström, 2013). However, the rural-urban fringe is not a recent phenomenon. As David Thomas (1990) has stated, ‘Like the poor, the rural-urban fringe we have always had with us’. In this chapter I will examine the development of urban fringe areas in Helsinki from the early nineteenth century to the present and, through this case study, also discuss some aspects of the phenomenon more generally in the context of Finland and Sweden. Some features of rural-urban fringe are universal, and found everywhere, yet some others are specific to natural conditions and other local factors, such as the pace and scale of urbanization and the nature of local government powers and obligations. The Nordic countries urbanized late compared to Western Europe, and middle-class suburban migration did not begin in earnest until the 1950s (Hall, 1991, pp. 248–253; Niemi, 2007, p. 30). Municipal governments

66  Marjaana Niemi in the Nordic countries have been relatively strong, both politically and functionally, and many municipalities have been important landowners and therefore well placed to control urban development, at least as long as it was confined to the city limits. The development of regional planning, on the other hand, has been slow and fraught with problems (Hall, 1991, pp. 254–256; Sundman, 1991, pp. 87–89; Wollman, 2004, p. 647). The aim of the chapter is to look at how the inner urban fringe was defined and how its future development was envisaged and planned as Helsinki underwent urbanization, industrialization and deindustrialization. Although the fringe areas have served important functions, municipal authorities have usually viewed irregular suburban and peri-urban development critically, as something that threatens to ‘destroy a preferred land use’ (Crankshaw, 2009, p. 219). The fringe areas have been expected to adapt to the changing needs of the city, thus the first key question here concerns how the Helsinki authorities sought to retain this adaptability. As the fringe is understood here as both a territorial entity and the experience and perception of that entity, the question has many interrelated dimensions. The focus is on the actions and non-actions of the Helsinki authorities to control the development of the fringe, but also on the impact of these actions on the perceptions of the fringe areas. To what extent and in what ways did the authorities succeed in upholding the idea that the communities and buildings in the fringe areas were ephemeral arrangements in place only until plans for more permanent transformations were approved and implemented? To what extent did they seek and manage to define meadows, fields and forests on the fringe as ‘undeveloped land’—and not, for example, as ‘nature’, as something of value and worth preserving? Whatever plans the municipal authorities may have had for the future development of the city, the pace and precise direction of urban growth has always been difficult to predict, and therefore many fringe areas have been left in a ‘state of waiting’ for years, even for decades. The second key question concerns what was happening on the inner urban fringe ‘in the meantime’, when the ambitious visions and plans were left in abeyance and the development of the areas was indefinitely delayed. In particular the aim is to examine how the interplay between different actors and the interaction between plans and everyday life changed the fringe areas while they awaited a future transformation. A key to understanding the particular and unique nature of the fringe areas is to examine them as ostensibly short-lived places which have survived for a period of time and which are lying somewhere along the continuum from ephemeral to transient and then all the way to permanent (Qviström and Salzman, 2006). The municipal government has had an important role in defining the present and future of the Helsinki inner fringe, while central government has exerted influence through legislation and regulation, but they have never been the only actors in the process. The concept of urban

A Place in Its Own Right 67 governance is utilized here to gain better insight into how different actors have participated in defining the fringe. Urban governance is not confined to the actions of municipal government but also includes the interaction between different spheres of urban activity: central and municipal government, private agents such as landowners and property developers, and various actors in ‘civil society’ (Morris, 2000). Furthermore, the scope of urban governance is here extended to include non-human agency. ‘City’ and ‘nature’ are both seen as active agents in the creation of the urban fringe. ‘City’ claims spaces from ‘nature’, and ‘nature’ in turn claims back spaces that humans had once conquered (Loughran, 2016; Kowarik, 2005). Most sources addressing the fringe areas have been produced by appointed and elected municipal officials, civil servants and the experts on whom they have relied, and therefore their views are obviously well represented in the analysis. To build a more comprehensive picture of the urban fringe, not only as a phase but also as a place in its own right, I have used a variety of other sources such as newspapers and memoirs. Through the memoirs of people who lived on the fringe of Helsinki, it is possible to capture not only their personal but also their collective history, because our personal memories—as Aleida Assmann puts it— ‘include much more than what we, as individuals, have ourselves experienced’ (Assmann, 2006, p. 211).

Urban Fringe Before Industrialization In early modern Sweden, the ambitions and aspirations to enhance urban development far exceeded the resources available. This was true throughout the Kingdom of Sweden, but especially in its eastern part, the area now known as Finland. The Crown hoped that towns would become the economic engines of the state—as happened in many other European countries—and labored with determination to found new towns and help them thrive, or at least to survive. Measured against the excessively optimistic expectations, the results were disappointing: nearly all towns in Sweden remained small and unimposing until the nineteenth century (Lilja, 1995, pp. 50–76; Sandberg, 2001, pp. 47–52). Helsinki, too, was among the disappointments. It was established as a trading town in 1550 by King Gustav Vasa of Sweden and removed to a new site in 1640 to improve its chances of success, but until the early nineteenth century its progress was slow, and often interrupted by fires, wars and epidemics (Hietala and Helminen, 2009, pp. 9–20). In spite of failing to achieve the desired results, the efforts to promote urban development had some far-reaching effects. They went a long way to define what a proper town should look like and to shape the relationship between a town and its fringe. Most early modern Swedish towns had no chance to survive on trade and the handicraft industry alone

68  Marjaana Niemi and therefore the state, as part of its policies to promote urban growth, ended up subsidizing urban agriculture. When a king of Sweden founded a town, he also provided the necessary land, including large areas of pasture, arable land and woodlands. This tradition divided towns into two parts: one was the town proper, built according to a town plan and where plots were sold for private use, while the other was the common land situated outside the planned area and owned jointly by all burghers. Towns were not allowed to sell the agricultural or pasture land so donated without state permission but they were able to lease plots to private individuals (Perälä, 1983, p. 30; Björklund, 2010, pp. 61–71). What further accentuated the division of the towns into different parts was the ambitious approach taken to actual town building. By raising building standards, the Crown sought to transform modest settlements into proper towns which would be more respectable in appearance and less susceptible to fire. This aspiration was evident as early as 1571, when the Swedish king, Johan III, decreed (Hall, 1997, p. 96) that all those who are, if not exactly rich at least of reasonable wealth, should build in brick, if they desire to be inhabitants of the town; those others who have not the intention, the possibility or the means for such houses, should live apart. However, the prohibitions issued against wooden buildings usually fell on deaf ears, especially in provincial towns. The turn came gradually in the nineteenth century when the centers of the major towns were increasingly built in brick—and there were few places where the change was as dramatic as in Helsinki (Hall, 1991, p. 282). Russia wrested Finland from Sweden during the Napoleonic Wars in 1809. Finland was annexed to the Russian Empire as an autonomous grand duchy with a separate Finnish central administration, and Helsinki, a backwater market town of a few thousand inhabitants, was made the capital. The transformation from a tiny wooden town to a prestigious capital city was carried out under the leadership of the military engineer J. A. Ehrenström and the Berlin-born architect C. L. Engel. What emerged on Ehrenström’s drawing board in 1817 was a city where wide streets and park-like boulevards were laid out on a geometric grid plan. Within the next thirty years most of Ehrenström’s plan was blasted into the rocky terrain, and the streets were lined with monumental buildings designed by Engel: administrative buildings, churches, university buildings, army barracks, hospitals and a few private residences (Klinge, 2012). Creating a monumental city from scratch had its challenges. The English novelist Charles Dickens (1842, pp. 139–140) visited Washington, DC, in the 1840s and described the city as having ‘streets, mile-long, that only want houses, roads, and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete’. The same could have been said of Helsinki.

A Place in Its Own Right 69 Thinking back to Helsinki during the 1830s and 1840s, the Finnish journalist Zachris Topelius (1885) wrote that only a small minority of the Helsinki dwellers could afford to build houses that blended harmoniously with the imposing public buildings. There were gaps and incomplete developments in the monumental core of the city and even in the nearby ‘suburban areas’, where wooden houses were allowed and where some of the wealthy families chose to live. The poor often gravitated outside the zoned urban area. The inner urban fringe, which the municipal authorities saw as a land bank for the future, offered them the best—or in many cases the only—opportunity to find an affordable place to live. Fishermen built their shacks in the coastal areas south of the city, whereas many poor widows lived just east of the city, on the rocky hillsides of Katajanokka, eking out an existence by renting out rooms or running illegal drinking dens. Carters and factory workers lived in the areas west of the city, where the sugar and tobacco factories were also located. At first the poor built their hovels without permission, but from the 1820s onwards the city’s administrative court leased plots of land outside the zoned area to town-dwellers too poor to live in the center. This policy was officially approved by the central government in the 1850s (HKT, 1876, p. 105; Waris, 1932, pp. 7–9). Both ‘transience’ and ‘permanence’ were evident in the inner fringe areas. The municipal authorities highlighted the transience of these communities by indicating in various ways that these areas had no characteristics of a real (urban) place. First, shantytowns did not usually appear on city maps: the tendency was to represent them as uninhabited rocky and forest terrain (in gray and green) or as vacant and awaiting development (white). Second, unlike the city center, the fringe settlements followed the contours of the terrain, and third, most of the fringe areas were not integrated into the street network or with the urban services. When one came to the border of the planned area, cobbled streets lit with lanterns gave way to muddy paths where one stumbled around in pitch-black darkness at night, and in midwinter also in daytime (Tanner, 1966, p. 159; Savo­ lainen, 2017, pp. 270–273). However, some change was already under way in the 1840s. While emphasizing the ‘impermanence’ of the fringe, the city’s administrative court took measures that paved the way for the integration of these areas into the town plan. The court expected the ­tenants—especially if their plots were close to the urban core or along the  main thoroughfares—to fence off their plots, get the plans of their houses approved, level the street in front of their houses and plant broadleaved trees to replace lean pines which had been the predominant trees in the area (HKT, 1876, p. 105; Lehto, 1989, p. 17). Thus the tenants cleared land for ‘urban’ living, and in the process many of them began to see their ‘temporary’ houses as a ‘permanent’ way of life and were eager to buy their plots. The city administration still viewed the neighborhoods as spontaneous settlements and remained reluctant to sell.

70  Marjaana Niemi In addition to the poor, many early manufacturers sought inexpensive sites outside the center, and especially sites near rivers and seashores. Waterways provided factories with hydropower and water for the production processes, but also with easy ways of disposing of waste (Åström, 1956, p. 176). Most of the Russian army barracks as well as certain functions that the urban community preferred to keep out of sight and out of mind—the county prison, the mental asylum and the cemetery—were also relegated to the edge of the city. Despite the shantytowns, industrial buildings and institutions that sprang up on the outskirts of Helsinki, large areas of pasture and arable land remained within the city limits. Part of this land was leased to private individuals, while the rest served as common grazing land. A  clear indication of the importance of animal husbandry in the early nineteenth century was that the city of Helsinki still had a shepherd on its payroll (Wiherheimo and Rein, 1951, pp. 264–270). However, the question of which type of food production was acceptable in cities was already a subject of debate. The townspeople in Helsinki were encouraged to give up growing rye, oats and barley and concentrate on more ‘urban’ products: vegetables, spices, hemp, flax, hops as well as tobacco and dye plants (Yrjänä, 2013, pp. 22–24).

Fringe of an Industrializing City As in all the Nordic countries, industrialization started relatively late in Finland, with the real breakthrough taking place during the last decades of the nineteenth century. The growth of Helsinki and other major towns in Finland accelerated in the 1870s and 1880s, and new town plans were drawn up to expand the zoned areas (Clark, 2009, pp. 227, 231–232). In Helsinki, a plan to expand the city proper to the poor neighborhoods east, south and west of the center was approved in the mid-1870s. Transferring the plan from paper to the actual ground was started by leveling the rocky terrain a few streets at a time. Although the process eventually made the areas almost unrecognizable, some traces of the earlier development were preserved. The existing plot divisions were often used in drawing up the plan (HKT, 1876, pp. 90–92, 105–108; Schulman, 2009, pp. 54–58), and the past was also evident in street and place names. The street dissecting the area was named Korkeavuorenkatu (High Mountain Street) and the western part of the area was called Punavuori (Red Mountain). Acknowledging that many working-class tenants had invested their life savings in their plots, the City Council decided to give them first refusal and ten years’ time to pay. Those unable to buy their plots had to vacate the site when the city saw fit to sell it (HKT, 1876, pp. 105–108). The planning of these inner fringe areas and the new housing developments that followed—elegant apartment buildings designed mainly for middleclass residents—kept a large part of the lower classes on the move in the

A Place in Its Own Right 71 late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They moved first toward the west, where old neighborhoods escaped redevelopment for a longer time, and then increasingly to the northern fringe of the city (HKT, 1884, pp.  2–3). The north was the natural direction for expansion, since the center of Helsinki was located on a narrow peninsula surrounded by the sea to the west, south and east. Workshops, factories and workers’ housing spread from the city along the roads and railway lines, first to areas within the city limits, but as time passed, increasingly to more remote areas. Although the boundary between the core and the fringe remained blurred, there was no doubt about its importance. In the 1870s and 1880s, when the roles and responsibilities of city governments were expanding, making a clear demarcation between the two spheres was an effective way to curb spending. One principle the Helsinki policy makers came to accept, although they did not always act on it at once, was that in the zoned areas the city government provided basic infrastructure services. The state and plot owners may have contributed to the costs of the services, but the responsibility for providing them rested with the city administration. In addition to paving and lighting the streets, the city was expected to connect the streets to the piped water supply and sewage system (HKT, 1875–1878, pp.  8–21, 131–136, 165–178, 360–368; 1884, pp. 2–3). The central areas were seen as orderly urban spaces or in the process of becoming so: an unbroken urban fabric with buildings adjacent to each other and connected to the same infrastructure networks. Between the buildings there were streets, squares and parks in which artifacts, infrastructure systems and humans all increasingly had their own places (HKT, 1876–1878, pp. 131–136, 359–360; 1884, p. 21; Buiter, 2008, p. 142). The areas outside the zoned urban core, whether inside or outside the city limits, were often the antithesis of orderly urban space. As in the past, the municipal authorities viewed the fringe primarily as an extension of the city. It was a land reserve for potential future development and an ideal place for activities which, although important, were unwelcome in the city proper (HKT, 1884, pp. 2–3). Regarding fringe areas within the municipal boundaries, the city as the landowner had power to determine the use of the land, and it used that power actively to preserve a ‘temporary’ and even ‘disordered’ character of the areas until the growth of the city made it necessary to plan these areas properly. Open meadows, fields and forested areas were sprinkled with ‘temporary’ settlements: scattered upper- and middle-class villas, workers’ houses, workshops and factories, all built on rented land owned by the city and usually without access to the infrastructure services (Waris, 1932; HKK, 1977). Especially in working-class areas—in Helsinki and in many other Nordic cities—maintaining ‘temporariness’ remained a commonly used strategy until the 1910s (Hall, 1997, p. 98). As Sven-Erik Åström (1957,

72  Marjaana Niemi p. 262) has argued, ‘the “better” districts were planned in advance and the working-class districts in retrospect’. A  prime example of an area where the Helsinki administration sought to maintain ‘temporariness’ was Kallio (literally ‘rock’), a working-class district just north of the city center and in the vicinity of the industrial area of Sörnäinen. In the 1870s working-class people had begun to move into the area and to settle in houses scattered over the rocky landscape. When it became obvious that more houses were needed, the city authorities determined the future location and alignment of streets, divided the land into plots, but, instead of selling the plots, they leased them out cheaply, at rates only 25–30 percent of those paid in the zoned areas. The city administration did not level the terrain, nor did it provide the area with municipal services, but little was demanded of the tenants, either. They built their wooden houses with no need to adhere to any strict building regulations, thereby creating a neighborhood prone to fires and epidemics (Waris, 1932, pp. 190–194). The distinction made by the authorities between the ‘temporary’ fringe areas and the city proper, built on the idea of ‘permanence’, was not relevant to all. Many working-class families moved regularly within the fringe, but also between the fringe and the urban core, and therefore for them the fringe was just as much ‘a place’ as were the core areas (Waris, 1932, pp. 219–223). The distinction was also contested by some industrialists and important public institutions, such as the state railway company. While many industrial enterprises and institutions were on the edge of the city geographically, they were very much part of the city socially and politically, and eager to be connected to the infrastructure networks. Securing a water supply, for example, was of utmost importance to them, as groundwater was scarce in the rocky terrain of Helsinki. The industrialists in particular pressed the city administration to extend the municipal water system to the fringe areas, and if unsuccessful in their efforts, they often installed the water pipeline to their property at their own expense. Extending water supply and sewerage to factories paved the way for providing the services to the nearby working-class areas, where the installation of hydrants and filling in of wells were, however, received with mixed reactions. According to male writers, women in particular insisted on using the well water because it ‘made better coffee than the municipal water’ (Tanner, 1966, p. 165; Åström, 1956, pp. 197–204). In their memoirs, working-class people living in Kallio and other inner fringe areas describe their environment: the haphazardly placed houses and the muddy streets that had no names. ‘Temporary’ green and open spaces—vacant lots, rocks, meadows, fields and forests—were an integral part of their everyday lives. They were popular places where children and young people played and socialized. Working-class women, many of whom earned extra income by doing laundry for wealthier families, used the rocks to dry washing. Some fields and meadows were still rented out to farmers, and in the forests people picked wild mushrooms and berries

A Place in Its Own Right 73 (Salmela-Järvinen, 1965, p.  49; Salmela-Järvinen, 1966, p.  70; Tanner, 1966, pp. 148–149). These spaces were not officially acknowledged as ‘nature’ or a valuable resource, but some of them became ‘permanent’ features of their areas. For example, in Kallio some of these spaces survived the twentieth-century development booms which laid low all the wooden houses around them. While the fringe was usually seen as a land bank for urban growth, some green areas, such as the islands of the Helsinki Archipelago, were set aside to be preserved as ‘nature’. Since the eighteenth century many of these islands had been under military control, but the rest had been owned either by the City of Helsinki or private individuals, and used for various purposes: farming, grazing, shipbuilding and storing flammable materials (Kumela, 1979). In the late nineteenth century, when the city was growing fast, the islands were increasingly seen as an ideal place for recreation. Many wealthy families rented or bought a summer place in the archipelago, while the working-class people made day trips to islands by steamboats and rowing boats. The municipal authorities encouraged working-class people to spend their free time in the archipelago and especially in People’s Parks founded on two forested islands in the 1880s. In these parks an idealistic vision of nature was put on display in contrived landscapes, in museums and in the zoo (Koskivaara, 1968, pp. 79–83; Knapas, 1980). Some of the city’s woodlands on the inner fringe were also considered to have value as ‘nature’. The Forest Act of 1886 required cities to ensure that woodlands were maintained but what really caused the Helsinki dwellers to comprehend the value of their woodlands was the devastating storm of 1890 that felled thousands of trees in the city (Päivälehti, 1890.08.30). The city administration employed a forester, in addition to the forest rangers it already had on its payroll, and started planting new woodlands to replace those lost in the storm. The city administration planted indigenous trees such as pines, spruces and birches, but also trees that were rare in Finland and therefore considered more valuable and ‘urban’, such as larches and elms. Some of them did not survive the cold climate, but many did. The replanted urban forests shaped by both cultural and natural processes gave their own particular character (still visible today) to many inner fringe areas in Helsinki (Lehti, 1989, pp. 32–49). While there was general agreement on the value of the islands and forests, there was no consensus on the appropriate relationship between humans and (other) nature. For example, many people still had a very pragmatic attitude to killing animals. Väinö Tanner, the first Social Democratic prime minister, recorded in his memoirs how in the 1880s he and other working-class boys were often sent out to buy blood in the slaughterhouse on the edge of the city. While there, they watched animals being slaughtered and they even drank warm blood (Tanner, 1966,

74  Marjaana Niemi pp.  145–146). Some middle-class people beginning to take an interest in nature conservation were shocked by the ‘rural’ and ‘foreign’ ways of treating animals and plants. Workers coming from the countryside and Russian soldiers were especially blamed for vandalism: killing animals, trampling plants and stealing trees (Palmgren, 1913). In the early twentieth century, attitudes toward animals became more sympathetic, and campaigns were developed to increase the populations of swans, ducks and squirrels in the city. The change, however, was contradictory: While ducks were protected, pigeons were increasingly seen as a nuisance (Koskivaara, 1968, pp. 205–206; Haapanen, 2001).

Toward Greater Helsinki: The Fringe Outside the City Limits The alternative of living outside city limits became increasingly attractive to many at the turn of the twentieth century. Urban policy makers in Finland had underestimated the challenges posed by the rapid urbanization and invested insufficient effort into creating opportunities for the development of affordable housing. Some entrepreneurs recognized a business opportunity in the growing demand for cheap housing and, following the example of their Swedish counterparts, founded property development companies to meet the demand. The companies acquired large areas of farming land outside the cities, parceled them out and marketed the parcels as residential plots. Consequently, a significant proportion of urban growth in Finland at the time took place outside the city boundaries, often on privately owned land and therefore beyond the reach of municipal control (Harvia, 1918, pp. 48–49; Perälä, 1983, pp. 35–36). Some of the new communities attracted upper- and middle-class families favoring a more rural milieu, but the vast majority of those who moved to the new suburbs were low-income city dwellers or migrants flooding into cities. The Helsinki authorities estimated in the early twentieth century that 80–90  percent of the suburban residents living outside the city boundaries were working-class people, and in some other Finnish cities the figure was even higher (HKV, 1912, pp. 3–4; Harvia, 1936, pp. 80–81). The diversity of places referred to as ‘suburbs’ in early twentieth-century Europe clearly stretched the concept so far that it lost some of its usefulness. While in Britain the long-standing negative connotation of suburbs was reversed in the nineteenth century, as middle-class people left the urban core for the convenience of the fringes (McManus and Ethington, 2007, p. 320), in Finland the negative connotation largely persisted. Although most of the suburbs outside Helsinki were mere semi-rural villages with few or no amenities, they had much to offer to workingclass people. There were no building codes to regulate the construction of houses, building materials were cheap, small-scale farming and gardening

A Place in Its Own Right 75 provided food for the table, and the atmosphere was often reminiscent of the countryside where many suburban residents had grown up (Harvia, 1936, pp. 57–58). Indeed, the memoirs of those who lived in the fringe communities show that hybrid places where urban and rural interacted often came closest to their idea of stable life. For many of them, the fringe suburbs were the place where they settled down as married couples and where they built their first ‘permanent’ homes. In their new neighborhoods they ‘watched wheat ripple in the wind’ and sensed ‘the fresh scent of the coniferous forest’ while at the same time enjoying their suburban gardens with apple trees and experiencing the ‘pulse of the city’ (SalmelaJärvinen, 1966, p. 67; Tuglas, 1986, p. 298; Harvia, 1936, pp. 57–58, 80–81). The interaction of cultural and natural processes in the irregular suburbs created a new kind of nature. As soon as the Helsinki authorities became aware of the accelerating suburban growth and the role played by the private landowners and property developers in the process, they expressed their concern about the situation (HKV, 1892, pp. 12, 15). However, that was often all they did. Under the legislation valid until 1926, cities were not allowed to annex privately owned land, and so in order to annex property adjacent to the city boundaries, the city had to first acquire ownership. Consequently, only few annexations took place in Finnish cities at the turn of the century (Perälä, 1983, pp. 37–40). The most obvious reason for the critical attitude toward irregular suburbs was the perceived threat to the health and public order of the city. The residents of these communities often relied on polluted wells for drinking water and lacked both sewerage and paved streets. Many of them kept pigs and chickens in their yards, much to the annoyance of the Helsinki authorities, who had made progress in restricting the keeping of livestock within the city. The fact that there was little or no policing in the suburbs was believed to result in a culture of excessive drinking and violence (Tidskrift för Hälsovård, 1892, pp. 109–110; HKT, 1905, p. ii, 48; HKV, 1912, p. 52). Another reason why the irregular communities were seen as a problem was the irreversibility of many changes. ‘Temporary’ solutions often achieved an unwelcome ‘permanence’. The authorities were acutely aware that in the long-term informal settlements inhibited the effective planning of the future development of the city, and therefore were keen to discourage the settlements at an early stage. They preferred to ‘colonise’ fields and forests, not settlements created by ‘the speculators’ (HKV, 1912, p. 52). Some of the concerns harbored by the municipal authorities were groundless. As regards sanitary conditions, the difference between the fringe neighborhoods within and outside the city was often small. People living outside the city had to do without the municipal services, but those living inside could not always rely on their availability, either. Regarding the property developers, the situation was not as black-and-white as

76  Marjaana Niemi presented by the authorities (Harvia, 1936). The founders of the property development companies were often sincerely concerned about urban problems, and therefore many companies started their operations with the best of the intentions. A  good example is the company Puistokylä Oy, which acquired over one thousand hectares of land near Helsinki. By applying garden city principles, the company sought to create a community that would bring together working-class people, farmers and small enterprises. However, such plans proved too ambitious. Picturesque curved streets were abandoned in favor of a straightforward grid pattern, the services promised by the company never materialized and in the absence of building control, all the builders simply did what seemed best to them (Piilonen, 1996, pp. 6–51). Although the new suburbs did not always meet the expectations, they kept on growing. The success of the property developers led to a situation where the city found itself squeezed between the sea and the ‘speculators’. At the urgent instigation of leading municipal officials, the city of Helsinki followed the example set by Copenhagen and Stockholm and embarked on a land acquisition process in order to become yet again ‘master in its own house’. The pace was first slow as the policy makers were still coming to terms with the idea, but after a few missed opportunities, the majority of councilors acquiesced, and World War I, with falling prices for land, indirectly provided further impetus (HKT, 1907, pp. 105–108; 1917, p. 11; HKV, 1912, p. 52; Brunila and af Schultén, 1955, pp. 35–49). In the spring of 1917, the City Council bought 1,450 hectares of land outside the city limits for a price equivalent to one quarter of the city’s annual budget. This acquisition, together with further purchases in 1918 and 1919, greatly facilitated the controlled development of the city. The first priority in the land purchasing policy was to acquire ownership of those areas where suburbs had been built with little regard for order and safety. In these areas the parceling out of land was discontinued and, if the city did not need the land immediately, it was ‘temporarily’ rented out as agricultural land. Another motive behind the policy was to provide building land and hydropower sites (rapids) for industrial activities, and thereby secure the future of Helsinki as an industrial city. The large forests, on the other hand, seemed at that time to have little value in the eyes of the authorities, although they were popular places for informal recreation (HKV, 1917, p. 18; Lehti, 1989; Yrjänä, 2013, pp. 51–68). What also prompted the municipal decision makers to act was the realization that they were about to lose the initiative in urban planning. In 1908, a new municipal planning authority, the Town Planning Committee, had started its work, but the Committee had formidable competitors, especially in the 1910s. In spite of the war-related difficulties, some property developers were still actively involved in determining how the fringe should be developed. For example, the biggest of the companies

A Place in Its Own Right 77 in the Helsinki area, M. G. Stenius Oy, had the most prominent Finnish architect, Eliel Saarinen, among its shareholders and commissioned him to design suburban areas immediately outside the city boundaries (Saarinen, 1915). A few years later, Saarinen published the Pro Helsingfors plan (Jung and Saarinen, 1918): a proposal for a master plan for the entire Helsinki region. Saarinen envisaged a new monumental center for Helsinki, which was now the capital of a newly independent Finland, but he also planned a ring of satellite centers. The spacious suburbia was to be structured by railway lines and various types of green spaces: forests, fields and parks, and especially the Central Park stretching all the way from the center of the city to the rural areas (Nikula, 1988, pp. 23–30; Niemi, 2016, pp.  249–254). Although the Pro Helsingfors plan was never officially adopted, it left behind it a powerful legacy, and many of its elements were incorporated into subsequent plans. For example, Saarinen envisaged one of the most notorious irregular suburbs, Pasila, as the second center of Helsinki. In the following few paragraphs, I will briefly discuss over a century-long process of transforming Pasila into the second center: a process characterized by long-lasting ‘temporary’ arrangements.

From ‘Pigtown’ to Helsinki Nord: Ambitious Plans and Everyday Life in Pasila In the early years of the twentieth century, Wooden-Pasila was a small settlement just outside the city limits, three kilometers north of the city center and within walking distance of the industrial workplaces in eastern Helsinki. The neighborhood consisted of fifteen hundred residents living in wooden houses built on rugged pine covered hills. The houses varied in size, ranging from single-family homes to low-rise tenements, and each had its own character and style. The municipal authorities saw Pasila as a kind of ‘Klondike’, notorious for its near-lawless frontier life, with inadequate planning and poor sanitation as well as excessive drinking and brawling, and the main daily newspaper emphasized the ‘un-urban’ nature of Pasila by calling it Pigtown (Helsingin Sanomat, 1905.08.04; Kervinen, 1998, pp. 75–76). Those who lived in Pasila often lamented the lack of services, but at the same time they felt that the negative reputation of their suburb was unfairly perpetuated by outsiders (Työmies, 1902.07.18; 1907.07.20). Pasila was not the only problem suburb near Helsinki, but it was too close to be ignored. The City Council decided to buy up the area, and it was annexed to the city in 1912. After the annexation, the city administration provided the area with piped water and sewerage, and improved the streets. The intention, however, was to do the very minimum (HKT, 1913, pp. 48–49, 71; Harvia, 1936, pp. 21–22; Kervinen, 1998, p. 79). For the Helsinki policy makers, Wooden-Pasila was a suburb without a

78  Marjaana Niemi future. As soon as the new plans were completed, the old Pasila would fade into oblivion. In his Pro Helsingfors plan, the architect Eliel Saarinen complied with the wishes of the Helsinki authorities. Saarinen (Jung and Saarinen, 1918) suggested that the main railway station be moved to Pasila, which would become the key transport node of the city. Though not officially approved at the time, the idea of Pasila as Helsinki Nord gained ground (Mäkinen, 2004). The expectations of urban growth, however, proved excessively optimistic and the plans to build new Pasila were left in abeyance for sixty years, almost a human lifetime. Meanwhile the ‘temporary’ Wooden-Pasila carried on (almost) as before: Children grew up and adults grew old, ground leases were renewed and the original gray houses were painted in brighter colors. The environment, too, changed almost beyond recognition. Many residents had vegetable patches in their gardens but they also planted flowers, bushes and trees, and in consequence the rugged pine covered hills gradually turned into a green oasis. In the 1950s, four decades after the predicted end of Wooden-Pasila, the neighborhood of three thousand people enjoyed its heyday. It remained a working-class community, with most of the residents being relatively poor, but it was in many ways a lively, close-knit community (Kervinen, 1998, pp. 79–82; Auvinen, 2015). Rapid urbanization in the 1960s marked the beginning of the end for Pasila. In order to have the land available for use when needed, the Helsinki city administration reduced the lease period of the plots to five years. This decision created so much uncertainty that only few property owners were willing to invest in keeping up the place. The buildings and infrastructure deteriorated, and many residents, especially young people and families, left to find homes elsewhere. Pasila gradually became a makeshift first home for poor people coming to the city and a neighborhood of elderly people who refused to move from their homes. Houses, gardens and streets, which for many residents had been ‘permanent’ places, reverted to being ‘ephemeral’ arrangements. In the early 1970s the city administration started to terminate plot leases, and at the same time, little by little, ‘nature’ reclaimed the area. Weeds and shrubs grew out of cracks in the buildings and took over gardens which were no longer tended. The deterioration of the built environment and the spread of the ‘natural’ environment made it relatively easy for the city administration to legitimize the demolition of Pasila. The irregular suburb had not been a ‘real’ urban place to begin with and in the 1970s it was even less so (Helsingin Sanomat, 1974.07.02; 1974.09.28; Kervinen, 1998, pp. 80–82). A new town plan for the area was approved in 1979, and the wooden neighborhood was quickly replaced with a modern residential and office area, Western Pasila, with blocks of flats, streets, tramcars and ‘urban’ parks. Eastern Pasila, the new administrative center of Helsinki with

A Place in Its Own Right 79 central and city government offices and apartment blocks, had been built during the 1970s. The last part of the process of developing Pasila as the second center is still ongoing. The development of Central and Northern Pasila has started and will continue until 2040, when Pasila will be home to thirty thousand people and fifty thousand jobs (HK, 2017).

The Ideal Place to Live: The Fragmented Fringe of the Forest Suburbs The City of Helsinki had acquired large expanses of land from the surrounding areas between the 1910s and 1930s, and the policy culminated in the purchase of one of the most active property development companies, M. G. Stenius Oy, in 1938 (HKT, 1938, p.  205). The official annexation of the acquired areas was initially delayed due to legal obstacles and later because of World War II, but in 1946 the annexation finally occurred, increasing the area of Helsinki from 29 to 165 square kilometers. These reforms enabled the city of Helsinki to become ‘master in its own house’ and hold that position for a foreseeable future. The city owned around the half of its land area—and the 1932 Town Planning Act further empowered the municipal authorities to make plans for privately owned land (Sundman, 1991). Integrating the city and the annexed areas into a functioning system that would work well was a difficult task in the exceptional post-war conditions. What further complicated the task was the accelerating urbanization. The population of Helsinki increased from 360,000 in 1950 to 520,000 in 1970, and the two neighboring municipalities—Espoo and Vantaa—likewise grew fast and by 1970 had a total population of 270,000. At the same time, the living standard rose and both middleand working-class families increasingly looked for more spacious homes. Following the idea presented by Eliel Saarinen in 1918 and the example set by many Swedish cities, Helsinki and the neighboring municipalities adopted decentralization as a key strategy for meeting the high housing demand in the 1950s and 1960s (Schulman, 2009). The process of decentralization was from the outset ambitious. One of the earliest suburbs built in the Helsinki region after the war, Tapiola, was praised both nationally and internationally for its qualities: well-kept parks that transformed subtly to more natural landscape, the Modernist buildings designed by prominent Finnish architects and the ambitious goal of creating a socially mixed neighborhood (Tuomi, 2003). Tapiola owed its name to Tapio, the ancient god of the forest in Finnish mythology, and was located ‘in the middle of nowhere’, in the rural municipality of Espoo, some ten kilometers from the center of Helsinki. Those who moved to Tapiola in the 1950s remember the seclusion of the place: The bus route from Helsinki to Tapiola ran through ‘dark, dense forests’ (Astikainen et al., 1997, p. 22).

80  Marjaana Niemi Following the inspiration of Tapiola, several new suburbs were built within the municipal boundaries of Helsinki in the 1950s and early 1960s. In this process, public images of and attitudes toward the fringe suburbs changed from fairly negative to predominantly positive, at least temporarily. The new suburbs were located literally in old-growth forests which had not been held in high regard in the interwar years but which now were seen as nothing less than an ideal place to live. Politicians, municipal officials and the media emphasized that children especially needed direct contact with nature and could not achieve their full potential in the ‘asphalt jungles’ of the inner city (Niemi, 2006, pp. 210–211). The new suburbs were not only surrounded by forests but patches of forest were often preserved even between buildings, which ranged from tower blocks to vertical apartment buildings and terraced houses. The facades of the buildings were as simple as possible to allow ‘nature’ to take care of the embellishment (Ekelund, 1940; Tuomi, 2003). Furthermore, trees and shrubs between buildings were not only something to be enjoyed outdoors; owing to large windows there was a spatial continuum between the exterior and interior spaces, and therefore ‘nature’ could also be enjoyed from indoors (Niemi, 2006). Tapiola and the forest suburbs built in the 1950s and early 1960s were praised as a new national landscape of a modern, urbanized Finland; a landscape reflecting the Romantic notion that the Finns—even when living in cities—were uniquely tied to the nature of their country (Niemi, 2017). The ideas implemented in these suburbs were expected to spread across the fringe areas surrounding Helsinki and other Finnish cities. In the mid-1960s, however, attitudes changed and the forest suburbs were increasingly criticized for ‘anti-urban romanticism’. The criticism did not stop the building of more suburbs; on the contrary, they sprang up at an accelerating rate in the late 1960s and 1970s. What changed, however, was the spatial structure of the suburbs. Informally located streets and buildings were abandoned in favor of grid plans to create a more ‘urban’ feel on the fringe. The city of Helsinki was again relatively slow to develop new residential areas, and therefore the strongest suburban development took place outside the boundaries of Helsinki. The neighboring municipalities, eager to attract new residents and industries, speeded up housing production by making land development contracts with private construction companies. As a result of the cooperation, a number of large suburban estates dominated by prefabricated multi-story apartment blocks were built in the middle of forests and fields of the Helsinki region. Tucked between these estates were low-rise residential areas as well as industrial estates (Sundman, 1991, pp. 94–99). Although the suburbs were now built on the idea of ‘permanence’, most of them were in a fundamental way ‘temporary’ and ‘unfinished’. They were still building sites when the residents began to move in, and many of them remained ‘unfinished’ and ‘improvised’ for a long time.

A Place in Its Own Right 81 Visions and plans for the suburbs often included workplaces and kindergartens as well as shops, libraries, playgrounds and pubs, but many of these activities, services and cultural amenities were either provided only after a considerable delay or not at all (Sundman, 1991, pp. 98–99; Niemi, 2006, pp.  212–213). As the leisure facilities in particular were often limited, the residents made the most of the natural environment around them. Children saw woodlands, beaches, sand quarries and derelict buildings as places to explore and opportunities for imaginative play. Teenagers, too, spent their free time in woodlands and on beaches, enjoying the greater freedoms these environments afforded, and adults enjoyed the surrounding nature by walking, jogging and walking their dogs. In so doing, the residents recreated a new kind of nature. For example, species that had low resistance to trampling gradually disappeared in the suburbs, whereas those tolerating such disturbance flourished. Indeed, the large suburban estates, low-rise residential areas and industrial estates— the areas between urban and intensively cultivated agricultural areas— provided essential habitats for many species (Asikainen, 2014). If the suburbs were ‘unfinished’ and ‘temporary’, the same can be said of suburbia as a whole. The lack of overall coordination, the disputes between Helsinki and other municipalities, and the rivalry between the construction companies created a highly fragmented fringe area: fragmented patches of urban fabric broken by swathes of forest, fields, vacant land and limited access motorways. In some international comparisons, the fringe of the Helsinki region appeared to be among the most fragmented urban areas (EEA, 2006, p. 13).

The Twenty-First Century: Revisiting the Old Fringe The past few decades have witnessed a gradual reversion to the dense, continuous urban fabric prevalent before the rise of the automobile. The city of Helsinki and to some extent also the neighboring municipalities have pursued a policy of urban consolidation, encouraging growth in areas with existing infrastructure and reducing the development along the rural-urban fringe. The change has been uneven as a result of the disparate and conflicting interests of the cities in the Helsinki Metropolitan Region, but the trend has been clear. The policy has been justified as a strategy indispensable to improve the accessibility of services and to mitigate climate change (Maijala and Sairinen, 2008; Helsingin Seutu, 2010). The compact city ideal, together with difficulties in regional planning, have caused the city of Helsinki to concentrate more on the development of the ‘fringe within the city’. The focus has first been on underused land areas in or near the urban core. A prime example is the heart of the Kamppi area, which in the nineteenth century was occupied by Russian army barracks and parade grounds. The area remained a kind of periphery in the middle of the city—a gap in the urban fabric—until the early

82  Marjaana Niemi twentieth-first century, when a redevelopment project finally absorbed the area into the central business district of Helsinki. Another example are the old industrial estates and harbor areas, which lost their original function in the late twentieth century. Many of these have been or are in the process of being redeveloped for housing. Finally, a third example are the islands which for long were under military control. They lost their military significance in the course of the twentieth century, if not before, and many of them were gradually reclaimed by nature. In the twentyfirst century, these islands have been opened to the public as recreational areas combining cultural and natural heritage.

Conclusion In Helsinki, as in many other Nordic cities, the difference between the urban core and its fringe areas became more pronounced during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. While the center of the city became gradually more ‘permanent’, with more enduring buildings and infrastructure, in the inner fringe areas the accelerating urbanization heightened the sense of ‘temporariness’. The Helsinki authorities, for their part, reinforced the process. They imposed an increasing number of building, fire and public health regulations on the zoned areas, while at the same time actively seeking to retain ‘informality’ on the outskirts of the city. Shantytowns and irregular working-class areas were ‘temporary’ arrangements providing housing for low-income groups until demolished to make room for the expanding city. Agricultural land and forest areas near the city center—with the exception of a few islands and woodlands—were seen as ‘undeveloped’ land. These areas served the needs of the city proper, functioning as a ‘temporary’ source of urban food and industrial materials as well as places for informal recreation until surveyors, road workers and builders started integrating them into the urban core. The authorities sought to keep their options open so that when the time came to finalize the formal plans and implement them, they could take advantage of what they then perceived to be the best opportunity. In practice, it was not always easy to maintain ‘temporariness’. The city of Helsinki was an important landowner and therefore well placed to control development in the fringe areas, especially in the nineteenth century and between 1920s and 1960s, but there were many other actors and factors at work. Even in informal settlements located near the urban core and specifically intended to be ‘temporary’, some ‘permanent’ changes were often inevitable. The interaction between the inhabitants and their environment shaped the places through small transformations which, accumulating over time, resulted in significant alterations. A little further away, private landowners and property development companies together with home builders created ‘permanent’ urban structures in the middle

A Place in Its Own Right 83 of fields and forests. The neighboring municipalities became active in the 1960s and 1970s. The simultaneity of very different time experiences and the particular interaction of the cultural and natural processes have made the fringe a unique place, different from both the urban core and the intensively cultivated agricultural areas. While the fringe as a whole has been in a state of change, many parts of it have become ‘permanent’ or at least acquired a feeling of ‘permanence’.

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Part III

Nature as Urban Resource

4 Urbanizing Water Looking Beyond the Transition to Water Modernity in the Cities of the Southern Low Countries, Thirteenth to Nineteenth Centuries Ric Janssens and Tim Soens Introduction: Looking Beyond Water Modernity ‘Modern water’ is considered as one of the essential constitutive elements in the structuring and functioning of present-day ‘modern’ cities. Modern water, both as an idea and a material reality, rests on the dualism between nature and society, the supremacy of humans over non-humans and consequently, the controlling and disciplining of nature. The origin of (water) modernity is traditionally traced back to the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth. Linton (2010) understands modern water above all as an intellectual achievement, the main feature of which is to abstract the world’s waters from their local, social, cultural, and ecological contexts, to reduce them to a single substance, and thus render them commensurable and interchangeable. This is consistent with broader changes in the relation to nature at that time: from a world of qualitative differences, natural philosophy effected the reduction of natural reality to a set of quantities. Nevertheless, it took a long time before the identity of water as we know it—a natural resource that is a compound of oxygen and hydrogen and can serve as a commodity—came into being, that is, before an assemblage of historical, hydrological, political and technological circumstances was put in place that produced ‘modern water’. Water modernity in turn needs to be distinguished from water modernization, as Maria Kaika (2005) has argued. Although the programming vision of modernity was to render cities independent from nature’s processes, modernization, the materialization of this vision, was predicated upon establishing large networked infrastructures. Mobilizing flows of natural elements, social power relations and capital investment cycles, such infrastructures did not separate nature from the city, but instead wove them together more closely than ever into a socio-spatial continuum. Furthermore, the chronologies of water modernity and water modernization are highly divergent. During most of the nineteenth century, ambitious plans were made for controlling nature’s water flows, the

90  Ric Janssens and Tim Soens provision of water and the development of sewage networks. Yet, it was only from the late nineteenth century onwards that industrialization and the expansion of capitalist world markets promoted the development of these large-scale urban sanitation projects. Ironically, the myth of progress and modernization as an automatic means of producing a better society that was promoted by the technological systems, was called into question at the exact moment that in most western cities the modernity project could be considered as having been completed, rendered hegemonic and normalized: the 1970s. This chapter aims to rethink the history of urban water supplies in a non-linear way, looking at multiple transformations of urban water infrastructures over the past centuries and identifying the actors and processes steering such transformations. First of all, we aim to bridge the historiographical gap between the pre-modern and the modern period in the study of the urban environment, starting from the observation that urban water supplies have been subject to a large degree of technological manipulation ever since urban settlements transcended their predominantly agrarian character—in northwest Europe mostly in the ‘long’ twelfth century (Magnusson, 2001; Guillerme, 1988, pp. 51–117). Second, the dualist view of humans and nature-water is abandoned. Both water and cities can be considered hybrids: entities that are at once social and natural (Schatzki, 2003), and this is as true for a medieval city as for a twenty-first-century one. As such, the history of urban water supplies cannot be limited to a history of humans acting upon water, but should instead be enlarged to a permanent co-evolution in which any form of agency—either by human actors or material-natural ‘actants’—is a networked agency, inseparably embedded in a network of relationships with the surrounding world (Asdal, 2003, drawing on Bruno Latour). Third, technologies, wrapped up in small or large infrastructural systems, are central to our analysis. Technology can be considered the nexus or interface linking daily practices of water-use to the material ‘arrangements’ of water in the physical and social landscape (Winiwarter et al., 2013). From Science and Technology Studies, we derive the notion that technology is never neutral, but loaded with values and power. Social purposes are embodied in technology and cannot be seen as mere extrinsic ends to which a neutral technological tool might be applied (Feenberg, 1991 in Bell). However, infrastructural systems like water supply systems should not only be read as tools of a Foucauldian ‘governing at a distance’ in which states, governments, or power elites are ‘stabilizing’ their social values in an attempt to reproduce existing power relations. A broad reading of ‘water governance’ implies attention to multiple and often competing stakeholders, including individual consumers, who through the daily use of water or through active involvement in regulation and management, are able to add new and sometimes conflicting layers of meaning and value to existing infrastructures (Olsson and Head, 2015).

Urbanizing Water 91 Within European history, two basic technological systems of providing water to citizens can be discerned: systems of piped water on the one hand and groundwater wells on the other. Piped water is often associated with dynamic water, underground networks, regulation, commodification, and in the end, ‘water modernity’. It is also deemed more apt to either private or public management. Groundwater wells in contrast, seem more local, associated with stagnant waters, and apparently more apt to forms of shared or common resource use and management (Guillerme, 1988, pp. 137–164). As we will show in this chapter, such a distinction does not hold for urban water supplies in the Low Countries when placed in a long-term perspective. Both technological complexes (centralized networks and decentralized wells) coexisted for centuries, and both could operate in different societal and natural contexts, intermingling public, private and common use and management. Furthermore, similar technological systems could have had highly different values embedded in them. A  system of piped water could symbolize ‘public’ municipal power, but it could also—and sometimes at the same time—be associated with strictly delimited ‘conduit communities’ (Jenner, 2000) or with a consumer-logic, linking private consumers in their homes to a commercial provider (Taylor and Trentmann, 2011). Thus, rather than presenting a clear gap between the modern and the pre-modern, between centralized and decentralized systems, the history of urban water in Europe over the past five centuries (or even the past millennium) has been characterized by a coexistence of multiple water systems—creating a ‘water plurality’ which in most European cities lasted until well into the twentieth century. In what follows, we will analyze the simultaneous development of both clusters of water technologies (piped water networks and groundwater wells) in the cities of the Southern Low Countries, as well as in neighboring regions (mainly France and England) from the Middle Ages to the end of the nineteenth century. We will investigate how socio-natural relations and power hierarchies were stabilized in these systems—and by whom—but also argue that such stabilization was never permanent. The values attributed to a certain technological system could change over time as the social and socio-natural relations embedded in them evolved. Detecting the moments and conditions in which human actors consciously embarked on projects aiming to establish human control over water resources, also forms part of our enquiry.

Decentralized Systems: Water Wells The Romanization of northwestern Europe did not, in most former Roman cities, lead to a continuity in urban water supplies. For instance, Roman Paris on the left bank of the Seine had the use of an aqueduct to provide it with water, but medieval Parisian development was concentrated on the right bank of the river and used ‘private’ wells as the most

92  Ric Janssens and Tim Soens important source of water for individual families (Benoît, 2000). In most northwestern European cities, these wells were organized in what could be described as a ‘courtyard-system’, which is intrinsically linked to the evolution of urban landownership during the period of rapid urban expansion between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries. In many northwestern European cities, the urban territory was organized in rather large plots of land—about three thousand square meters each in the city of Ghent—leased from a noble or ecclesiastical landlord in exchange for a customary rent (census or ‘burgage rent’ in England). In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, these rents were often redeemed by the urban elite, who, as full proprietors of urban land (viri hereditarii), dominated urban politics. By the thirteenth century, intense population and economic pressure produced more complex divisions of urban space, as individual occupation units (‘burgage plots’ in England) were split into even smaller ones. Occupants of these subdivisions often continued to share a number of facilities including water wells or access roads. The large plots of the viri hereditarii were subdivided, and family members and other members of the patrician clan built smaller tenements next to the major ‘stone house’ (Verhulst, 1994; Hammel-Kiesow, 1996; Hardin, 2002). The patrician family remained the owner of the land and continued to collect customary rents for it. Although we are not well informed about the access to water on these patrician plots (Laleman and Vermeiren, 2010, pp.  26–29),1 one might suspect that many plots had their own water provisioning. In Ghent for instance, these patrician hereditates usually enjoyed direct access to a river or stream through small ‘water streets’ (waterscippen or watertrappen), while some of them also had access to a well situated somewhere in the courtyard of the hereditas. By the thirteenth century, further subdivision of tenements created informal ‘water commons’, as the ‘water street’ or ‘water well’ of the hereditas was shared by all tenants. The management of these largely informal commons is poorly documented. Thus, in the period before the Black Death, the access to water was largely steered by the structure of landownership. In Brussels, a city with a strong spatial structuring around family clans, urbanites had access to numerous water wells scattered across the city which were denominated by the patronyms of the important families that lived in the neighborhood (Deligne, 2003; Deligne, 2008). Water systems became increasingly complex, the result of demographic growth and the fragmentation of property and usage rights. Private space was subdivided into smaller geographical units. Shared spaces sometimes evolved into thoroughfares with common right of access, although sometimes restricted to local residents (Harding, 2002). Access to, and use of, public spaces also became more strictly regulated. With property rights becoming more diffuse, the ‘private’ character of the courtyard system of water provisioning increasingly moved toward what could be labeled as a ‘common property regime’ (Ostrom, 1990), in which

Urbanizing Water 93 the patrician landowners of the housing block or quarters retained a somewhat higher degree of control (real or symbolic) compared to other users. Interestingly, as shared use-rights to the ‘courtyard’ wells grew in volume, elite members of society increasingly dissociated themselves from them. Already in 1274, Jehan Boinebroke—the archetypical capitalist textile entrepreneur of Douai—demanded and got permission from the Douai authorities to close a so-called flegard or water street running through his property. Others followed his example, and from time to time Douai aldermen allowed persons of wealth to close a water street. However, in Douai as well, access rights for ‘les circonvoisins et la communaulté’ were not easily wiped out: we find examples where the construction of a door was allowed, but only to be closed overnight (Boone, 1959, p. 137). In the period following the Black Death, courtyard facilities were increasingly complemented by a system of wells on streets and squares that were evenly distributed across the urban territory. Many of them probably originated in former courtyard facilities, which were given a more ‘public’ character. For Brussels, Deligne (2008) suggests an appropriation by the city of the neighborhood water points associated with family clans. In the fifteenth century, they were referred to as gemeyne putteborren (common groundwater wells). In 1453, the magistrate established the division of the city into twenty-one districts, each of which was headed by two wijcmeesteren, aided by two supervisors. The supervisors were responsible for fire prevention; the wijcmeesteren ensured public order and the maintenance of the common wells. Similarly, in the city of Antwerp, in 1463 a similar system of wells open to ‘public’ use, but maintained by neighbors, was already in place. Regulation by the municipality constituted one element in a wider transformation of the urban environment for the purpose of municipal firefighting, touching not only public space, but even the home and the workshop. From 1502 onwards, two well officers were elected in each district annually, responsible for the maintenance of the public wells and firefighting equipment. The funding of the wells’ maintenance, as a community-based system, gradually became institutionalized (see also: Ruhland, 2007). The principle of the Antwerp ‘well and fire tax’ was mentioned as early as 1502; in 1654 all district wells were said to be maintained by means of a tax, to be paid by every house in the neighborhood and calculated on the gable-width of the house. Interestingly, the tax had to be paid by the inhabitants of each house, but they had to recover the costs from the house owners, who were ultimately responsible for the maintenance of shared infrastructure. The assistant—knaap—of the Fire Chamber organized the tax collection (Van Nieuwenhuizen, 2000); four to six of the richest owners of the neighborhood helped in supervising tax collection. Neither the city aldermen nor the central fire masters intervened in this process on a regular basis.

94  Ric Janssens and Tim Soens On the one hand, neighborhood wells in the post–Black Death period clearly reflect the ambition of municipalities to fight environmental ‘corruption’. From the late fourteenth century onwards, urban authorities issued an increasing number of environmental prescriptions, most notably on the cleaning of drains and ditches and the removal of waste from streets and privies. Nowadays, their repetition is no longer seen as a sign of failure, but rather a determination to improve the situation. Sanitation was seen as integral to ‘good government’ and became strongly intertwined with the development of urban governmental structures (e.g.,  ­Jørgensen, 2010). The neighborhood wells also began to play an important role in ‘city marketing’ (see Figure 4.1). Indeed, the Antwerp district wells and the Brussels fountains are distinctive features on the 1565 map of Vergilius Bononiensis, and the 1572 map of Braun and Hogenberg, respectively (Deligne, 2008). On the other hand, maintenance systems like the Antwerp ‘well and fire tax’ corresponded to a broader arrangement of urban space, in which house owners or residents bore the costs of collective provisions such as street paving and river maintenance. The municipal authorities did not directly assume responsibility for the construction and maintenance of wells. In each ward, district or neighborhood, the ‘neighbors’ were held responsible for the maintenance of the infrastructure.2 This fitted the socio-political framework of many early modern towns in the Low Countries, in which public services were mainly provided by a myriad of ‘civil’ agencies, all motivated by ideologies of the common good, citizenship and community (Van der Heijden, 2010). In many small towns in the northern Netherlands and Germany, collective maintenance arrangements even turned into real ‘well communities’ as separate units of sociability with their own festivities (‘well parties’) and religious manifestations (Groenewoudt and Benders, 2013). In a large city like Antwerp, the concept of a ‘well community’ is more difficult to apply, as there is no sign of strongly ritualized practices or festivities centered on fountains and wells. Perhaps the far-reaching rationalization and commodification of urban housing in a commercial metropolis like Antwerp impeded such evolution. In the post–Black Death period, urban property relations were increasingly simplified to uniform landlord-tenant relations, and most urban inhabitants had to acquire access to housing on a competitive leasehold market (see also for London: Harding, 2002). The predominance of contractual landlord-tenant relationships entailed a dissociation of ownership and residence, as well as a high mobility among tenants. The tenants were the actual users of the wells and performed the actual maintenance. The financial responsibility, however, remained with the owners. The rental value of the house—in pre-modern societies a good proxy for the wealth of its inhabitants—determined the contribution each had to make to the maintenance of the wells, but also the potential for social profiling as ‘neighborhood’ or ‘well’ officer.

Urbanizing Water 95

Figure 4.1 Monumental neighborhood well with pump (demolished in 1882) at the Antwerp Veemarkt, watercolor by Jozef Linnig, 1849 Source: Stadsarchief Antwerpen, 12#2988, www.felixarchief.be

According to Euzen and Haghe (2012), urbanites’ perceptions of what constituted clean water were at the heart of a complex and specific dynamic which evolved in response to transformations in both natural and urban milieus, in sanitary concerns and socio-economic dynamics, and scientific discoveries and technological innovations. In line with Hippocratic ‘environmental determinism’, the quality of the environment

96  Ric Janssens and Tim Soens determined the quality of social life, providing the better-off neighbors with a clear incentive to survey these qualities. Natural determinism continued to have a profound influence on scientists and doctors up until the nineteenth century. In this light, it is not surprising that the urban authorities relied heavily on the local neighbors, who were in the best position of assessing the quality of the water in the environment they came into contact with on a daily basis. By the second half of the eighteenth century, the influence of the neighborhoods on the urban environment was increasingly reduced, although trajectories diverged between cities. Just like their counterparts in central governments, city officials adopted a more ‘managerial approach to nature’ (Merchant, 1990) instead of the type of government-at-a-distance characterizing the previous period. In 1774, Ghent introduced specialized alderman offices, in which aldermen managed their own departments of finances, public works, waterways and so forth (Decavele, 1997). In early nineteenth-century Antwerp, the city government asserted that the 110 district pumps were public property. The responsibility for daily supervision of the wells (that gradually had been covered and made accessible by metal pumps in the previous centuries) was transferred from the well officers to newly instituted, lower-rank firefighting officers, who had to check each pump at least once a week for defects. A senior fire officer was required to communicate all defects to the city architect, who was to propose technical solutions to the city council. The city council had the final responsibility for the measures to be taken to remedy the situation. After 1830, the Antwerp police increasingly obtained a crucial position in the supervision of public infrastructure, often functioning as an intermediary organ between the urban residents and the municipality. Furthermore, the urban elite increasingly started to dissociate itself from the shared water infrastructure, a process not unlike what we have seen in Douai in the late thirteenth century. In Bruges in 1750, a certain de Peelaert, lord of Steenmaere and Cleyhem, had a dispute with the aldermen concerning the pump on his property, which was used by people in the neighborhood. De Peelaert wanted either the municipality to pay for the maintenance, or alternatively, to be granted permission to restrict access. The municipality preferred the first option but planned to install separate access to the well on the street (Vandevyvere, 1983, p. 141). In Ghent, many ancient water streets were privatized, while the immediate neighbors’ protests were no longer automatically taken into account (Deceulaer, 1996). However, we should be careful not to present such privatizations as linear evolutions toward the triumph of private property rights. When we look at both the nineteenth-century property rights regime and environmental regulations, a strong individualism and liberalism only came about after 1860 and lasted up to 1890. During the Napoleonic era, governments issued many and far-reaching measures that limited the liberties of private owners. Only during the second half of

Urbanizing Water 97 the nineteenth century were many of these measures revised or repealed. In environmental policy, the imperial decree of 15 October 1810 is considered as the first modern, state-issued regulation of industrial pollution and still forms the basis of the current environmental legislation in France, Belgium and the Netherlands (Massard-Guilbaud, 2010). Indeed, in the early nineteenth century, arguments from individuals asserting their rights as house owners rarely proved to be decisive in the case of water provision.3 Technological changes also played a role in efforts to privatize water access but the relationship can be rather complex, as the invention of the piston pump in the late sixteenth century shows. Such pumps made it much easier to introduce water into the domestic sphere without the costly operation of sinking a new well on the property. Multiple pumps could be placed on one well, making joint access unnecessary. In 1610 ten houses in the city of Bruges—including the house of the local mayor— disposed of a pump, which allowed to bring the water delivered by the water network from the cellar to the kitchen (Vandevyvere, 1983). In Antwerp as well, a survey of real estate for 1561–1614 (the Grootwerck by Ketgen), shows multiple references to pumps. By the early nineteenth century, the upper levels of urban society all enjoyed private access to water within their homes. However, we should be careful not to associate pumps solely with domestic access to water: in the same period, many neighborhood wells were also equipped with a pump. In the nineteenth century, the use of neighborhood wells became more socially biased. In a city such as Antwerp, pumps and wells disappeared in richer neighborhoods, but retained their social functions—even more strongly than before—in working-class neighborhoods (see Figure 4.2). Lis and Soly (1993) linked this evolution to a more pronounced residential segregation between the upper and the lower strata of society, increasingly producing socially homogenous neighborhoods. In its turn, the Antwerp municipality increasingly saw the delivery of drinking water to the poorer citizens as part of their responsibility for ‘public’ health. When in 1833 artesian wells were successfully constructed in Paris, the Antwerp city and provincial governments saved neither effort nor money to follow their southern neighbor’s example. The initial proposition for an experiment regarding artesian wells, which draw water from a deeper, confined aquifer through hydrostatic pressure, was made by council member Bréquigny with the goal of obtaining abundant and healthy water for the poor residents of the parish of Sint-Andries. Following the report of a special commission established a few weeks earlier, the city council voted a budget of 2,500 Belgian francs, ‘wishing to make the resulting benefits available for the residents if we succeed in procuring for them water that is healthy and pleasant, which regrettably is missing in many city quarters’ (1836). In Antwerp the project initially resulted in a failure (due to excessive amounts of salt in the water), but in 1879,

98  Ric Janssens and Tim Soens

Figure 4.2 Neighborhood pump at the Bontwerkersplaats in Antwerp, photo Léon Keusters, c. 1935 Source: Stadsarchief Antwerpen, FOTO-OF#8158, www.felixarchief.be

experiments by geologist baron Oscar Van Ertborn with an artesian well in a hotel on the Avenue des Arts were embraced by the city engineer and the (liberal) newspapers as cost-efficient ways of providing clean water.4 In Ghent, too, the municipality dug twelve new groundwater wells and pumps in the period 1860–1882, as a compensating measure for the fact that the surface water had become too polluted to use (De Groote, 1986).

Urbanizing Water 99

Centralized Systems: Piped Water Starting in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the predominant ‘courtyard’ system of shared water facilities was supplemented in many of the major European cities by a ‘public’ provisioning of water through networks of pipes supplying fountains in central places. In this period of pronounced urban growth, the access rights of a growing number of poor citizens to water were severely restricted. In this context, the provisioning of the urban poor with clear water became a highly prestigious act, either symbolizing the strength of the urban community or the benevolence of private benefactors or princely or ecclesiastical overlords (overviews in Magnusson, 2001; Schott, 2014, pp. 111–117; Rawcliffe, 2013, pp. 180–188). Basins and fountains were placed on central market squares, near central buildings or on main street corners, and, together with other types of buildings and monuments, served to appropriate these spaces as ‘public spaces’, common to all citizens and townspeople, and contrasting with the side streets, alleys and courtyards, which were increasingly associated with ‘private life’ (Deligne, 2008). Many of the earliest ‘public’ water infrastructures built on royal or monastic ‘private’ predecessors. They were turned into ‘public’ systems as early as the twelfth century (for London: Keene, 2001). In the capital cities of London and Paris, the first urban conduit systems were established through royal intervention. In 1182, the French king Philip II Augustus claimed the waters coming from Le Pré-Saint-Gervais through monastic conduits. Two centuries later—in 1363—the Parisian municipal authorities seized control of the comprehensive aqueduct of SaintLazare, and from that point on, the royal and municipal networks served the northwest and east of Paris respectively. Although the fountains that were served by the network rarely yielded sufficient amounts of water, it was said that their primary goal was to deliver water to urbanites who lived too far away from the Seine to obtain their drinking water from the river (Benoît, 2000). Similarly, the first London network was constructed with the aid of the king. Instead of supplying fountains, a comprehensive reservoir was built, ‘the Great Conduit’. The needs of the poor, who of all groups in this part of the city would have had least access to fresh water, seemed to have informed the enterprise. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the system of pipes was extended and more conduit houses were built across the city (Keene, 2001). Economic prosperity also served as an incentive for municipal authorities to construct water networks, independently from royal aid. In the Low Countries, the cities of Ypres and Bruges are renowned for their medieval networks. Bruges developed at least three networks of Moerbuizen in the thirteenth century, piped water networks which supplied public wells (Vandevyvere, 1983). For Liège, Deligne identified the temporal correspondence between the construction of the first public fountain (1285–1305) and the disturbances created by rival clans (1295–1335). The fountain acted

100  Ric Janssens and Tim Soens as a means of conciliation, restoration of public order and an appeal to the common good. The fountains of Brussels as well—most of them concentrated in the political and economic center of the city—were illustrative and constitutive of the municipal claim of authority over both influential families and the central ruler (Deligne, 2003, pp. 121–123). The design of the network also varied according to the ambitions and the goals of their initiators. Some of the early examples, like the one in Bruges, were more ‘distributive’—reflecting the ambition to distribute water to those in need of it. Other systems, often some time later, such as the Brussels’ network, were more ‘nodal’, clustered around the center of political gravity. They materialized the power and unity of the city’s elites in the urban landscape, but without the ambition of poor relief. It is also interesting to question why some major cities did not invest in a system of public water fountains supplied by pipes. Ghent—which had sixty thousand inhabitants or more at its peak in 1300—offers perhaps the most intriguing example of a major city that did not develop any kind of networked supply until the nineteenth century. Explaining the absence of such network in Ghent once again has to start from the specific socionatural configuration of the city. Ghent was situated at the confluence of two lowland rivers—the Lys and the Scheldt—and was crisscrossed by a myriad of river branches, ditches and canals, which were fully hybrid entities themselves, as they were either dug or constantly reworked by human intervention. Urban water supply was thus facilitated by the omnipresence of fresh water, and careful location policies forced the most polluting activities to be situated downstream. However, natural conditions alone are insufficient to explain the lack of enthusiasm displayed by the Ghent municipality for the undertaking of the construction of (piped) waterworks. In the thirteenth century (and later), the Ghent municipality was obsessed with waterworks, permanently reshaping its surface waters into a multifunctional complex, assuring navigation, flood protection, military defense, leather and textile industries, energy, and drinking water (Gelaude, 2010), but it did not construct a network of piped water, nor did it invest in public water wells (Laleman and Vermeiren, 2010, p. 26).5 Political considerations might have played a role: the control of surface waters helped to materialize the territorial ambitions of the city of Ghent, which was striving for economic and political hegemony over a broad hinterland during this period. On the other hand, unlike the international commercial gateway that Bruges was, the industrial city of Ghent might have been less inclined to invest in ‘fancy’ water systems to impress foreign visitors. A different socio-natural configuration, path dependency or perhaps an ‘intrinsic logic’ in the way a city dealt with water (Löw, 2012; Toyka-Seid, this volume), might also help to explain why one Flemish metropolis in the thirteenth century—Bruges—invested heavily in a networked system of piped water, and another one—Ghent— was not interested at all.

Urbanizing Water 101 Even if long-term path dependencies might be detected, the systems of piped water were also subject to important degrees of change over time. By the fifteenth century, the water system of Bruges increasingly supplied private houses as well as public fountains. The number of private connections rose from a modest 33 in 1404 to 96 in the early sixteenth century, and no fewer than 338 in 1610 (Vandevyvere, 1983). In London too, the water supplied by the conduit systems gradually came to be seen as a resource which could be traded. Already in the fourteenth century professional users (brewers, fishmongers, etc.) paid a fee for using the ‘Great Conduit’ (Magnusson, 2001, p.  127; Keene, 2001). On the other hand, providing free water to the urban poor became an act of Christian charity, and fifteenth-century London merchants and aldermen bequeathed large sums of money for the upkeep and expansion of the Conduit systems, as well as the cleaning of ditches and drains (Rawcliffe, 2013, pp. 223–227). Throughout the early modern period, networks of piped water did continue to be constructed, although often as private ventures. The best-known example is, of course, London (Van Lieshout, 2012; Jenner, 2000). As London’s population grew exponentially throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, open water largely disappeared in the city. This was both a direct result of the spread of the built-up area and an outcome of expanded drainage networks that channeled water underground. Networks of piped water, operated by private companies, increasingly became the vessels through which access to water was mediated. By the end of the eighteenth century, tenants in London expected to have access to domestic piped water supplies, and were prepared to pay for it. Here we apparently have the first advent of ‘modern’ commercial water supplies, but in practice the story is less straightforward and linear than often presumed. First of all, medieval conduit systems, which showed increasing signs of privatization from the fifteenth century onwards, had paved the way for the new water systems. Second, the new consumer-logic they introduced was modeled on old neighborhood sociability, as neighbors mostly negotiated with water companies as a group, not as individual consumers.6 And third, the new networked water supplies coexisted for centuries with other types of water provisioning (wells and fountains). Apart from the pre-existing traditions, and the dynamics caused by rapid population growth, the specific configuration of London water supplies with several competing private companies, might also be embedded in the wider context of the propensity of Elizabethan and Jacobean governments to entrust public works to ambitious ‘adventurers’: investors and (self-proclaimed) experts, operating through what could be labeled ‘public-private co-operations’ (their reputation often tarnished because of their speculative and corrupt nature). In hydraulic projects, some of these entrepreneurs originated from the Low Countries, like Peter Morris, who from 1581 on, elaborated a supply system based on

102  Ric Janssens and Tim Soens a waterwheel situated beneath London Bridge (Davids, this volume) or Cornelis Vermuyden, famous for his role in the drainage of the fens. In sixteenth-century Antwerp too, a water supply network was developed by a private entrepreneur, Gilbert Van Schoonbeke (d. 1556), but he operated in a somewhat different socio-natural configuration. Ever since Henri Pirenne, Van Schoonbeke has been considered as an early exponent of a capitalist concentration of industrial activities, permanently looking to maximize profit through scale enlargement, simplification and rationalization of the production process (Soly, 1968–1969, pp. 1202– 1204). His activities in the building industry, in energy provisioning— Van Schoonbeke organized large-scale exploitations of peat—and in the brewing industry, also show fascinating ways of dealing with ‘nature’, characterized by a long-distance mobilization of resources, a preference for large-scale technological solutions, and an underlying discourse on the ‘quality’ of the resource in question. His attempt to relocate the entire Antwerp brewing industry to a newly developed neighborhood in the north of the city was legitimized by the—real or perceived—deterioration of water quality in the old city which would have made brewing increasingly difficult. Already since the 1470s, Antwerp brewers complained that the water supplied by wells was too muddy (siltachtig). In the contract Van Schoonbeke negotiated in 1552 with the city of Antwerp, he promised to supply the breweries with a sufficient quantity of fresh (zuet) water, drawn from a more inland river about thirty kilometers from the city (Soly, 1968–1969, p.  369). This solution did not prove satisfactory and a few years later a new system was developed. In this, river water was channeled from the city moats and transported through an underground conduit to a water house, where a horse-driven waterwheel pumped the water into a network of lead pipes to the individual breweries. The whole reorganization of breweries and waterworks had cost an enormous amount of money—about 270,000 guilders, more than the new Antwerp city hall—but it granted Van Schoonbeke control over a vital industrial sector in what was by then the largest city of the Low Countries. In a context of increasing taxes on beer consumption—beer excises—and close financial ties between Van Schoonbeke and leading figures in the urban and central government, the whole operation was far from uncontested. In their attack on Van Schoonbeke in 1554 rioters also proved sensitive to the discourse on water quality: in their opinion the water stank and maggots germinated in it, which prompted the city government to invite a committee of foreign brewers (from Gouda and Delft in Holland, and Ghent and Menen in Flanders) to investigate the matter (Soly, 1968–1969, pp. 372–373). Both from an economic and an environmental point of view, Van Schoonbeke’s water system was not as innovative as its instigators proclaimed—after all, the waterwheel-driven system resembled its thirteenth-century predecessors—but it remains a clear example of the way technological ‘improvement’ was used for

Urbanizing Water 103 the consolidation of power relations, based on underlying discourses of water quality. In this case, the consolidation did not prove permanent: after Van Schoonbeke’s death, the Antwerp brewing industry was reorganized on a ‘normal’ corporate basis and the piped water system came to symbolize the corporate power of the brewers. In Antwerp and most other cities of the Low Countries, the breakthrough of piped water for domestic use only occurred in the nineteenth century. The eventual hegemony of what is today considered ‘modern water’ was not the result of a new technology which was inherently superior to its predecessors and universally adopted because of this superiority. First of all, the adoption of the new centralized water networks was remarkably slow. According to Geels (2005), local conditions in some cities provided space for the first piped water systems in the 1850s. Problems in the water supply regime grew worse during the 1860s and 1870s, yet public authorities did not embrace this new socio-technological niche. Instead, they searched for solutions within the existing regime. It would take a few more decades—and an acceleration of urban demographic and economic growth—before the new socio-technical project was finally accepted. Second, the form in which the water system that we today consider as modern became stabilized, the values that were materialized in its technology, were far from agreed upon at its origin. Most authors point to the increasing influence of the sanitary movement and the adoption of changing notions of cleanliness by the working class, but the importance of health concerns as a trigger for the transformation of urban water supplies might have been less universal than often thought (Geels, 2005; Van Craenenbroeck, 1998). A city like Maastricht, studied by Cillekens et al. (1988), mostly used the new water supply system as a way of marketing the city. The urban authorities had become increasingly concerned about the city as an unattractive living environment, causing well-to-do citizens to escape to the suburbs. In keeping the well-off within the city, the creation of a networked water supply and the promotion of a modern ‘water culture’ were crucial. Furthermore, no consensus existed regarding the question of whether the construction of waterworks should be a public operation or be left to private initiatives. Municipalities generally took the lead in the Low Countries, but large cities such as Ghent, Antwerp and Maastricht opted for issuing concessions to private companies in the 1870s and 1880s, despite their financial prosperity at the time. The identity of the contractors reveals something of the ambitions of the initiators: whereas in Maastricht the concession was issued to two architects as part of a broader plan of city redevelopment, in Ghent the concession was given to the petitioner that was able offer the best rate for the water needed by the municipality itself (to clean public streets and squares) (De Groote, 1986). It is clear that for the lower social classes who were still dependent on public provisions, the advent of the waterworks introduced a temporary

104  Ric Janssens and Tim Soens deterioration in their access to water. After the implementation of a piped supply in 1887, the Maastricht authorities refrained entirely from maintaining the public pumps, arguing that it was up to house owners to arrange drinking water for their tenants (Cillekens et al., 1988). In Antwerp, the concession agreement between the city and the Easton and Anderson Company of 1879 stipulated that ten standpipes would be installed at the expense of the city, to which the water company would deliver free water for the benefit of the ‘laboring and destitute classes’. However, only of six of the free standpipes could it be said that their location ensured they would be used for their envisaged purpose.7 Even when the system remained in public operation, such as in Brussels from 1855 and in Ghent after 1884, getting all urbanites connected to the water network was not the main concern. The Brussels water provision was conceived of from the very beginning as a public service, managed entirely by the urban authorities. The goal of the municipality was to connect all urbanites, rich or poor. However, the rates were high and as such excluded the lowest social classes, while at the same time, the city removed the ancient public fountains. As a result, in Brussels too, it were the city’s service providers who were the main consumers of the networked water, with only 37  percent of the water distributed to private consumers in 1903 (Deligne et al., 2006). In Ghent, expansion of connectivity occurred at an even slower rate. Only within a limited perimeter did the city construct water mains for free when receiving a demand for network connection. As such, public management of the water supply remained economically beneficial for the city, given the vast urban territory, and, in addition, keeping the number of subscribers limited prevented a worsening of the problem of water scarcity that Ghent struggled with from day one (De Groote, 1986). Especially in Lower Belgium (and parts of France and the Netherlands), surface water was considered as too insalubrious. With the exception of Antwerp, where the network supplied filtered river water (just like its sixteenth-century predecessor), most Flemish cities opted for groundwater. However, pumping capacity remained extremely limited (Van Craenenbroeck, 1998; Frioux, 2010). Only around 1900 did regional and national cooperation resolve issues of water scarcity. The Belgian state embarked on an active program of subsidizing municipal drinking water initiatives. In 1891, the Brussels suburbs Ixelles, Schaerbeek, SaintGilles and Saint-Josse founded the Brussels Intercommunal for Water Distribution, out of resentment at the Brussels water management. In this they were funded by the Province of Brabant. The project served as an inspiration for the law of 18 August  1907 which enshrined the advantageous status of intercommunal institutions for water distribution. In 1913, even interregional solutions became possible thanks to the creation of the National Society for Water Distribution (Deligne et al., 2006). For Ghent, years of water shortage were put to an end in 1923,

Urbanizing Water 105 when the city received water from Wallonia (water-rich Upper Belgium; De Groote, 1986). Even then, full connectivity was not reached. Only after World War II was the social issue of water access raised in political debates by members of the socialist party, leading to the Brunfaut Law of 1949, promising fully subsidized network connections in social housing projects. Still, Brussels had to wait until 1980 to reach 98 percent connectivity (Deligne et al., 2006).

Conclusion Urban water has been a socio-technical resource in northern Europe since the urban take-off in the period 1000–1300. At the same time, the precise socio-technical and socio-natural configuration of urban water has been subject to immense variations over the past eight hundred years. During most of northwestern European urban history, centralized and decentralized water systems have existed simultaneously. What at first sight appear as rather straightforward transitions between ‘socio-natural regimes’ or ‘Ages of Water’ (as argued by Guillerme, 1988, p.  175), on closer look are gradual, complex and discontinuous processes, with different water technologies coexisting for centuries. Traces of water modernity and modernization (water as commodity; physical distancing between humans and water through underground networks; expert control, technological or scientific testing, etc.) pop up now and then, but they are seldom permanent, and not linked to a particular type of technology. Much more important and consistent than water as an intellectual project was water as social project; as a vital resource in urban life, water supplies invariably embodied a certain vision of society, and improvements of the water infrastructure often proved the ideal object for programs of social politics. In this perspective, ‘modern’ water networks of the nineteenthcentury thus become just one example of transforming society through water (compare Schott, 2014, pp. 305–306). Prevailing power relations and ideas on what constituted ‘ideal’ water were embedded in water systems at their construction. However, the agency of technology in stabilizing these values proved limited in the end. It is true that certain values were embedded in technologies of water supply at the moment of their implementation; however, the same technological configurations could embody entirely different societal realities at a later date, without major changes in their material structure. A  thirteenth-century networked water system could be inspired by religious motives of charity toward the urban poor, but by the late Middle Ages, the same network could be exploited on a more commercial basis, providing connection to private dwellings. Similarly, late medieval and early modern decentralized water wells might embody neighborhood solidarity and the ‘common wealth’ of rich and poor inhabitants in a particular district. Yet, the same infrastructure could

106  Ric Janssens and Tim Soens also be used by municipal governments to consolidate their rule over the urban space. In addition, despite the longevity of the public wells and pumps, rather than neighborhood solidarity, the system came to embody the social distinction between those who relied upon such free water and the well-to-do who could afford alternatives. Lastly, even the extraordinary expansion of networked waterworks in the nineteenth century cannot be reduced to a uniform materialization of (hygieneinspired) social-environmental politics. Local political constellations, the dynamics of the real estate market, and different geographical and hydrological settings, all interacted to produce highly divergent trajectories of modernization. Throughout the history of urban water supplies, multiple cultures of water continued to coexist, and technologies were flexible enough to incorporate prevailing social requirements (see Figure  4.3). Even when a networked water supply was widely available, according to Taylor and Trentmann (2011), practices did not necessarily enact new technical directives, as consumers reassumed forms of control that were not foreseen by the ‘designers’ of the system. In recent decades, consumers have continued to act against a limiting of their choices of drinking water, by taking advantage of newly introduced alternatives to tap water, such as home filtration products and the introduction of a wide range of bottled waters (Euzen and Haghe, 2012). Practices and norms surrounding urban water are increasingly discussed by individual users and collectivities, which, according to Bell (2015), generates a huge potential for a more ‘sustainable’ transformation of urban water consumption. Insofar as such a new transformation hopes to undo the negative consequences of ‘modern water’ (such as the excessive use and spoiling of a scarce resource; the unequal distribution of costs and benefits or the qualification of water as an economic resource), the history of urban water analyzed in this contribution allows for three final observations. First of all, urban water infrastructures and practices have been shaped by centuries of interaction and co-evolution of cities and water. They display an important degree of rigidity and path dependency, but are nevertheless open to change. Second, every past transformation of urban water has been conceived and ‘marketed’ as an ‘improvement’, but we should be alert to the redistribution of—environmental and economic—costs and benefits it entails, as well as the way power relations are established or confirmed through the reconfiguration of urban water. Finally, we hope to have demonstrated how urban water should be analyzed starting from the specific socio-natural configuration of every city. Even highly similar technologies could have a profoundly different meaning in different cities or periods. In addition, designs which worked perfectly in one context, failed completely in another. By looking at urban water as a socio-natural site, we realize that even if a technology has universal aspirations, its implications invariably are site-specific. As such we should be careful not

Figure 4.3 Continuity and change in water supplies: neighborhood pump with ‘tap’ connected to ‘modern’ network of piped water, Antwerp, early twentieth century (?) Source: Stadsarchief Antwerpen, FOTO-OF#6160, www.felixarchief.be

108  Ric Janssens and Tim Soens to develop new universal models of ‘sustainable urban water’, which do not take into account these site-specific socio-natural conditions. Otherwise, sustainability risks becoming the new modernity.

Notes 1. For the city of Ghent, for instance, only the ‘water streets’ are clearly documented. In contrast, only a few medieval patrician houses seem to have disposed of a water well (Laleman and Vermeiren, 2010, pp. 26–29). 2. See also the Antwerp fire ordinance of 1581: ‘The fire men will ensure that in each district two well officers are appointed, who, for the entire year, will supervise the common wells in their area, in order that these wells are maintained in a good and ready condition with clean water, allowing the community to use them on a daily basis and to extinguish any flames in times of fire’ (Antwerp City Archives, Ancien Régime, Privilegiekamer, ‘Put- en brandmeesters’, PK#1472, July 8th 1581). 3. In 1835 the Antwerp city architect stated: ‘I believe, gentlemen, that the City cannot remove an object of public utility in order to satisfy a private interest’. (Antwerp City Archives, MA#956a, Suppressions et Réclamations, 9, 16 November  1835, ‘Je crois messieurs que la Ville ne peut pas supprimer un objet d’utilité publique, afin de satisfaire à un intérêt particulier’.) 4. Antwerp City Archives, MA#1289, 1, 25 January 1879: ‘Ce prix étant bien inférieur à celui d’un puits en maçonnerie d’un diamètre plus grand mais d’une profondeur moindre, il serait à mon avis très convenable de faire un essai, et si le résultat est favorable comme tout le fait supposer la Ville serait dispensée d’établir plus d’un puits public parce qu’il serait facile alors à tous les particuliers de faire des puits de l’espèce, d’un diamètre et d’un coût inférieur, avec la certitude de succès’. 5. Laleman and Vermeiren, 2010, p. 26: only six public water wells are reported in the period before 1420—remarkably few for a city of sixty thousand inhabitants. 6. In addition, traces of a consumer-logic can be found in the maintenance of neighborhood wells as well. In early modern Antwerp, a distinction was made between brandgeld—fire tax, representing the function of the well in fire prevention and paid by all households—and putgeld—well tax, representing the consumption of water, which was not paid by those households disposing of private water facilities. 7. Ongoing PhD research by Ric Janssens (UAntwerpen) on the social topography of Antwerp water supplies (sixteenth to nineteenth centuries).

References Archival Sources Antwerp City Archives. Ancien Régime, Privilegiekamer, ‘Put- en brandmeesters’, PK#1472, 8 July 1581. ———. Modern Stadsarchief, MA#956a, ‘Suppressions et Réclamations’, 9, 16 November 1835. ———. Modern Stadsarchief, MA#1289, 1, 25 January 1879.

Urbanizing Water 109 Literature Asdal, K., 2003. The problematic nature of nature: the post-constructivist challenge to environmental history. History and Theory, 42 (4), pp. 60–74. Bell, S., 2015. Renegotiating urban water. Progress in Planning, 96, pp. 1–28. Benoît, P., 2000. L’alimentation et les usages de l’eau à Paris du XIIe au XVIe siècle. Programme Interdisciplinaire de Recherche sur l’Environnement de la Seine (PIREN) Rapport d’activité 2000. www.metis.upmc.fr/piren/phases_16/?q=webfm_send/492 (last accessed 11 August 2017). Boone, R., 1959. Overheidszorg voor drinkwater in Vlaanderen. Gent: Snoeck-Ducaju. Cillekens, C., van den Boogard, J. and Gales, B., 1988. Loop naar de pomp: Geschiedenis van de watervoorziening en waterleiding in Maastricht. Maastricht: Stichting Historische Reeks Maastricht. Decavele, J., 1997. Bestuursinstellingen van de stad Gent (einde 11de eeuw-1795). In: W. Prevenier and B. Augustyn eds. De gewestelijke en lokale overheidsinstellingen in Vlaanderen tot 1795. Brussel: Algemeen Rijksarchief, pp. 277–320. Deceulaer, H., 1996. Implicaties van de straat: rechten, plichten en conflicten in de Gentse gebuurten (17e-18e eeuw). Handelingen der Maatschappij voor Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde te Gent, 50, pp. 121–147. De Groote, S., 1986. De watervoorziening in Gent vanaf het midden van de 19de eeuw tot het begin van de 20ste eeuw. In: Het openbaar initiatief van de gemeenten in België, 1975–1940. Brussel: Gemeentekrediet, pp. 209–222. Deligne, C., 2003. Bruxelles et sa rivière: Genèse d’un territoire urbain (12e-18e siècle). Turnhout: Brepols. Deligne, C., 2008. Edilité et politique: Les fontaines urbaines dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux au Moyen Âge. Histoire Urbaine, 22 (2), pp. 77–96. Deligne, C., Dagenais, M. and Poitras, C., 2006. Gérer l’eau en milieu urbain. Regards croisés sur Bruxelles et Montréal, 1870–1980. In: S. Jaumain and P-A. Linteau eds. Vivre en ville: Bruxelles et Montréal (XIXe-XXe siècles). Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang, pp. 169–201. Euzen, A. and Haghe, J-P., 2012. What kind of water is good enough to drink? The evolution of perceptions about drinking water in Paris from modern to contemporary period. Water History, 4, pp. 231–244. Feenberg, A., 1991. Critical theories of technology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frioux, S., 2010. De zoektocht naar zuiver water in Noord-Franse en Belgische steden tijdens de Belle Epoque (1890–1914). Jaarboek voor Ecologische Geschiedenis, pp. 123–146. Geels, F., 2005. Co-evolution of technology and society: the transition in water supply and personal hygiene in the Netherlands (1850–1930)—a case study in multi-level perspective. Technology in Society, 27, pp. 363–397. Gelaude, F., 2010. Waterbeheer in een middeleeuwse grootstad: stuwen en dammen te Gent (12e-14e eeuw). Jaarboek voor Ecologische Geschiedenis, pp. 33–52. Groenewoudt, B. and Benders, J., 2013. Private and shared water facilities in rural settlements and small towns: Archaeological and historical evidence from the Netherlands from the medieval and post-medieval periods. In: J. Klápště ed. Hierarchies in rural settlements. Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 245–262.

110  Ric Janssens and Tim Soens Guillerme, A., 1988. The age of water: the urban environment in the North of France, A.D. 300–1800. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Hammel-Kiesow, R., 1996. Property patterns, buildings and the social structure of urban society: some reflections on Ghent, Lübeck and Novgorod. In: F-E. Eliassen and G. A. Ersland eds. Power, profit and urban land: landownership in medieval and early modern Northern European towns. Aldershot: Scolar Press, pp. 39–60. Harding, V., 2002. Space, property and propriety in urban England. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 32 (4), pp. 549–569. Jenner, M., 2000. From conduit community to commercial network? Water in London, 1500–1725. In: P. Griffiths and M. Jenner eds. Londinopolis: essays in the cultural and social history of early modern London. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 250–272. Jørgensen, D., 2010. ‘All good rule of the citee’: Sanitation and civic government in England, 1400–1600. Journal of Urban History, 36 (3), pp. 300–315. Kaïka, M., 2005. City of flows: modernity, nature, and the city. Oxon: Routledge. Keene, D., 2001. Issues of water in medieval London to c. 1300. Urban History, 28 (2), pp. 161–179. Laleman, M-C. and Vermeiren, G., 2010. Ruimte en bebouwing in het centrum van het middeleeuwse Gent. Handelingen der Maatschappij voor Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde te Gent, LXIV (2), pp. 3–56. Linton, J., 2010. What is water? The history of a modern abstraction. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Lis, C. and Soly, H., 1993. Neighbourhood social change in West-European cities: Sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. International Review of Social History, 38 (1), pp. 1–30. Löw, M., 2012. The intrinsic logic of cities: towards a new theory on urbanism. Urban Research and Practice, 5 (3), pp. 303–315. Magnusson, R. J., 2001. Water technology in the middle ages: cities, monasteries, and waterworks after the Roman Empire. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Massard-Guilbaud, G., 2010. Histoire de la pollution industrielle: France, 1789– 1914. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS. Merchant, C., 1990. The death of nature: women, ecology and the scientific revolution. New York: HarperCollins. Olsson, L. and Head, B. W., 2015. Urban water governance in times of multiple stressors: an editorial. Ecology and Society, 20 (1), p. 27. Ostrom, E., 1990. Governing the commons: the evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rawcliffe, C., 2013. Urban bodies: communal health in late medieval English towns and cities. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press. Ruhland, F., 2007. Power, pleasure and pollution: water use in pre-industrial Nuremberg and Prague. Klaudyán: Internet Journal of Historical Geography and Environmental History, 4 (2), pp. 5–18. Schatzki, T. R., 2003. Nature and technology in society. History and Theory, 42, pp. 82–93. Schott, D., 2014. Europäische Urbanisierung (1000–2000): Eine umwelthistorische Einführung. Cologne: Böhlau.

Urbanizing Water 111 Soly, H., 1968–1969. De brouwerijonderneming van Gilbert van Schoonbeke (1552–1562). Revue belge de Philologie et d’Histoire, 46, pp.  337–392 and pp. 1166–1204. Taylor, V. and Trentmann, F., 2011. Liquid politics: water and the politics of everyday life in the modern city. Past and Present, 211, pp. 199–241. Van Craenenbroeck, W., 1998. Antwerpen op zoek naar drinkwater: Het ontstaan en de ontwikkeling van de openbare drinkwatervoorziening in Antwerpen 1860–1930. Tielt: Lannoo. Van Den Nieuwenhuizen, J., 2000. Bestuursinstellingen van de stad Antwerpen (12de eeuw-1795). In: R. Van Uytven, C. Bruneel, H. Coppens and B. Augustyn eds. De gewestelijke en lokale overheidsinstellingen in Brabant en Mechelen tot 1795. Brussel: Algemeen Rijksarchief, pp. 462–510. Van der Heijden, M., 2010. Introduction: new perspectives on public services in early modern Europe. Journal of Urban History, 36 (3), pp. 271–284. Vandevyvere, E., 1983. Watervoorziening te Brugge van de 13de tot de 20ste eeuw. Brugge: Koninklijke Gidsenbond van Brugge en West-Vlaanderen. Van Lieshout, C., 2012. London’s changing waterscapes—the management of water in eighteenth-century London. Unpublished PhD dissertation. King’s College London. Verhulst, A., 1994. The origins and early development of medieval towns in Northern Europe. Economic History Review, XLVII (2), pp. 362–373. Winiwarter, V., Schmid, M. and Dressel, G., 2013. Looking at half a millennium of co-existence: The Danube in Vienna as a socio-natural site. Water History, 5 (2), pp. 101–119.

5 Cities Hiding the Forests Wood Supply, Hinterlands and Urban Agency in the Southern Low Countries, Thirteenth to Eighteenth Centuries Paulo Charruadas and Chloé Deligne State of the Art: Dominant Narratives and Reflexive Framework The Middle Ages as well as the Early Modern period were by and large ‘civilizations of wood’. Wood was the primary source of energy, only partially rivaled by peat and coal where these raw materials were locally available and exploited. As such wood served all kinds of purposes, in the domestic sphere (heating, cooking) as well as in industry (bakery, brewery, metal industry, salt production, etc.). It played a key role in the manufacturing of many tools and devices, it was used in the transport sector (carts, ships), for making beverage and food containers (barrels, casks), in agriculture (plows, fences) and in many craft industries. Finally—even if secondary in quantitative terms—it was one of the main materials used for building. Against this background, the importance of wood for the process of urbanization is glaringly obvious (Schubert, 1986; Knoll, 2006, pp. 80–81; Haneca et al., 2009). However, little attention has been paid to the environmental dynamics between cities and their wood resources in the literature dedicated to urban history and the urbanization of Europe, or of some regions within Europe (AGN, 1980; Verhulst, 1999; Pinol et al., 2003; Clark, 2010). Conversely, environmental history of woodlands has paid little attention to the process of urbanization (Delort and Walter, 2001; Rackham, 2001; Aberth, 2012). Until quite recently, it was hard to find any studies bridging both themes (for a useful exception, see Cronon, 1992), especially for ‘early’ periods like the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. With regards to wood supply and woodland management, historiography has been limited to general considerations, assuming that the general population growth and the concurrent growing urbanization of the Middle Ages led to an overall deterioration of woodlands and, more generally, to extensive deforestation, at least in Western Europe (Braudel, 1979, pp.  408–416; Roche, 1991; Williams, 2003). The emphasis has long been on the dieback of the woodlands, but with little regard

Cities Hiding the Forests 113 for forest management, for technical knowledge, or for the evolution of forest ecosystems. This resulted from the too-simplistic reading of some historical sources, reflecting the views of the landlords and rulers, who claimed woodlands were badly managed and jeopardized by usage rights exercised by neighboring peasants and inhabitants. But the discourse about the inevitable dieback of European forests has its own history. It is not the purpose of this paper to describe how this ‘depletion narrative’ was constructed during the Early Modern period, then reinforced in the nineteenth century, and finally taken for granted by a large number of twentieth-century historians. Suffice it to say that the context of emergent globalization (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries), which witnessed the development of this narrative, was one of a huge demand in timber wood, mainly for shipbuilding and fortification works. In this context, to put it simply, any forest whose profits were not maximized in order to meet the state demand was regarded as badly managed or ‘deteriorated’, when in fact it was often intentionally preserved as coppices-with-standards1 or wood-pastures.2 It should also be remembered that the available historical sources mostly concern the domain, or state-owned forests, which were the most likely to be subject to the multiple usage rights of inhabitants and which, according to their landlords, ‘threatened’ the development of high forests.3 The scant information about private commercial woods truncates our vision of woodlands management in the pre-industrial period. Since the 1990s, this ‘depletion narrative’ has been deconstructed by some historians in Germany, France or Britain. It is considered, especially in Germany, that the critique of the degraded forest and the woodshortage debate, its corollary, had been a discursive strategy designed to regulate usage rights. It is even believed that both aimed to prohibit usage rights as part of the evolution of a utility-based society into a propertybased society (Warde, 2006; Radkau, 2008; Radkau, 2012; Reith, 2014). Other historians, mainly in France, reinterpreted the complaints from the institutions in charge of forest management as a way of affirming their ‘good governance’ (Corvol, 1994; Corvol, 1996; Chalvet, 2011). In the Southern Low Countries (roughly speaking, present-day Belgium) both interpretations can be supported. Several alarmist reports produced in the eighteenth century by the Chambre des Comptes (Accounts Chamber) and by the Conseil des Finances (Council of Finance)—both central institutions operating throughout the Southern Low Countries and based in Brussels—showed willingness to reorganize or reduce usage rights as well as to claim control over woodlands (Goblet d’Alviella, 1927–1930; Schmit, 2010, pp. 142–143; Charruadas, 2012). The role of urban actors and ‘urban agency’ in the history of European forests remains poorly studied. In England, for instance, except in the case of London studied by Galloway et al. (1996), the study of anthropogenic impacts on woodlands either leaves aside the specific influence

114  Paulo Charruadas and Chloé Deligne of cities and towns (Rackham, 2001; Aberth, 2012, pp. 77–139) or faces analytical difficulties to a practical understanding of the arrangements of this possible ‘urban agency’. In his study of the woodlands economy of medieval Kent, for example, Kenneth Witney finds it difficult to differentiate between local/regional urban demand (London, Canterbury) and the interregional commercial exports on the river Rother and the Channel (Witney, 1990). By contrast, the specific impact of urban demand on the woodlands of late medieval Champagne has been addressed by Richard Keyser (2009). According to his study, commercialization and commercial opportunities contributed to transform the, until then, extensive woodland management that resulted in a landscape of scattered tall trees needed for mast feeding into intensive firewood production that lead to another type of landscape (coppice-with-standards) that was specially intended for commercial purposes. This new landscape also fulfilled the fuel needs of the growing neighboring cities (Troyes, Provins, Reims, Meaux). But even in the case studied by Keyser, it is difficult to clearly distinguish between the specific impact of urbanization and the influence of the general commodification of woodlands resources. How can these two factors be isolated from one another in a European urban landscape that, according to the hegemonic narrative developed since Henri Pirenne and Max Weber, was deeply framed by the ‘consubstantial’ developments of cities ‘and’ commerce? As stated by Jean-Pierre Sosson (1996), the question of urban wood supply remains largely unexplored in the Southern Low Countries (one recent exception for Flanders from a dendrochronological perspective: Haneca, 2015). The available ‘environmental’ or ‘supply’ studies focusing instead on other raw materials such as wool, grain or water (Van Uytven, 1985; Deligne, 2003). For one of the most urbanized areas of pre-industrial Western Europe, this statement may seem surprising, especially when considering the importance of wood in urban everyday life, as noted above. The only global study of woodland history in the Southern Low Countries is an old one, from the beginning of the last century (Goblet d’Alviella, 1927–1930). Although it provides relevant information about the evolution of woodlands and forests, the approach appears globally out of date. A more recent general attempt made by Jean-Pierre Sosson has concentrated on the commercial aspects of wood circulation (Sosson, 1996). An overview of the evolutionary relations between cities and woodlands resources in the Southern Low Countries is thus still missing. Of course, local and regional studies do exist (for example Sosson, 1977; Charruadas, 2012; Billen, 1993a, 1993b), but until now they have not been put together in a comprehensive study. This chapter aims at taking a first step in that direction. In the wake of the works of Karl Appuhn on Venice (Appuhn, 2000; Appuhn, 2009) and Joachim Radkau on wood issues (Radkau, 2008; Radkau, 2012), this chapter will try to shed light on the history of the

Cities Hiding the Forests 115 complex interactions between cities and woodlands not only from an economic and material point of view, but also from a social and cultural one. Questions about the Cartesian separation between nature and culture have promoted a shift in our vision of the relationships between social context and natural environment (Godelier, 1984; Latour, 1991; Descola, 2005). Approaching wood and woodlands from an urban-environmental perspective necessitates the use of different timescales. With regard to wood, a long-term or diachronic perspective is needed to understand the structural dimension of the circulation network of wood supplies (Schott, 2004, pp.  520–522; Quenet, 2014, pp.  174–176). In contrast, a short term or synchronic approach is important to reveal the layers that framed woodlands management, as well as urban and social needs. Only this twofold approach can lead to an assessment of what urban agency was in the case of wood supply. By focusing on how urban networks shaped wooded areas and how wooded areas shaped urban networking, this chapter will also deal with the question of hinterland. Given the variety of wooden products needed in urban everyday life, the hinterland of a city as far as wood supplies were concerned was constantly reshaped. This was because of the necessity to think about woodlands management on different temporal scales (short: a few years; long: about 25–40 years; very long: between 80 and 120 years). In order to meet their needs, cities and their merchants developed complex sourcing strategies, resulting in the diversification and specialization of different kinds of wooden spaces. What remains then of the classical notion of hinterland described as the space polarized by a central place or as a homogeneous supply area?

Contrasted Landscapes: Forest Cover and Management in the Southern Low Countries Mapping the real extent as well as the composition of woodlands remains a major challenge for historians whatever the spatial scale. At a European level, some figures have been assumed. According to the estimates provided by Paul Warde (2004), around 30–35  percent of the surface area of France, Germany, Bohemia and Poland were wooded in the Early Modern period. Scandinavia and the Baltic were more forested, but forests covered only around 10–12  percent of the surface area of Ireland and Britain. For the ‘Netherlands’ (but it is not clear which region it is referred to: the present-day Netherlands and Belgium?) the ratio would have reached about 20 percent. This last figure however conceals a much more complex reality in the Southern Low Countries. This area is characterized by variety in terms of landscape, urbanization, socio-economic organization and political structures (this diversity is the starting point of Van Bavel, 2010). With respect to the woodlands and the city-nature relationships, the region appears de facto heterogeneous and can be divided

116  Paulo Charruadas and Chloé Deligne

NORTHERN LOW COUNTRIES

RHIN Dordrecht

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Figure 5.1 Map of the Low Countries, showing the principal cities and the different political principalities Source: Map by authors

at a macro-regional scale and in a long-term perspective into three main areas (Figure 5.1): •

A northern and northwestern area, which was densely populated and urbanized (with big cities like Ghent, Bruges, Ypres, Tournai, Antwerp and Lille) and therefore sparsely wooded from an early period

Cities Hiding the Forests 117 onwards; this area, somewhat larger than the former county of Flanders, borders the North Sea and its inner territories were endowed with a dense river system suitable for trade (the Scheldt and the Leie, with artificial canals linking the coast to the inland). • A Southern and Southeastern area, which was more sparsely populated and preserving a vast expanse of woodlands, roughly corresponding to the small county of Namur, the Prince-Bishopric of Liège and the duchies of Limburg and Luxembourg; the main waterway here was the river Meuse, regarded since the early Middle Ages as a major trade route. • In between, an intermediate area stretching from the north-east to the southwest, corresponding approximately to the county of Hainaut and the duchy of Brabant (with big or medium-sized cities such as Mons, Binche, Brussels, Leuven, and Mechelen) where several scattered, but in some case valuable, woods and forests were maintained throughout the period (fourteenth to eighteenth centuries); Hainaut and Brabant were characterized by a poorer hydrographical network consisting of small and medium-sized rivers, so that the city of Brussels would dig an impressive canal in the sixteenth century in order to be connected to the North Sea area. Regarding the forest cover, this general overview, corresponding more or less to the late medieval and early modern situation, results from a long-term process rooted in different geological, pedological and landuse patterns. It is still clearly visible on the late eighteenth-century map of the Count of Ferraris, which was produced after two hundred years of intense exploitation of woodlands, especially in the southern and southeastern area. At that time 80 percent of the forests were still located south of the Meuse, especially in the Ardennes (Tallier, 2004) (Figure 5.2). This general statement could refer to a Braudelian ‘geographical time’: made of imperceptible and slow changes. But it is essential to deepen our understanding by looking at practices, since they tell us another story about the relation between cities and woodlands in this area. It could be assumed at first sight that the scarcity of wood resources in the north and northwestern area, or even in the intermediate area, led to an early medieval organization of commercial networks, and therefore to a relative lack of interest in local woodlands. If the first proposition is true (see the following), the latter is untrue. As a study has shown, the low forest cover (about 10 percent) of the region corresponding to present-day Flanders actually resulted in a more intensive exploitation and a better use of hedgerows, groves and woodlands under the influence of urban demand. From the fourteenth century onwards, damaged woodlands and fringe lands were reforested and the inhabitants’ usage rights were limited, if not completely suppressed. There are strong indications that the forest cover increased to reach an afforestation rate of around 15  percent in the middle of the eighteenth century (Tack and

118  Paulo Charruadas and Chloé Deligne Dordrecht

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Figure 5.2 Map of the ‘Belgian’ forest cover at the end of the eighteenth century based on the Ferraris map Source: Map by authors, based on data from Tallier, 2004

Hermy, 1998). The great majority of these woodlands were coppiceswith-standards, mainly dedicated to intensive firewood production, but occasionally providing construction wood thanks to the presence of their timber trees (Verhulst, 1995; Chahou, 1997; Tack et al., 1993; Tack and Hermy, 1998; Haneca, 2015). In any case, forest management was on the whole far more intensive in the north and the center than in the south (Sommé, 1990; Billen, 1993a; van Bavel, 2010, pp. 48–49). This observation leads us to think that cities may have played a protective role with regard to some forests and woodlands. As a matter

Cities Hiding the Forests 119 of fact, this was convincingly demonstrated in several studies of cities, such as Nuremberg, Frankfurt am Main, London and Venice (Pfeiffer, 1972; Galloway et al., 1996; Monnet, 2000; Appuhn, 2009). In these cases, the preservation of peri-urban, or more distant, woodlands could be directly correlated with the political and administrative action of the cities. Some cities of the Southern Low Countries could be added to the list. On the borders of the county of Hainaut and the duchy of Brabant, the ancient Forêt charbonnière (silva carbonaria or ‘charcoal forest’) had been extensively cleared during the Middle Ages. But some stretches of woods were maintained, mostly close to the small cities of Hal, Braine-leChâteau, Nivelles, Enghien, Binche and Mons. In the thirteenth century, these woods were managed as coppices-with-standards and harvested in a short-rotation system (between seven and twenty-five years; Soumillion, 1997; Chahou, 1997; Charruadas, 2016). The case of Brussels with its Forêt de Soignes (the ‘Sonian Forest’) offers another example of the interplay of economic, social and political contexts and environmental dynamics; an interesting example of a complex socio-natural process. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, this important city of the Southern Low Countries had coexisted with a relatively large state-owned forest that stretched out southeast of the city and covered around ten thousand hectares. The presence of a large urban population contributed to the preservation of a forest mainly composed of coppices and timber trees. The latter had been exploited in an eighty-year rotation system since at least the sixteenth century. The matter was not that simple, however. Two complementary features must be taken into account to understand the relationship between the city and the forest, and the socio-institutional arrangement which made this conservation possible. First, the city had been the seat of a princely court since at least the twelfth century. For this court the practice of hunting was of great importance. The Forêt de Soignes, with its tall timber trees, was even regarded as of great symbolic value by the princely government who struggled to maintain the ‘grandeur’ of the natural scene. As such, this landscape formed an ornamental extension of the court and the city—although lying outside the urban territory (Charruadas, 2012, p. 69). Thus, the management of this domain forest was not under the direct control of urban authorities as sometimes occurred in the German Empire or in Northern Italy, where cities could take control of their neighboring forests. The princely officers (the woudmeester or ‘master of the forest’, and various other officers, mostly from Brussels) held authority over the Forest while a group of sworn wood merchants (most of them also from Brussels) was appointed as judicial support for commercial matters. They ensured that the forestry code established by the princely forest administration was respected. In this context, while merchants certainly fostered the commercial production of the Forêt de Soignes— firewood and charcoal for the urban market—and thus a short-rotation

120  Paulo Charruadas and Chloé Deligne coppice management, the symbolic dimension of the Forest played an important role in the conservation of wide areas of tall timber trees. This explains why its management is a startling exception in the north and central region of the Southern Low Countries, where short-rotation coppices largely prevailed (Figure 5.3). The situation was clearly different in the southern and southeastern area, where forests and woodlands, due to a significantly lower population density, were less impacted by local needs, at least until the end of the Middle Ages. These woodlands were characterized by an arrangement of much more complex landscapes, combining at different spatial scales different kinds of wooded areas. These ranged from mere coppices (i.e., intensively exploited for fuel production) to extensively exploited tall trees zones, and everything between these two methods of harvesting the forest. Not surprisingly, the first were more likely to be located close to urban centers and/or floatable rivers whereas the second were located in more remote areas that were difficult to harvest (Billen, 1993a; De Moreau de Gerbehaye, 1996). On the scale of the entire Southern Low Countries, north and south were connected through the Meuse and the Scheldt Rivers. The first flows from the richly wooded Ardennes in the South to the ‘hub’ of the

Figure 5.3 Le livre des Déduis du roi Modus et de la Reine Ratio: manuscript of the fifteenth century probably made in Brussels Source: © Brussels, Royal Library of Belgium, Manuscripts, Mss 10218–10219, f° 42v°

Cities Hiding the Forests 121 Meuse-Rhine delta, bordered by the highly urbanized areas of Flanders, Northern Brabant, Holland and Zeeland (Fanchamps, 1966; Sosson, 1996; Suttor, 2000, 2006). The second flows from the moderately wooded areas of Southern Flanders (present-day France) and Hainaut, through inner Flanders, before reaching the same North Sea hub (Sosson, 1996, p.  753; Suttor, 2011; also see Figure  5.2). Owing to their geographical position, the cities of the Meuse Valley (especially Namur, Liège and Dordrecht) quickly became important marketplaces for wood coming from the ‘Entre Sambre et Meuse’ and the Ardennes. For the latter, wood was floated down the river and its many tributaries, or carried by boats (Figure 5.4). Several kinds of wood (timber as well as firewood) were transported to these cities before being locally marketed or reexported. The city of Dordrecht, located on the Meuse-Rhine delta hub, was probably the major place for the timber and lumber trade. It supplied the northern cities of Holland, Utrecht and Gelderland as well as Flemish and Brabantine cities such as Ghent, Bruges or Antwerp (Sosson, 1996, pp. 752–759; Suttor, 2006, pp. 380–388; Haneca, 2015). Wood merchants operating on the Meuse supplying the Flemish markets are mentioned from the fourteenth century onwards (Bruwier, 1958; Billen, 1993b), while the oldest timber from the Ardennes identified in a Flemish archeological site (Bijloke hospital in Ghent) dates back to the midthirteenth century (Hoffsummer, 1991). The pattern for the Scheldt is less clear since it has been less documented by historical research. From the fifteenth century onwards, alongside the gradual commodification and commercialization of its wood resources, the Ardennes’ economy was progressively transformed by the development of the metal industry, especially in the vicinity of Namur and in the Upper Meuse. Both were iron-rich areas. This industrial expansion dramatically increased the need for firewood and pressure on woodlands. It probably fostered a shift toward short cycles of cutting and favored the transformation of tall-tree forests into new coppices-with-standards. In some cases, overexploitation led to deforestation, as in Hertogenwald forest, southeast of Liège, whose surface area was halved between the beginning of the sixteenth century and the end of the eighteenth, as a result of the development of a local iron industry (Goblet d’Alviella, 1927, vol. 2, p. 205). In this context, Baltic wood and timber became an important and necessary additional source of supply for cities that until then had been strongly connected to the Meuse (North, 1996; Riis, 1996). At the end of the sixteenth and in the beginning of the seventeenth century, Baltic markets such as Danzig, Königsberg or Riga and the Scandinavian ports increased their timber exports (essentially sawn wood such as barrel staves, beams and boards) to Western Europe, in particular to Amsterdam, and from there to England and the Southern Low Countries (North, 1996, p. 2). At the scale of the Southern Low Countries these observations seem to confirm at first glance Von Thünen’s classical model in which raw material

Source: © Liège State Archives

Figure 5.4 The lumber port of Liège around 1549

Cities Hiding the Forests 123 was transported from remote regions thanks to waterways and mutual influence existing between the densely populated northern places of consumption and the southern places of production. Joachim Radkau has stated that ‘the problems of the wood supply had a balancing effect structurally, for they affected the large cities most of all and favored peripheral regions that were densely forested’ (Radkau, 2008, p. 147). A closer look at the spatial structure of the Southern Low Countries, however, reveals that in most cases the supply networks were complex and hinterlands must be considered as dynamic. These networks were not restricted to a radial hinterland around the cities and towns nor to a mere axial hinterland commercially connecting south and north via waterways. In many examples they articulated various places of provenance, from proximate to remote (Clark and Lepetit, 1996, pp.  9–10; Schott, 2012, p.  133). The issue of wood supply invites taking into account a plurality of hinterlands, in accordance with the views of Barles and Knoll in the present volume (see also Clarke, 2014, p. 17).

Forests as Hinterlands: From the Classical Spatial Pattern to a Networked Environment The needs of the Flemish and Brabantine cities for firewood, timber and several other types of ligneous resources were very important, so that the resources coming from the south (through the Meuse or the Scheldt or otherwise) were not sufficient. Regional possibilities—when they existed—as well as more remote resources had to be mobilized. An important medieval city like Bruges met its firewood and timber needs thanks to the surrounding groves, but more importantly through international trade and its position as a commercial gateway to continental Europe (Murray, 2009). Geographic origins and routes were quite diversified: the eastern Baltic regions and southeastern England were connected by the sea, northern Germany by the Rhine, northern France by the Scheldt or an overland route, and the Meuse area by the river and then the sea (Sosson, 1996, pp. 750–757; Haneca, 2015). Added to this, Bruges and the urban network of Flanders as a whole could rely on the economic exploitation of peat, in particular in coastal Flanders (Thoen and Soens, 2009). At another scale, we know that trade could work both ways. Merchants from Zeeland, Flanders and France in the fourteenth century went as far as buying firewood in the forest area of the Weald in southeastern England: entering by boat the port of Winchelsea, they went up the river Rother to reach the many inland coppices that stretched along the banks (Witney, 1990, p. 34). At the same time, English wood merchants got to the Zwin estuary, connecting Bruges with the North Sea, in order to sell lump wood (Sosson, 1996, p. 750 and p. 754). The cities of Hainaut and of Southern Brabant were in a slightly different position. Most of them were located far from the coast and far

124  Paulo Charruadas and Chloé Deligne from the major waterways suitable for floating (Mons, Binche, Brussels, Nivelles, to name some of the most important). They thus had to meet their wood needs—even more than Flanders—by preserving and rationalizing their local resources (Chahou, 1997; Charruadas, 2012, 2016). The aforementioned case of Brussels is exemplary. The city was located on a very small river—the Senne—making any importation of timber and firewood by boat difficult. Nevertheless, as seen before, the city lay near a forest covering approximately ten thousand hectares until the nineteenth century. This wooded area—containing tall forest areas and coppiceswith-standards—was largely devoted to the exploitation of firewood and the production of charcoal intended for the heating needs of the urban and regional population. But standards could regularly provide useful material (see above). Apart from that, several small wooded areas, together with numerous hedgerows and other roadside trees, allowed some timber production (Weitz et al., 2014). Like Bruges, Brussels met its timber needs thanks to a great diversity of supply resources (coming from the Eastern Baltic by boat or from the south by an overland route). But, unlike Bruges, Brussels was less connected to the international wood trade and was therefore faced with higher transportation costs. In this context, the city exploited all the wooded resources available in its surroundings (woodlands as well as hunting parks and hedge trees) but would also re-use and recycle with great care its own building materials (Sosnowska, 2013). According to fifteenth century ducal accounts, for instance, the numerous buildings of the dukes of Brabant in the Brussels area were built, repaired or rebuilt with timber and wood from some twenty different villages within a radius of thirty kilometers of the city and from the city itself, in addition to Baltic imports (Sosson, 1996, p. 759). In this context, a forest owner like the Abbey of Forest/Vorst, located on the outskirts of the city and holding approximately two hundred hectares of woodland in the region, could sell his whole wood production at a very high price. According to Claire Billen, such sales on the urban market were the main source of income in cash for the Abbey (Billen, 1995, pp. 507–508). Brussels’ situation is not exceptional. Several authors have already pointed out the underestimated importance of hedgerows (especially fruit trees) in medieval and early modern wood supply (Goblet d’Alviella, 1927, vol. 1, pp. 402–406; Pryor, 2011, pp. 385–388). According to Paul Warde, ‘in many regions [of western and central Europe] perhaps the majority of trees stood in fields or hedgerows rather than woodland’ (Warde, 2004; see also Figure 5.5). A similar complexity can be found in the southern and southeastern area. These areas appear to have been largely selfsufficient, and even able to sustain an export trade without ignoring local needs. For instance, in the thirteenth century the coppices-with-standards located South of Namur (in the so-called Entre Sambre et Meuse) were exported both overland and by river to the North, toward Brabant and

Cities Hiding the Forests 125

Figure 5.5 Lumberjacks cutting down tree rows Source: © Brussels, Royal Library of Belgium, Manuscripts, Mss 9242, f°270 v°

the Hesbaye (an area that extended east of the Brabant and north of the Meuse) apparently without causing any damage to the self-sufficiency of the city of Namur (Deligne, 2016). Similarly, the population of the small city of Luxembourg easily met its firewood and timber needs at the end of the Middle Ages by exploiting the Baumbusch, the nearby communal forest held as a whole by the city, and by exercising common rights in the peri-urban domain forests of Grunewald without regular and extensive recourse to importation (Schmit, 2010; Pauly and Uhrmacher, 2011). At this stage of research, the same picture seems to emerge from the case of Namur (Sosson, 1996, p. 749; Schmit, 2010). However, the situation is likely to have been more complex at the micro level than presumed at first sight. We know for instance that at the beginning of the sixteenth century the urban authorities of Luxembourg imported pine timber for public works from the Vosges (Schmit, 2010, p.  144). This might be explained by the specific management of the peri-urban woodlands, coppices with too few standards to satisfy global demand. Undoubtedly we lack detailed and extensive studies/archives to understand the very concrete implications and interactions between the interregional trade, local consumption patterns and environmental factors.

126  Paulo Charruadas and Chloé Deligne

Taking Account of Local Conditions: Actors, Powers, Ownership At a smaller scale of time and space, the wood supply patterns were neither simple nor static: They were constantly reshaped by changing economic, political and social conditions. Without being exhaustive, we will mention some significant evolutions. First, there is the commodification of the Meuse and Ardennes woodlands. This process began during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and was given additional impetus in the sixteenth century (Bruwier, 1958; Billen, 1993a, 1993b). The general process could result in very different local situations. For instance, in the county of Namur, roughly situated between two major waterways (‘Entre Sambre et Meuse’), numerous documents confirm the growing importance of forests and woodlands as land for investment as early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Deligne, 2016). Not unlike the Champagne case mentioned above, 90 percent of the count’s woodlands (approximately ten thousand hectares) were exploited by coppicing to be sold as firewood. By contrast, further to the south in the duchy of Luxemburg, major and large forests like the ones of Anlier or Chiny were still exploited as wood-pasture at the end the fifteenth century. As noted above, the first commercial forests were located close to urban centers and/or floatable rivers while the woodlands situated in more remote areas were marketed to a much lesser extent. For instance, the wooden products coming from the Hertogenwald forest around the small town of Limburg, southeast of Liège along the Vesdre, a poorly navigable waterway (Suttor, 2006, p.  210), were never exploited for exportation outside the region and remained devoted to local consumption until the arrival of the railway in the nineteenth century (Goblet d’Alviella, 1927, vol. 2, pp. 204–214; Yans, 1938). By contrast, although situated only some forty kilometers from there, on the right bank of the Meuse upstream from Liège, the woodlands of the abbey of the Val-SaintLambert in Seraing and Ivoz were ideally located for commercialization. In the fourteenth century these coppices-with-standards are mentioned in the accounts as more profitable than agriculture and coal mining (Van Derveeghde, 1955, pp. 105–106 and pp. 130–131). Historical analysis clearly demonstrates the importance of commercial activity and merchants’ actions, as mediating forces between the cities and the woodlands in the Southern Low Countries. A good location has never proven to be sufficient; human intervention was important. This raises the question of which driving forces shaped the hinterland’s designs and locations. Various actors were involved in the process of linking a natural resource with a place of consumption: customary forest users and local forest officers, landowners (ecclesiastical institutions, central government, private owners), urban authorities, merchants as traders and commercial investors.

Cities Hiding the Forests 127 The aforementioned forest of Chiny and the woodlands of Saint-Hubert are perfect examples of how spatial distribution results from successive social arrangements and how natural ‘objects’ transform into raw materials under specific circumstances (Godelier, 1984, pp.  112–113). The first one, a demesne forest of around nine thousand hectares, was ideally located along the Semois river, a floatable tributary of the Meuse, allowing easy exportation, at least theoretically. In the early modern period this state-owned forest was subject to strong customary rights, managed by the forest officers according to the satisfaction of local interests and practically beyond control of the central and distant administrative institutions in Brussels. Unable to provide the necessary investments or to reorganize its management, the central government hardly exploited this forest for commercial purposes until the nineteenth century (Leroy, 1973; Billen, 1993a). The woodlands of the Abbey of Saint-Hubert, situated about forty kilometers north of Chiny, were completely different. Distant from any major river, theses woodlands remained exploited for local industrial purposes until the end of the seventeenth century. At that time, however, the monks—likely aware of new economic opportunities and/or approached by certain merchants—renegotiated access to woodlands with peasants by restricting the exercise of their customary usage rights to thirty-five hundred out of the eighty-five hundred hectares they owned. In the eighteenth century, when the ironworks’ activities took off and the urban demand for firewood grew considerably in the Meuse cities (Dinant, Namur and Liège), things changed rapidly. Urban merchants frequently appear in the abbey accounts while, at the same time, the waterways were substantially transformed (with dams and sluices) in order to allow and facilitate the floating of logs (Dupont, 1991). This last example is essential to make an important point: in the late medieval and early modern periods, in the Southern Low Countries in particular, the only ‘ownership’ was not a decisive factor in the control of woodland exploitation. Of much greater importance were the effective appropriation of the places on the one hand, and the action of the merchants properly informed about wood resources on the other. These elements were key issues for linking potential resources to market opportunities (Boissière, 1997). In this sense, it is striking how scarce the examples of woodlands completely held by and under control of the urban authorities are—the city of Luxembourg, which owned the forest of Baumbusch as a whole, was among the exceptions in the Southern Low Countries (Pauly and Uhrmacher, 2011). Of course, rural and urban communities could exercise some usage rights in most domain and stateowned forests (the Forêt de Soignes for Brussels’ poor population; the forest of Marlagne for Namur; the Grunewald for Luxemburg). But these rights specifically excluded activities with commercial purposes. In this analytical framework, it remains however difficult to delineate the notion of market attractiveness or, more concretely, to understand

128  Paulo Charruadas and Chloé Deligne how specific goods were attracted into specific urban markets—a market being defined as a central location where sellers and buyers could meet and therefore create trade opportunities. Transportation costs and distance undoubtedly played an important role. In the case of wood supply, as demonstrated in the cases of Venice or London, the high demand and high value of timber could bear higher transportation costs than firewood and allowed this good to travel greater distances. However, as already mentioned, it is hard to put forward a ‘universal’ pattern of wood circulation around a given city—even when taking into account the presence or absence of waterways. After all, local and regional features like waterways could be completely remodeled, either physically or in economic terms, in order to link a city to remote territories. Indeed, most cities and towns attracted sellers and buyers by modulating the tolls on the products and commodities that they absolutely needed. Some cities were even able to obtain a staple right from their lord, i.e., the right to compel merchant ships and convoys to unload their goods on the city market and display them for sale for a certain period of time. As far as we know, only two cities have been granted this kind of privilege for wood. The city of Dordrecht obtained such a right in 1299 from the Count of Holland John I for wood, oats and wine transported by water. This staple right was further extended in 1355 to all river traffic within South Holland (Van Uytven, 1985, p.  81). The position of Dordrecht on the Meuse-Rhine delta hub allowed the city to get easy and constant access to wood coming from many parts of the Northwestern Europe (Upper Meuse, ‘Entre Sambre et Meuse’, Northern France, Western Germany). From there, it made it easier for the urban merchants to supply the rest of the Northern Low Countries to their profit. The city of Namur, further to the south at the confluence of the Sambre and Meuse Rivers, obtained the same privilege in 1424 for firewood and in 1568 for charcoal (Suttor, 2006, pp. 272, 405 and 413). In the same way as for Dordrecht, that legal privilege helped the city to take within its walls fuel material for its own needs. But, most importantly, it also allowed the merchants of the city to export wood to Brabant, Hesbaye, or Dordrecht. In both cases, it should be stressed that these staple rights pursued commercial objectives and concerned superregional and intercity supply networks (and not simply local wood supplies). In this respect, it is worth noticing that these two cities were located at the interface between the wooded south and the more or less deforested center and north. As a general rule, the political elites within the cities and towns of the Southern Low Countries were strongly involved in the commercial sector. Consequently, the ‘urban agency’ (intrinsically linked with a kind of ‘commercial agency’) exerted on forests and woodlands should be strongly related to the capacity of the urban authorities, in constant dialogue with the merchants and mindful of the needs of their population. Urban authorities secured wood supplies by helping merchants, by

Cities Hiding the Forests 129 regulating the urban market and by improving their market attractiveness (Boone, 2010, pp.  117–119). The role of the merchants was thus essential in shaping the ‘attractiveness’ of a market either in terms of resource transformation, collective political and commercial bargaining, information handling, or routes shaping. As such, markets as well as supply areas were complex socio-political constructions.

Conclusion The observations made throughout this modest review of what can be known of the relations between cities and woodlands in the medieval and early modern Southern Low Countries lead us to stress some final points. First of all, as far as wood supply of cities is concerned, it seems justified to challenge the traditional importance given to the ‘hinterland’ described as the space curved around a central place or as a homogeneous supply area (according to the traditional von Thünen model), and to replace it with the notion of a networked system to which specific ‘economic spaces’/hinterlands (in the plural) could be connected depending on economic, political, social or cultural conditions and shifts, and within which cities as commercial places were important nodes. Obviously, some small cities, in particular in the south and southeastern area, roughly corresponded to the simplistic and static von Thünen model. However, even in the case of a modest city like Luxembourg, the wood supply sometimes required the use of more distant sources of production. It remains difficult, however, to clearly identify the actors and driving forces behind this networked structure. Medieval and early modern commercial actors adopted different strategies of commercialization of wood products, as did the owners of woodlands. Both did so in a legal framework designed by urban authorities and the state. The resulting landscapes could, thus, be very different (coppices, tall trees, coppiceswith-standards) even at an infraregional scale. Some cities (but not all) appear to have played an important role in the destiny of specific woodlands and forests, especially in the ‘preservation’ of some of them. This preservation role was probably developed at its best when the urban commercial actors could share their interests with princely powers established in the city. Cultural factors, in this case the strong association of princely power with the ownership of tall trees, could have a decisive role. Finally, urban societies faced with the scarcity of locally available wood, timber and lumber developed intensive strategies of rationalization and exploitation of all kinds of wood resources (hedgerows or re-used material, for instance), replaced wood by other material when possible or adapted new building techniques. Their built fabric often manifests this inventiveness. The size of the cities and their accessibility by water may have partly determined these choices, constraints and connections

130  Paulo Charruadas and Chloé Deligne but cities could develop powerful tools to transform their environment, especially as far as waterways were concerned.

Notes 1. A coppice is composed of underwood which is cut close to the ground once every few years and whose shoots grow again in the meanwhile. Most of the time scattered bigger trees are left among the coppice allowing them to grow to a suitable size for beams and planks. These trees are called ‘standards’ or timber trees. Academic writers draw a distinction between the ‘coppice-withstandards’, which includes timber trees, and the ‘simple coppice’ (thus without standards), however the distinction is not that strict as standards ‘come and go’ (Rackham, 2006, pp. 17 and 494). 2. Tree land on which farm animals or deer are systematically grazed (Rackham, 2001, p. 234; Rackham, 1996). 3. Wood composed entirely or mainly of timber trees, i.e., trees having trunks big enough to make beams and planks (Rackham, 2006, p. 507).

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6 Energizing European Cities From Wood Provision to Solar Panels—Providing Energy for Urban Demand, 1800–2000 Dieter Schott Introduction One of the fundamental inputs into the urban metabolism was and still is energy (Fischer-Kowalski, 1997; Schott, 2014b). Of course, the ‘nature’ of this energy changed very significantly over time. In the light of current environmental debates the transition from renewable energy sources such as wood, water, wind—all in the last resort resulting from solar energy—to fossil energy resources such as coal, oil and natural gas, has been interpreted as a fundamental caesura, the transition to a whole new energy regime (Sieferle, 1997, 2001). This transition entailed not only the predominant use of a different energy source but also new spatial relations between cities and their energy ‘hinterlands’ (Barles and Knoll, this volume) and new technological systems through which this new energy source was acquired, transported, processed, distributed to the final customer and put to use. This chapter wants to shed some light on the way this transition materialized at the level of cities. Obviously, there was not just ‘one’ big transition of energy regime but also many smaller transitions ‘within’ the fossil energy regime, e.g., between domestic heating being based on coal, oil or gas, or public transport being powered by horses, oil-fired engines or electricity. In complementarity to the chapter by Paulo Charruadas and Chloé Deligne on changing urban wood supplies in the medieval and early modern Low Countries, I will focus on how European cities—with a special focus on Germany—organized their energy provision in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, how they manifested ‘agency’, not necessarily only as municipality but also as a collection of consumers, entrepreneurs, technological innovators and so forth. I will first highlight some central features of urban wood supply as it was organized by 1800, then show how political, economic as well as technological transformations changed urban energy supplies and energy systems in the nineteenth century. I will then argue that the ‘networking of cities’ as a fundamental and long-term process brought a significant change in the way in which urban administration was evolving, as well

136  Dieter Schott as the way in which urban energy demands impacted on nature and the way the urban metabolism was organized. ‘Networking of cities’ refers to the successive build-up of comprehensive systems of technical infrastructures, used for the supply of water, gas, electricity, the disposal of sewage, and urban transport and communication (Schott, 1999a, pp. 2–8, 2015b, pp.  256–258). The new modes of technological organization also had major consequences for power structures; the power balance in terms of energy policy shifted at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for a considerable period in favor of cities. Just before World War I, the decisive role in supplying energy and the regulation of energy systems passed again to the state. The period after World War II was subsequently characterized by a fairly rapid introduction in succession of new energy sources such as oil, natural gas and atomic energy (Pfister, 1995), which all basically reinforced the centralized structures generated in the interwar period and just after 1945. Within the last twenty years we can observe a very contradictory landscape in urban energy provision, particularly in Germany and those European countries with strong ecological movements: on the one hand, EU demands for deregulation and liberalization of energy markets make themselves felt, on the other hand, the almost universal rejection of nuclear energy and the widely shared conviction of the need for a comprehensive de-carbonization of the energy system have contributed toward a partial reversal of the energy policies developed during the twentieth century. Whereas the focus on large power stations, long-distance transport of power and highly monopolized structures have dominated from the 1920s to the 1990s, we can now observe— as a corollary to the shift toward renewable energy sources—tendencies favoring a re-municipalization of energy utilities and a relocalization of energy production.

Wood as Primary Urban Energy c. 1800 When Joachim Radkau published a frequently cited survey on urban wood provision in pre-industrial German cities twenty years ago, he described the subject as a ‘riddle’ or ‘mystery’ (Radkau, 1997). Shedding light on this mystery, Radkau identified four types of cities according to their mode of firewood provisioning (see, for medieval wood provision, the chapter by Charruadas and Deligne in this volume). For the first type, the city with access to abundant forests, either in municipal ownership or under more or less complete control of the city, Nuremberg is a prominent example and demonstrates a long history of strategic forest management. Nuremberg was rather disadvantaged in terms of shipping or floating wood—the local river Pegnitz was not navigable nor were there other suitable waterways—and thus had to concentrate on the two imperial forests close to the city. Using the historical window of opportunity in the wake of Black Death after 1348, when, due to massive

Energizing European Cities 137 demographic decline, the pressure on local resources had diminished, Nuremberg took comprehensive control of the imperial forests which had been rather depleted from overuse and restored them by planting pine trees, instead of the slower growing indigenous beeches (Sporhan and Stromer, 1969; Radkau, 1997, p. 50). Nuremberg’s policy of reserving the forests for urban wood fuel demand was pursued very consistently: Energy-intensive activities, such as the production of charcoal, pitch and glass-making, and later, smelting activities for producing silver and copper, were banned from the forests by imperial order, following on Nuremberg petitions already begun in 1340. Thus, imperatives of subsistence, securing the essential fuel wood provision for her inhabitants, took precedence over the interests of industrial policy (Radkau, 1997, p. 51). Radkau’s second type are cities easily accessible by water. Ideally, such cities were located on a floatable river which had densely forested areas upstream and where no wood-consuming industries or other large cities acted as competitors. If cities owned staple rights and could force floaters to stop and offer their wood for (usually three) days at a locally fixed price, so much the better for urban customers. In such cases, locally owned and controlled forests could be partially replaced by more distant forests beyond municipal control, the wood of which, however, could be cheaply shipped on water: cheap transport always was of the essence for wood provision. A long-term study of the energy consumption of Paris has shown that in 1800, 80 percent of the total energy requirement of Paris was transported by water, almost exclusively wood (Kim and Barles, 2012, p. 301). The intrinsic price of wood from the deep forests was frequently virtually zero, but transporting wood fuel on a cart generated huge transport costs. Therefore, cities tried to transport wood on water wherever possible and also frequently invested considerable sums in making small rivers or creeks floatable or usable for log driving. The problem of cities with a favorable location on a river was, however, how to control the floaters and the complex system of log driving which involved many actors who would not easily be governed by the imperatives of the urban wood economy. The imperial city of Augsburg, well located on two floatable rivers, the Lech and the Wertach, nevertheless had problems in controlling its resource stream. Apart from losses due to the pilfering of driftwood, the fundamental problem of Augsburg and other imperial cities such as Regensburg was of a political nature: as their territory was very small, they depended for their wood provision on the good-will of the neighboring dukedom of Bavaria, which was occasionally quite prepared to use wood supplies as a pawn in power games. When Augsburg lost her independence in 1806 and became part of Bavaria, these troubles disappeared almost overnight (Radkau, 1997, p. 53). A third type of city were those who specialized in ore smelting and salt-making. For these very energy-intensive processes they required

138  Dieter Schott massive amounts of wood and were thus forced to pay a great deal of attention to their wood supplies. Radkau argues that in these cities we can frequently observe the development of a long-term economic perspective which approaches sustainable forest management. Reichenhall, a Bavarian salt city, already proclaimed the principle of sustainable forest management in 1661 (Radkau, 1997, p. 56; see for Hallein, Sonnlechner and Winiwarter, 2002). Developing a ‘forest-consciousness’ (Waldbewußtsein) depended, according to Radkau, on the degree of control over the forests or on their proximity. Lüneburg, the most important salt city of the Middle Ages in the north of Germany, however, is an example of complete disregard: here the adjacent forests were depleted already by the Middle Ages, turning the area into the now-famous ‘Lüneburg Heide’ (heath) and the wood had to be shipped from forests in Mecklenburg. In a case such as Schwäbisch Hall, where the forests providing the fuel for saltmaking were in the adjacent county of Limpurg, not under political control of the city of Schwäbisch Hall, a cooperative, but also at times tense relationship could develop between ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’. The day when the logs driven on the local river Kocher arrived in Schwäbisch Hall was always a major event in the yearly life cycle of the city. A fourth type of city was the residential city or capital. Here the political will of the ruler was exercised in order to secure sufficient wood not only for his or her court but also for the inhabitants of the city. A city like Munich, seat of the Wittelsbach dynasty, rulers of Bavaria since 1255, was in a favorable position on both geographical and political grounds: It commanded floating and log driving on the Isar, originating in the thickly wooded, lower reaches of the Alps, almost without competition. Moreover, the political authority of the Wittelsbach rulers ensured that the supremacy of Munich over its wooded hinterland would not be seriously challenged by anyone (Radkau, 1997, pp. 58–59). For larger capitals such as Vienna and Paris, the provisioning issue was clearly more complex and pressing. In Vienna, local forests (Wiener Wald) could no longer supply sufficient fuel wood for the rapidly growing population by the eighteenth century. By the late eighteenth century the city resorted to large-scale engineering measures to expand its wood hinterland further upstream on the Danube (Johann, 2005). Based on privileges granted by the emperor, private entrepreneurs began to construct a large array of technical devices to facilitate wood transport to navigable rivers (Zumbrägel, 2014). In essence, the entire transport, from the site of tree felling to the arrival of the logs in Vienna was made technical: Wooden slides made it easier to move freshly cut logs toward small rivers, from where the logs could be driven toward the Danube. In order to make log driving possible all year round, collecting ponds were constructed at the headwaters which could be emptied on demand to produce a high-water wave and wash logs downstream. In some cases, rivers were diverted across the watershed between the Danube and the Moldava to refill these ponds

Energizing European Cities 139 with sufficient water. At the Danube or its larger tributaries the logs were assembled into floats which then proceeded toward Vienna. In some more remote places in the forests devices for hauling logs uphill were even set up, usually powered by water (Zumbrägel, 2014, pp.  345–346). The canal built by the Count of Schwarzenberg connecting the Danube with the watershed of the Moldava, opened the vast Bohemian forests at a distance of some 150 kilometers up to wood provisioning for Vienna. More, a tunnel of some 450 meters was excavated in the early nineteenth century through the Raxalpe mountain, at that time the longest tunnel in Austria, which opened up a large, unexploited and hitherto inaccessible forest for Vienna’s wood supplies (Radkau, 1997, p.  60). In these cases, we can very clearly identify, well before 1800, a strong tendency toward ‘urbanizing nature’ in the service of urban energy demands for wood fuel. The environmental consequences of such attempts at ‘colonizing nature’ were considerable (Fischer-Kowalski, 1997). Since constructing these technical systems was very expensive, it only paid if vast clear-cuts were carried out. These lands were later replanted by fast-growing coniferous woods in order to accelerate production. Inevitably, this entailed a transformation in the local fauna: owls and ravens vanished and the fish population in the log driving stretches of small rivers was radically reduced: the once dominant trout disappeared completely (Zumbrägel, 2014, pp. 345 and 348). A similar pattern can be identified in Paris, where the city of Paris was granted extensive powers by the French king to establish an urban regime of monopolistic control by the metropolis over the woods and the trade in firewood in the catchment area of the Seine and its tributaries. This control extended over an area with a radius of twenty-four kilometers from the banks of the Seine and all her tributaries. At their headwaters more than a hundred ponds were dug to facilitate log driving down the smaller rivers and thus to penetrate and exploit the upstream forests to a larger degree. Sabine Barles interprets these complex technical structures far away from the city but constructed in its interest and under its jurisdiction as ‘out-infrastructures’ or ‘technical urban annexes’, in the true sense of functional parts of the city (Barles, 2017). Paris also succeeded in keeping competitors such as wood-burning industries out of its forests: The whole metallurgical industry and smelting of iron ore was located beyond the watershed of the Seine, in eastern France (e.g. Lorraine), thus reserving the wood resources of the Seine watershed for the wood fuel demand of Paris (Radkau, 1997, pp. 59–60; Kim and Barles, 2012).

Was There a ‘Wood Crisis’ in the Early Nineteenth Century? In the early nineteenth century, the mentioning of a ‘wood crisis’ can be found so often in the sources as to seem inflationary. Joachim Radkau warns not to take these ‘alarms’ about ‘wood emergencies’ (Holznot) too

140  Dieter Schott much at face value because, as he argues, they were frequently motivated by long-term strategies pursued by foresters and territorial forest owners to eliminate customary uses (meadows, litterfall) from the forests and to orient forest management completely toward the aim of increasing the output of saleable wood (Radkau, 1997, pp. 64–68; more critically: Rosseaux, 2006, pp. 106–108). Another origin for such alarm cries were traditional wood-consuming trades aiming to ban potential competitors for wood from their sphere of action. Nevertheless, Radkau acknowledges a crisis in the system of urban wood economy due to its excessive complexity. In the light of dominant processes of liberalization and deregulation in the first half of the nineteenth century, long-standing privileges, old reserves and rights such as staple rights, were increasingly abolished, as was the case with the staple rights on the Rhine, a major artery for wood transport, by the Mainz Act on Shipping on the Rhine in 1831 (Cioc, 2002). More generally, urban wood provision was under pressure from a range of processes: In the territorial re-alignment process, following the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss of 1803, most imperial cities—including Nuremberg, Augsburg and Regensburg—lost their autonomy and became part of territorial states (Krabbe, 1989, pp.  8–23). Frequently, particularly in Bavaria, their powers of self-government were severely curtailed in the wake of this process (Freytag and Piereth, 2002). On the other hand, the former political antagonism between imperial city and enclosing territorial state disappeared. The secular process of transport improvements in the nineteenth century, particularly for inland navigation (canalizing rivers and the construction of new canals), but also road improvements and, from the late 1830s, the construction of railways, greatly facilitated transport and transformed transport geographies, which for the first time made wood transports possible between regions which hitherto had not been connected by a waterway (Ziegler, 2005). The example of the former imperial city of Regensburg, since 1810 part of the kingdom of Bavaria, might demonstrate how processes of transport improvement, marketing and social policy considerations interacted in specific ways in the middle of the nineteenth century. Regensburg had comparatively few forests in its immediate vicinity, but the city was favorably located—type two in Radkau’s typology—being situated on the Danube with two tributaries, the Naab and the Regen joining the Danube at or near Regensburg, and this potentially gave access to large wooded areas to the north and east of Regensburg (‘Bavarian Forest’). Regensburg’s traditional wood provisioning regions had been around Kelheim upstream on the Danube and around Donaustauf and Wörth some kilometers downstream. In the 1830s, wood prices in Regensburg show a marked rise, due amongst other things to the impending opening of the Ludwig-MainDonau-Canal, which would drive wood prices up on the wood markets along the Danube, since, at that time, the wood demand from the then

Energizing European Cities 141 industrializing Franconian region around Nuremberg made itself felt (Schott, 2013). In conflicts on the urban wood provision of Regensburg around 1850 we can identify three principal actors. First, there was the Bavarian state, dominated by fiscal interests of the Ministry of Finance, wishing to develop the state forests as a major source of income for the state and thus aiming for high wood prices although the Ministry of the Interior was sensitive to urban demands for curbing the rise of wood prices. Second, the city of Regensburg basically saw itself as representative of urban consumers of wood fuel; it felt called upon to intervene in favor of enlarging the supply of wood and reducing prices, in response to pauperism and revolutionary unrest around 1848 (Knoll, 2006, 2007). And third, private entrepreneurs recognized opportunities to open up hitherto untapped wood resources in the Bavarian Forest by developing log driving on the river Regen and thus making substantial profits; in 1846 a Jewish wood merchant demonstrated the possibility of transporting major quantities of wood via the Regen toward Regensburg. Following this precedent, the city began in 1853 to engage in log driving on the Regen and established a municipal wood magazine to regulate the local wood trade. Three years later the Bavarian government published regulations for log driving and floating on the river Regen, thus trying to maintain control of the process. The situation changed again when Regensburg was linked to the railway line Schwandorf-Landshut in 1859. From 1862 onwards, Bohemian coals began to be imported by rail to Regensburg and the price of this coals was lower than firewood, thus changing the local fuel market considerably. From 1890 onwards we can observe a reversal of the principal direction of wood transport on the Danube: whereas the number of floats sailing downstream decreased significantly, there were now more steamships drawing floats upstream. The natural flow of the river no longer determined the shape and extent of transport hinterlands. Fundamentally, the transport monopoly of the river with respect to the wood supplies of Regensburg had been broken (Knoll, 2007).

From Wood to Coal: The Urban Transition to Fossil Energy In contrast to British cities, particularly London, where the transition from wood to coal had already made very significant progress in the seventeenth century, wood remained the primary energy resource in most continental cities well into the nineteenth century, frequently up to midcentury. An attempt in Frankfurt in the 1790s to substitute wood by coal remained a short-lived episode (Radkau, 1997, p.  69). For the territorial capital Darmstadt, residence of the Grand Dukes of Hesse, a city of some twenty thousand inhabitants by 1825, the transition can be dated approximately to the 1850s and early 1860s. Since Darmstadt has no

142  Dieter Schott navigable river and could only be reached by railway in 1846 (the MainNeckar railway in a north-south direction), it is highly unlikely that the city received major quantities of coal before 1846 (Schott, 1999a, pp. 87–93). On the other hand, Darmstadt was richly endowed with forests surrounding the city on three sides. The municipal forest had—after the annexation of the suburb Bessungen in 1888—an extension of 1,552 hectares. Darmstadt praised itself as a ‘wooded city’ and still in 1913 emphasized the cheap price of wood fuel (Gallo, 2013, p. 38). Nevertheless, by that time consumption of firewood only accounted for an insignificant share of less than 1 percent of total energy consumption. Calculated in terms of caloric value, coal already made up 78  percent in 1871, when a statistical survey of tax income from ‘octroi’,1 a local sales tax, begins to allow more detailed analysis (Gallo, 2013, p.  45). Wood then had a share of 18.3  percent, peat was at 3.8  percent and quickly dropped to under 1 percent by 1881. The octroi figures also show a significant rise in coal consumption per capita for these decades due to increasing industrialization but also due to a more energy-intensive mode of living on the part of the Darmstadt inhabitants: from 924 kilograms of coal per capita in 1871 consumption rose to almost 1,600 kilograms in 1910 and 1911 (Gallo, 2013, p. 42). The overall energy consumption of Darmstadt increased by 3.5 times between 1871 and 1914. The consumption curve of coal shows a clear correlation with economic cycles, particularly from the second half of the 1880s, when both the recovery from the depression of the 1870s as well as the short slump of the early 1890s are reflected in the changing steepness of the growth curve (Gallo, 2013, pp. 41–42). Vienna shows a basically similar pattern: By 1840 charcoal and firewood still provided over 95 percent of all technical energy consumed in Vienna, yet by 1880 this was down to less than 20 percent. The rapid decline of the share of wood started after 1840, when the railway to the north (opened in 1838) had made the coal-rich eastern provinces of the Danube monarchy accessible to the energy-hungry capital. Between 1860 and 1890 the total energy consumption of Vienna grew by 300 percent. If instead of the ‘subterranean forest’ of coal (Sieferle, 2001), which was used up for Vienna’s energy needs, an equivalent amount of wood had been consumed, by 1900 it would have needed a forest area of one million hectares, a third of the total area of modern Austria (Krausmann, 2005; Hauer et al., 2012).

New Energy Needs: The Rise of the Urban Gas Industry and Municipal Socialism Part of this process of substituting coal for wood was also due to the rise of new energy needs, as they developed with the growing sophistication of urban middle-class culture, the emergence of a ‘public sphere’

Energizing European Cities 143 (Habermas) and the accompanying technological changes which made these processes possible and further accelerated them. With the development and diffusion of gaslighting in cities, a major shift in urban culture set in which allowed a rapidly diversifying nightlife of entertainment and cultural events. From its British foundation in the 1810s (Goodall, 1999), the gas industry began to set up gasworks and gaslighting systems in continental cities in the 1820s. At first this often happened in princely residences and regional capitals such as Berlin, Hannover and Dresden, usually funded and put in place by English companies (Schivelbusch, 1983; Williot and Paquier, 2005). The breakthrough for gaslighting in German cities came in the 1850s, when the number of gasworks jumped from 32 by 1850 to 193 in 1858 (Schott, 2005, p. 497). Gaslighting transformed everyday urban life comprehensively. Before gaslighting, most people avoided being out on the streets after dark, these streets being illuminated fairly sparsely. Henceforth, it became acceptable and fashionable to saunter on well-lit city streets in the evenings and nights, and to frequent theaters, cabarets, dance halls, restaurants, bars and shops. The emergent capitalist commodity production was stage-managed by gaslight which gave a new brilliance to goods and wares (Schivelbusch, 1983). Under the auspices of then dominant economic liberalism, most gasworks were established as private companies, frequently with local shareholders. In Duisburg, then a rapidly growing industrial city on the Rhine, the gasworks were founded in 1854 by ten shareholders, all from the local entrepreneurial elite. The city of Duisburg granted the company a concession to use municipal streets for their gas pipes and a monopoly for twenty-five years to provide gas for municipal street lighting (Ring, 1954, pp.  21–26). Such contracts were quite customary also in other cities; in some cases, cities were granted gas for street illumination free or at reduced rates and occasionally for a fixed yearly sum as part of the profit. Over the duration of the concession, mostly twenty-five to thirty years, a large number of grievances and tensions accumulated which made municipal bodies reluctant to renew the concession. Gas companies frequently did not extend their networks in accordance with new urban development, gas prices were deemed too high, gas quality was frequently seen as deficient and the state of maintenance of networks was not satisfactory. In Duisburg, massive protests among consumers against too high gas prices and plans to establish a municipal gasworks as a competitor eventually forced the private gasworks to reduce its gas prices substantially and to relocate the gasworks to a more peripheral site where it would disturb the population less (Ring, 1954, pp. 37–46). As a general pattern, municipal councils found many reasons for not prolonging gas concessions once they expired. Instead, in many cases they decided to bring gasworks under local authority control in order to use profits, which were frequently quite substantial, for furthering the municipal budget (Brunckhorst, 1978).

144  Dieter Schott The most famous and paradigmatic case of ‘municipalization’ had been Birmingham, where Joseph Chamberlain, the mayor of Birmingham, had embarked on ‘municipalization’ already by 1870 in order to relieve the upward pressure on council rates by using profits from water and gas sales for other municipal purposes (Millward, 2000, p. 333). This ‘municipalization’ strategy, also sometimes called ‘municipal socialism’, became predominant in the 1880s, not only in German municipalities, but also in other European countries such as Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria and the Scandinavian countries. It furthermore ushered in a far-reaching transformation of the character of urban administration (Kühl, 2002; for Britain: Millward, 2000). Up to the 1870s, municipal administrations had been fairly small in terms of the number of staff employed and were led by prominent citizens, frequently retired, who headed local councils on a voluntary, unpaid basis (Reulecke, 1985, pp. 118–131; Krabbe, 1989, pp. 129–154). Having to manage large and capital-intensive enterprises such as gasworks, soon to be joined by waterworks, slaughterhouses and other municipal enterprises, this type of ‘layman’ administration could no longer persist: increasingly, municipal administrations came to be led by professionals, frequently attorneys, who worked as mayors on a fulltime basis and were paid attractive salaries. Generally the administrations increasingly came to be structured as divided and specialized bureaucracies where technical and disciplinary expertise of the senior staff was indispensable (Hofmann, 2012; Roth and Beachy, 2007). With respect to technology, where municipal administrations had not had any expertise up to the time of municipalization (of gas or water), or the decision to go forward with electrification or electric tramways, cities frequently either recruited their technical staff from the old companies or from engineering companies engaged in constructing power stations or tramway networks (Schott, 1999a, p.  192, p.  732). Within a relatively short period in the last third of the nineteenth century, municipal administrations in many German and northern European cities thus turned into ‘service administrations’ (Leistungsverwaltungen). These administrations increasingly understood themselves as actively directing the course of urban development by means of strategic town planning, investment in infrastructural activities, buying up land in advance and aiming to integrate an increasingly segmented population by appeals to a shared civic identity, backed up by considerable municipal welfare services (Reulecke, 1995; Lenger, 2013, pp.  149–202). Thus, we can identify in this period a strong and growing urban agency in the field of energy provision which was also applied to promote other goals of urban development.

Networking the Cities: Toward a New Relationship Between City and Country This metamorphosis of local council administration toward a proactive, interventionist and frequently also entrepreneurial role partly resulted

Energizing European Cities 145 from a process which I have earlier described as ‘networking the city’. This process evolved partly in reaction to market demand and private initiative, as in the case of gas industry, and partly in response to hygienic problems and the all-important debate over ‘public health’ in Britain and, shortly afterwards, also on the continent. Reacting to cholera epidemics, and particularly the excessive welfare costs for the sick poor, Edwin Chadwick’s recommendations, represented in his famous 1842 Sanitary Report, for a thorough cleansing of the cities by installing comprehensive systems of drinking-water provision and wastewater removal were eventually, with modifications in the details, implemented all over Europe and North America in the second half of the nineteenth century. In spite of their faulty scientific basis, e.g. the ‘miasma theory’, these measures helped, together with other factors such as improved nutrition, to significantly reduce the frequency of epidemics, to lower mortality and improve urban health standards (Vögele, 2001; Hamlin, 2003). ‘Networking the city’ also completely transformed relationships between cities and their immediate hinterlands. Networks were to provide urban households with what had then become basic necessities of daily life, such as gaslight, drinking water, and later electricity, and they would also serve to take away problematic matter such as feces and refuse from households and the neighborhood’s streets. In terms of the functioning of the urban metabolism, these networks substituted human labor previously used for tasks such as the collecting or cutting of wood, transporting it into town, storing and then sawing it to make it useable for the domestic fireplace; for the transporting of water from the well or the river to the household and so forth (Schott, 2014a). In many instances these networks did not only permeate urban streets, they were also linked with more extensive networks beyond the cities’ margins, tapping fresh water resources in regions distant from the city in the country for instance. Thus, cities in Europe and North America were turned into mega-machines. Filled and structured by multiple technical infrastructure systems which—in their totality—transformed the daily life of urban dwellers completely by 1900 as compared to 1850 (Hard and Misa, 2008). In conjunction with a massively increased material throughput of the urban metabolism, the ‘ecological footprint’ of cities expanded significantly both in spatial terms as well as in scope. Thus, in paradoxical ways, while cities were definitely improving in terms of healthiness, safety and liveability between 1850 and 1900 (Lees and Lees, 2007), the surrounding countryside, from which cities drew their resources and onto which they deposited their gaseous, liquid and solid waste materials, clearly deteriorated. Furthermore, ‘networking the cities’ did not only impact on the immediately adjacent countryside, it also opened the door to utilizing energy and resources that had been extracted and processed at considerable distances away, since the earlier prohibitive effects of high transport costs for bulk goods no longer applied. Due to the establishment of

146  Dieter Schott large transport networks covering whole states, i.e., rail networks and networks of canals and rivers, engineered for bulk transport, the real costs of transport were steadily declining and it became increasingly possible to provision large cities with coal from coal mines several hundred kilometers away (Ziegler, 2005, pp. 55–62). What had been possible for London as an exceptional case already in the seventeenth century, due to the possibility of water-borne shipping of coal from Newcastle upon Tyne all the way to London (Periman, 2004), became generally available by means of extensive rail and canal networks for many European cities during the second half of the nineteenth century. In Paris, the complete dominance of wood as primary energy resource by 1800 had, by 1850, given way to a halfway split between wood and coal. This transition also implied that the average distance of transport increased from less than 200 kilometers by 1800 to 270 kilometers by 1870 since most coal mining regions were at considerably longer distances from Paris than the forests. The massive expansion of waterways and railways enabled such a growing outreach of the city. In the twentieth century, due to the transition to oil and natural gas, and the exhaustion of French and western European sources of coal, this average distance exploded to 2,700 kilometers (1965) and 3,850 kilometers (2006) (Kim and Barles, 2012, pp. 300–302). Since wood from local or regional forests had lost its monopolistic role, the great pressure exerted on local woods in the early modern period to produce large quantities of firewood was relieved somewhat; woods in the vicinity of cities could and did acquire new functions as sites of leisure and entertainment for a broader section of the population, rather than just the aristocracy and its hunting privileges. In this way, the reduction in material significance of urban woods coincided with and enabled a new appreciation of green spaces (woods and open land) close to the city, which became dedicated as sites for urban recreation (Clark, 2006). By the late nineteenth century new ‘forest parks’ or ‘forest cemeteries’ were opened in many European cities at the periphery of cities, frequently connected by new tramway lines. These sites offered opportunities for walks in the open air for city dwellers who were desperate to get out of the smoke and noise of the inner city at least once a week (Walden, 2002). Even the comparatively small and not heavily industrialized capital of Hesse, Darmstadt, a city of about ninety thousand residents by 1900, developed Oberwaldhaus, a municipal leisure site at a former forester’s house some two kilometers from the edge of the city, sporting a restaurant, playgrounds and boating facilities on a small artificial lake besides ample opportunities for walks in the woods (Sauer, 2006). A new terminus of the electric tramway at the edge of the forest, established at the time when Oberwaldhaus was opened in 1902, made the leisure site accessible by means of an easy fifteen-minute walk in the woods. It became a very popular destination for Sunday outings (Schott,

Energizing European Cities 147 1999a, pp. 214–215). Yet within this new role for urban woods as leisure sites the old role as loci for the gathering of fuel could still resonate. In Frankfurt, the Wäldchestag, the Tuesday after Pentecost, the day when urban residents traditionally received their annual share of wood fuel in the woods (they had to transport it to their homes by themselves), has remained a festive day in the urban calendar ever since and is still an important local festival (Radkau, 1997, p. 48).

Electrifying the Cities: New Perspectives for Light and Transport Toward the end of nineteenth century gas acquired increasing importance for urban energy demands but at the same time its hegemony was challenged by a new technology: electricity (Hughes, 1983). Early enthusiasm with gaslighting, marveling at the well-lit streets by nighttime and the brilliantly illuminated interior spaces of operas, theaters and restaurants, had given way to disenchantment and apprehension, due to spectacular catastrophes, such as the fire at the Vienna theater on the Ring in 1881, which caused almost four hundred casualties (Patzer and Koll, 1981), but also to inconveniences linked with the daily use of gaslight. Gaslight consumed oxygen and thus deteriorated the air quality inside rooms. To improve air quality, public buildings had to install complicated systems of ventilation. Furthermore, burning gas also produced a range of substances such as tar, sulfur dioxide and so forth which, as components of coals, were still contained in the gas generated through the coking process. These substances settled on chairs, curtains and pictures, covering them, if the furniture was not cleaned and revarnished frequently, with a dark-brownish hue. When in the early 1880s Thomas Edison had developed an electric system for interior lighting, the public response for this new system of supposedly clean and non-poisonous illumination was enthusiastic. Nevertheless, it was not before the turn of the century that electricity had actually been introduced in most German cities. The reasons for this slow and delayed diffusion were the very high costs of electric lighting in the early years, but also the fact, that from the late 1880s on, three competing technological systems could be chosen, each of which had particular advantages and drawbacks. In the directcurrent system, developed by Edison, electricity had to be generated close to the place where it was consumed, because transmission caused significant losses and was not economically feasible beyond a radius of one kilometer. Thus, the power station had to be located right in the city center, where major consumers such as theaters, luxury entertainment sites, department stores, and the like were present. But power stations produced noise, vibrations and smoke; they consumed large quantities of coal and large quantities of ashes and other waste materials had to be removed from there. In short, power stations were major environmental

148  Dieter Schott nuisances. An advantage of direct current was, however, that excess electricity could be stored in an accumulator—a battery—much along the principles of how gas stations operated, storing excess gas in the gasometer and releasing it according to demand. The two competing systems, the single-phase alternating current and the three-phase current offered no such storing device. In compensation, they made it possible to locate the power station at the periphery of the city where it would not cause such environmental hazards. Since these two systems needed complicated installations to bring electric energy to the end user, the capital costs for networks were significantly higher than for direct current. They differed in the type of motor available: Single-phase alternating current had no motor suitable for industrial purposes, whereas in three-phase current the asynchronous motor was well-suited to industry (Wengenroth, 1989). However, by the late 1880s, many cities had just heavily invested in municipal energy infrastructures, they had municipalized their gasworks, and modernized and extended them in consequence. This acted as a brake on the rapid progress of electrification. In 1891 a highly popular International Electricity exhibition in Frankfurt had demonstrated the great potential of electricity for cities; the three-phase power system had its spectacular first presentation there with a long-distance transmission of waterpower by electricity over 175 kilometers into the exhibition grounds. Nevertheless, cities did not jump at the new technology (Schott, 1999b). Municipalities were very aware that giving concessions to private companies setting up electric power systems would reduce their income from gasworks. On the other hand, electrification could not be totally prevented: Many owners of prestigious restaurants, theaters and the like installed their private electricity provision just for their own house or they cooperated with other homeowners on their block to install a network delivering electricity to consumers within the block (Herzig, 1992). Challenges also arose within the gas industry: the technological innovation of the Auer gas mantle, a device which could give light by bringing a piece of textile to a glow, fired by gas, promised to radically reduce gas consumption for lighting to one sixth of the gas consumed by a traditional flame (Braun, 1980). Gasworks were worried that their principal market, gas for illumination, would shrink drastically with the introduction of this new gaslighting technology. They responded by diversification: gasworks introduced new and lower rates for gas consumed for heating and powering technical apparatus. And they offered the devices needed for this new type of gas consumption in their show rooms for inspection, so consumers could observe how to cook with gas, how to heat bath water or even the whole house with gas and which tasks gas engines could perform in the workshop or the factory (Schott, 1999a, pp.  423–433). Frequently, these devices, quite expensive at the beginning, were lent to customers on a hire-purchase basis. Customers paid the rent for these gas stoves together with their

Energizing European Cities 149 gas bill (Ditt, 2011). This strategy of diversification and market penetration was so successful that gas consumption rose instead of slumping as anticipated. Gas, particularly also for purposes of cooking and heating water, became an indispensable asset of modern urban living, technicized the house, produced the modern ‘bathroom’ and transformed domestic culture in many urban households around 1900 (Schott, 2015b). Driven too by the strong economic boom starting in the mid-1890s, gasworks reached the limits of their capacity and new gasworks were set up, frequently at more convenient locations on the periphery with easy access to water and rail (Schott, 2005). Public transport was also put on the municipal agenda in the 1890s. The rapid population growth of many cities in Germany and northern Europe, more generally after 1870, had expanded the spatial perimeters of cities, so that the need for public transport increased considerably. For an extended period between the mid-nineteenth century and the 1920s, horses became the principal urban energy converters and ‘living machines’ performing urban transport, their numbers and concentrations rising rapidly (McShane and Tarr, 2007). Horse tramway companies, frequently set up by English or Belgian investors, had catered for some transport demand, but they were too expensive to be used by the workers and their lines could not easily be extended in accordance with new development, since tramway lines needed horse exchange stations at set intervals. Street railways powered by steam proved a nuisance for city street life; steam locomotives upset horses and their smoke emissions added to the already polluted city air. Tramway companies experimented with a range of different traction technologies, such as gas engines, cable cars and so forth, but eventually it was electricity and the overhead trolley technology which proved the most flexible and economical technology for powering tramways (McKay, 1976). Municipal administrations thus had to grapple with a range of choices which significantly complicated the process of urban electrification. By the early and mid-1890s many German cities considering electrification were confronted with a bewildering range of decisions: 1. Should electrification be carried out by private enterprise or be kept under municipal control? 2. Which technological system should be chosen? What would be their consequences for urban development and industrial structure? 3. How could the transport issue be taken care of within this field of choices and decisions? The success and the fit of decisions taken on these issues depended on their appropriateness to the demand structure and specific consumer characteristics as well as the most important development issues at stake in a particular city: in the case of Mannheim, an entrepôt at the junction

150  Dieter Schott of the Rhine and Neckar at the northern edge of the state of Baden, the questioning of this entrepôt role—Mannheim had for several decades been the site of trans-shipment of bulk goods from boat (downstream on the Rhine) to rail—was crucial. Because it had been decided to develop the Rhine upstream from Mannheim for all-year shipping of larger vessels, Mannheim anticipated to lose that strategic position. In search of a new economic role, the municipality decided to develop an old arm of the Neckar, underused as a port for floats, as a new industrial port for production and processing companies (grain mills!) requiring cheap access by water. The need to supply the industrial port with electricity, and the fact that the port itself made up a suitable location for a power plant, eventually determined the choice of both system and location. The three-phase system was suitable for cranes and pulleys in the port and the industrial port seemed ideal as location (Schott, 1999a, pp.  379–389). Mannheim was, moreover, fortunate in that it was able to convince the rapidly growing Swiss company Brown, Boveri & Co., to transfer their production plant from Frankfurt to Mannheim by giving them the commission to build the power plant and to run it on a lease basis for the first five years. Moreover, Mannheim municipalized the private horse tramway, electrified it and extended the network considerably. It further adopted modern town planning principles, particularly the concept of separating housing and industry. Because of the expected high level of pollution, the industrial port was left almost without housing; instead the port was connected via electric tramway with existing and newly planned residential districts. In contrast to other cities, where the tramway was predominantly a middle-class means of transport, Mannheim introduced worker tickets and brought the tramway within reach of at least the more well-to-do workers (Schott, 1998). Thus, electrification became potentially an empowering technology; it could give cities, if they operated it wisely, new scope and room for maneuver to diversify their industrial portfolio and to open up new areas of the city for industrial or residential development. If we look at the general picture, the period between 1895 and 1914 can be seen as the high period of ‘municipal socialism’, in the sense that many cities consciously and comprehensively developed their technical infrastructure in order to prepare foundations for further economic and demographic growth and to secure steady income for the municipal budget. It was also a period when electrification, but also the development of gasworks, mainly took place on an urban scale. However, this period of a strong and extensive urban agency in local energy policy proved transitory: In the years just before World War I, electrification moved onto a regional scale. The fact that within a polyphase technology the sites of power generation and power consumption could be spatially separated, invited to utilize energy resources at a distance from the center of consumption, the cities. Such energy resources were basically

Energizing European Cities 151 the large brown coal fields in the Rhineland (between Cologne and Aixla-Chapelle) and Saxony, as well as the waterpower resources on large rivers or in the mountainous regions. Particularly the southern German states such as Bavaria and Baden, far away from the coal mining regions, began to develop energy policies which strove to utilize waterpower— then branded as ‘white coal’—and to market this power in the large, hitherto unelectrified rural regions of these states (Stier, 1999). When urban electricity utilities tried to expand beyond the municipal territory in the years just before World War I, they frequently encountered these new players, like Badenwerk or Bayernwerk, or large companies like the public-private corporation ‘Rheinisch-Westfälische-Elektrizitätswerke’ (R.W.E.) in the Ruhr region, which combined power generation from brown coal fields in Rhineland with waterpower generated in the Austrian Alps (Todd, 1999).

Empowering and/or Dis-empowering Cities? Toward Energy Transition In a transitional phase, dating roughly from the 1890s to the 1930s, setting up the networked city, particularly in the energy field, enhanced urban agency to the point where it directed urban development and influenced the daily life of urban residents (Schott, 2008). With the growth and formation of nationwide electricity and gas networks, however, the cities became progressively marginalized in the shaping and directing of power networks, although they frequently maintained control of the local distribution networks. The experience of both world wars and the huge power requirements of wartime industries, as well as the difficulty of planning and funding the massive investments required by ever-larger power plants and extensive distribution networks, seemed to prove to national governments that the municipalities were no longer an adequate scale at which to run and develop energy policy. Besides, city governments were blamed for keeping electricity and gas rates excessively high in order to balance their budgets. In several phases, national governments thus intervened to coordinate electricity provision at a national level, for instance by setting up national institutions such as the British ‘National Grid’, by bringing strategic resources such as waterpower from navigable rivers under imperial control, as in Germany after World War I, or by attributing extensive regulatory powers to the national government, again in Germany, in 1935 (Hellige, 1986). The most radical step was the nationalization of the utilities and the energy industry, as happened in the UK, France and Italy after World War II. This general structure of highly centralized and monopolistic energy-generating systems, dominated by nationalized or quasi-public energy utilities, has persisted for more than half a century. These utilities rely on large power stations fueled by brown coal, atomic energy

152  Dieter Schott or waterpower. Atomic energy, which started to play a significant role from the 1960s on, did not create this centralization but it intensified the trend toward larger power stations and higher voltage transmissions. In the sphere of domestic heating the rise of oil since the 1960s took place within the private sector whereas its partial replacement with natural gas since the 1970s has reinforced public, in many instances municipal, utilities since they served as distribution networks and promoted the adoption of natural gas for economic as well as ecological reasons. Only since the 1990s have new and in many aspects contradictory tendencies broken up these centralized and monopolistic structures, particularly in the electricity market. On the one hand, the EU has forcefully implemented a policy of deregulation and privatization of the energy market, in the course of which chances for new companies to enter the market have grown considerably; on the other hand, large-scale social protests against atomic energy in particular, but—in the light of climate change and the call for a comprehensive de-carbonization—also against fossil fuels, have contributed to legislation in many European countries which subsidize the use of renewable energies (in Germany, particularly the EEG law). This policy has facilitated the proliferation of solar panels, wind turbines, biogas plants and wood-based domestic heating systems on an unforeseen scale and speed. In terms of land use, this means a partial reversal of the former changes which accompanied the transition to fossil energy: Energy is now again being ‘harvested’ on and from a much more extensive area, almost bringing a return to the pre-industrial state of things, where the availability and energetic productivity of land (to produce wood fuel, hay and food) had been a major limiting factor of economic growth. Within this changed regulatory landscape, many cities with a large green political influence have overcome their earlier passivity and have newly engaged in municipal energy policies to promote the energy transition toward renewable energies. In particular, we can observe a marked tendency toward re-municipalizing of power-generation systems. This will make energy policies more susceptible to democratic pressure for more ecologically oriented energy policies (Libbe et al., 2011). The Fukushima accident of 2011 and the ensuing turn toward ‘energy transition’ (Energiewende) in Germany has given these policies additional drive. But the energy transition also poses new problems, particularly the issue of transporting electric energy, generated by wind turbines in wind-rich northern Germany, to the centers of energy consumption in the south; new high-voltage transmission lines have provoked massive resistance and this will have to be accommodated by expensive routing of these cables in the ground. Another issue concerns the social effects of rising energy prices, which threaten to make electricity a luxury product again. There is a danger that debates, such as those in the early nineteenth century when the price of wood fuel became a hot topic of social conflict, might return in these transition societies with

Energizing European Cities 153 respect to electricity prices. On the whole, it is still rather unclear and an open question as to how future energy systems will look like at the urban level, but it seems reasonable to assume that cities will exercise more agency in the field of energy than they did in the second half of the twentieth century.

Note 1. The ‘octroi’ was a tax imposed on all kinds of consumables imported into the city. There were tax collection points at all roads leading into the city and at the railway station, where (theoretically) all imported goods were registered and taxed according to a tax table (Gallo, 2013).

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7 Re-use and Recycling in Western European Cities Georg Stöger

Introduction The demands of urban production and consumption have resulted in flows of resources and goods into, within and out of the cities. All these materials and objects, in becoming part of the urban metabolism, therefore also have an afterlife (or multiple ones), which could range from being inserted into environmental media (air, water or soil) to being passed on, ‘re-used’ or ‘recycled’. These two terms refer to the same principle: the process of returning materials or objects into the production and consumption cycle. However, they can be defined in different ways: ‘Re-use’ refers to a new utilization, whereas ‘recycling’ implies a transformation of used materials or waste into a ‘new’ raw material. The term ‘recycling’ itself has to be considered a relatively recent one, since it arose during the 1920s and initially referred to technological processes within the oil industry. Especially from the 1970s on, it has been attributed to the reprocessing of used materials as a whole and it has subsequently become a central tenet of the environmental discourse (Liborion, 2012; Oldenziel and Weber, 2013). Thus, recycling and re-using cover the broad field of re-using materials, respectively the transfer and the consumption of secondhand commodities. On the one hand, these circulations were non-commercial (private, sometimes charitable or illegitimate) practices; on the other hand, they were profit-oriented transfers. These latter can be labeled as secondary markets. While the history of urban waste has interested scholars for years (Weber, this volume), the issue of recycling has attracted less attention. Yet for (Western) Europe several overviews exist that have discussed markets and practices of recycling from a longer-term perspective, and there are some case studies on certain materials, places or periods of time. Although they have often dealt with urban settings, they have mostly lacked an explicit focus on the city itself. Altogether research seems quite diverse and ranges from discussing urban sanitation and practices of waste management to considering the by-products of the mass consumer society. With respect to period, studies on the history of recycling have

158  Georg Stöger mostly focused on the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries (see also Stöger and Reith, 2015). Considerably more scholarly work has been done on the trade and consumption of secondhand objects with studies that were driven by an interest in poverty, non-elite consumption and alternative economies (see also Fontaine, 2008; Stobart and Van Damme, 2010; Stöger, 2016). However, studies on the pre-modern period and the nineteenth century in particular, have dominated so far, while the twentieth century has largely remained a ‘black box’ in respect of questions of urban secondhand markets and transfers. As a whole, the scholarly work on re-use and recycling seems uneven, and it offers a rather diverse and complex picture: Even apart from divergences in market conditions and institutional frameworks, each material also had its own history. Thus, we cannot expect, as Susan Strasser rightfully remarked, a ‘straightforward overall narrative’ for the history of recycling and re-using, but we can detect patterns that hint toward general constellations and trajectories (Strasser, 2013, p. 519). This chapter sketches an outline of urban re-use and recycling and its transformation—and/or continuities—during the pre-modern and modern periods. In doing so, I will deal with materials and commodities of everyday use and leave aside the re-using and recycling of other objects or substances such as luxury goods and collectables, or ashes, feces, chemical, and industrial wastes. I will discuss aspects of re-use and recycling by focusing on questions of materiality, urbanity and agencies.

Materiality and Technological Change During the pre-modern period recycling and re-use was mainly triggered by the high (relative) value of many commodities and materials. Labor costs did not contribute much to the price: This is evident for materials such as metal or glass, but also for textiles. Examples from late eighteenth century Salzburg show that—even in the case of rather modest clothing— we have to assume labor costs that could stay below 10 percent of the total price (Stöger, 2016). Especially for the lower urban classes textiles and clothing were quite valuable: the 480 pfennig that were paid for a secondhand man’s coat in Nuremberg at the end of the fifteenth century equaled forty-three days of work for an unskilled laborer at that time (Groebner, 1993, p. 156). At least in central Europe these relations do not seem to have changed much during the early modern period: in Salzburg, for example, in the 1790s, a fairly modest man’s jacket would have cost fifteen gulden (florins), for which an unskilled laborer would have had to work for almost sixty days (Blondé and Stobart, 2014, p. 212; see also: Fennetaux, 2015). The practice of valuing household effects made of metal primarily by weight and not by design, which is documented in many pre-modern probate inventories and household account books, can also be explained

Re-use and Recycling in Western European Cities 159 by the high value of materials. However, different materials have different ‘stories’: metals and glass could easily be recycled within urban production—and they were, as is indicated by the advanced collecting systems (see the following) and the meager findings by urban archeologists. In households (and urban institutions) other scrap materials or dysfunctional objects were usually stored, then given to collectors or used for different purposes, e.g., as spares, for repairs or as fuel. Building materials were re-used to a large extent ‘in situ’, and many urban craftsmen acted as recyclers themselves, especially when materials required a certain expertise or appliance. Some products, such as paper, were entirely based on recycled materials (Woodward, 1985; Stöger and Reith, 2015; Groebner, 1993, p. 182). Industrialization brought mass production, which resulted in declining (real) prices for goods and materials. Especially textiles were affected by this evolution: As ready-made clothing started to become significantly cheaper during the second half of the nineteenth century and concerns regarding hygiene grew, the importance of consuming secondhand garments began to decline (Rose, 2010; Ginsburg, 1980; Fontaine, 2008, pp. 127–151). There are also some hints that the durability of textiles— especially where cottons and mixed textiles were concerned—gradually declined and this may have hindered secondhand consumption (Blondé and Stobart, 2014, pp. 193–209). At the same time, the number of garments in circulation increased and unwanted clothing still had a certain value—it was not ‘just’ disposed of. In fact, the urban laboring poor relied heavily on used clothing, and the decrease in transport costs created wider markets for secondhand textiles that included transfers of clothing from urban Europe to African or Asian colonies (Shell, 2014; Richmond, 2013, p. 75f.; Rose, 2010, p. 129). During the nineteenth century some scrap materials still were cheaper than virgin materials and industrialization led to an expansion of markets for certain materials as the industrial system provided new forms and possibilities of re-use. Since the 1860s the discourse on ‘industrial waste recovery’ intensified, and the transport revolution facilitated international transfers of scrap materials (Desrochers, 2007; Cooper, 2011). Even after wood pulp was introduced in the paper industry during the second half of the nineteenth century, the use of scrap materials (paper and rags) retained its relevance within the production process. Around 1900, the German paper industry still used 180,000 tons of rags (and probably 85,000 tons of waste paper) annually (Weber, 2015, pp. 156– 158). Technological innovations allowed new forms of recycling, such as, for example, the reprocessing of woolen rags into yarns and fabrics, which were labeled as ‘shoddy’. The shoddy industry evolved from an expansion of the wool industry in West Yorkshire, which began to use shoddy as a (cheap) substitute for wool during the 1810s. Woolen rags were mainly obtained from London, where they had been collected or

160  Georg Stöger imported from the European mainland. During the first half of the nineteenth century the shoddy industry expanded remarkably and seems to have reached its peak in the years before World War I (Shell, 2014; Clapp, 1994, pp. 194f. and 201f.). But in the long run, the prices for raw materials and consumer goods declined notably and this development has accelerated since the post-war boom. From the 1950s on, cheap fossil energy has led to an unprecedented decrease in prices for a wide range of materials and consumer goods, while labor costs have begun to increase (Pfister, 2010). In consequence, possible earnings from recycling—as a labor-intensive process— have largely declined. Again, there were significant differences between different materials: especially materials of a higher value and those that could be separated and processed more easily or that appeared in bulk (such as metals, glass or printers’ waste) were still recycled to a large extent by specialized industries. In addition, technological innovations (mainly the mechanization of sorting and processing scrap material) allowed—and subsequently cheapened—large-scale recycling. But recycling was confronted with new obstacles: some materials could hardly be recycled as there were technical or economic constraints. The rubber used in tires, for example, could only be reprocessed in a complicated and costly way, which led—after attempts of refitting and re-using—to the use of scrap tires as a surrogate fuel in the cement industry from the 1970s on, or to large-scale exports to less-developed regions. Other problems were formed by ‘down cycling’ (i.e., the loss of material quality during the recycling process) and by the inseparability of composite materials (Liborion, 2012; Cooper, 2009, 2010; Winkler, 2016). Especially paper suffers a loss of material quality during the recycling process, and this became a central problem of paper recycling. Thus, waste paper is more likely to be reprocessed into inferior products such as cardboard or wrapping paper. At the same time, significant technological advances (e.g., the process of de-inking) resulted in a better quality of the waste paper and substituted (costly) human labor. Nevertheless, waste paper from households gradually lost its importance for paper recycling during the twentieth century, as prices for wood pulp steadily declined while labor cost increased. The use of waste paper from industries and services persisted because it was less labor intensive and usually had a higher quality (Weber, 2015, pp. 154–159; Stokes et al., 2013, p. 114). This devaluation of waste paper became evident in the greater amount of paper waste within cities. Paper littering in urban spaces became a new phenomenon of the interwar period and the share of paper and cardboard in the household waste increased significantly during the twentieth century—in the case of Britain, 30 percent (by weight) already in the late 1960s (Stöger and Reith, 2015; O’Brien, 2008, p. 102f.; Weber, 2015, pp. 156–158). The evolution of a ‘modern’ urban disposal system since the end of the nineteenth century has affected recycling markets to a certain extent, as

Re-use and Recycling in Western European Cities 161 new technologies and practices that aimed at ‘getting rid’ of wastes, such as landfills or incinerators, have been introduced. ‘Traditional’ collectors do not seem to have been completely excluded, but they were somehow marginalized (Weber, this volume). When we consider what ‘household waste’ might have consisted of during the late nineteenth century we can still assume functioning recycling systems—either within households (and by door-to-door collectors) or at the dumps ‘ex post’ (by sorters). A contemporary measurement of ‘ash-bin refuse’ in 1890s’ London revealed that it mainly consisted of ashes, dust and cinder (80 percent by weight). Only a very low percentage of reusable materials was found: 4 percent paper and board, 1 percent glass; the share of ferrous metal and rags was even below 1 percent. Still in the mid-1930s nearly 60 percent of British urban waste was composed of ashes, cinder and dust (Stöger and Reith, 2015, p. 282f.). While the treatment of urban waste had still aimed at sorting out reusable materials during the first half of the twentieth century, the increasing labor costs put such practices under pressure from the 1950s onwards.

Urbanity of Re-using and Recycling For the pre-modern period, we can assume the omnipresence of re-using and recycling within urban economies and societies (Woodward, 1985; Barles, 2005). Outside households and workshops these materials and goods were traded on markets highly embedded in the urban economy and consumption: used objects circulated through auctions and pawning, and licensed and unlicensed dealers traded them in streets or in shops and stalls. In bigger cities, such as Paris, London, Nuremberg and Vienna, there were even large marketplaces for secondhand goods and repair works. Over seven hundred secondhand traders are documented in Paris for the 1720s and over five hundred for Vienna in the 1810s— yet we have to keep in mind that these numbers usually refer to taxed traders only and thereby exclude the large number of informal traders, co-workers and other traders/craftsmen present in these markets (Stöger, 2016; Fontaine, 2008, pp. 97–114). Cities constituted focal points for the consumption of textiles and thus for the exchange of used clothing, as they provided both significant supply and demand. Garments and textiles either circulated within the households (as gifts or—in the case of domestic servants—as partial payment), or they were traded on the secondhand market. Auctions, which were held in cases of bequests or when cash money was needed, formed an important urban outlet for used clothing as well, but the majority of transfers were handled by the urban secondhand traders, which also sold used clothing on specialized marketplaces. Partially they provided new clothing as well and thereby blurred the gaps between old and new (Ginsburg, 1980; Palmer and Clark, 2005; Naggar, 1990; Levitt, 1991).

162  Georg Stöger There are hardly any figures available for the collectors of scrap materials, because most of them were informal or subcontracted laborers. However, some contemporary estimates reveal significant numbers: in 1829 nearly two thousand (licensed) chiffonniers (i.e., rag and waste pickers) could be found in Paris, around 1850 there were probably twenty-five thousand collectors and during the 1880s more than forty thousand (Barles, 2011). These collectors provided resources that could be used in urban production or that were even central to some industries such as paper production, which was entirely based on the recycling of rags and scrap paper until the second half of the nineteenth century (see Figure 7.1). Thus, rags were a sometimes scarce and sought after material, especially when the consumption of paper started to increase during the early modern period. Pre-modern paper mills were often based in cities or in their hinterlands, as they were bound to the scrap materials that urban consumers provided. Rags were needed in considerable amounts: it was estimated for the period around 1500 that a small paper mill would have reprocessed the number of rags that fifteen to twenty thousand people would have provided. In the 1750s about five tons of rags a month were able to be processed in a paper mill run by the Viennese municipal authorities—and this mill was only one of several others in Vienna or in its vicinity (Stöger and Reith, 2015, p.  276f.). Thus— despite frequent bans—rags were regularly traded over greater distances and in significant quantities throughout the early modern period: during the early 1790s nearly 4,600 tons of rags, which mainly originated from German and Italian territories, were imported into the British Isles each year (Zaar-Görgens, 2004, p.  41; Schmidt, 2013, p.  54; Barles, 2005). This implies the existence of a considerable network and a substantial workforce engaged in the collection, the processing and the transportation of rags. Urban settings seem to have played a crucial role for recycling and re-using: urban consumption provided scrap and used goods in large quantities, while there was a ready market and steady demand for these materials and objects. Port cities, for example, supplied large amounts of scrap iron, as it was used as an easily resalable ballast, which also came—especially since the nineteenth century—from recycled ships (Mende, 2001, pp. 38–44). The urban hinterland supplied scrap materials (e.g., metals or textiles) for urban trade and production, and vice versa it served as an outlet for the urban secondhand market: by peddlers visiting the countryside, and by the rural population coming to town. Urban clothing was also exported from Western Europe to overseas destinations even before the nineteenth century (Fontaine, 2008; Lemire, 1991; Ginsburg, 1980; Palmer and Clark, 2005; Naggar, 1990; Levitt, 1991). During the nineteenth century markets for some scrap materials further expanded, especially in the case of scrap metals and rags. As the consumption of paper increased steadily during the first half of the nineteenth century, rags again became a sought after material. This

Re-use and Recycling in Western European Cities 163

Figure 7.1 Pre-modern recycling practices persisted especially among the urban poor, as this photography of a chiffonnier’s premises in a Parisian shantytown by Eugène Atget shows, 1910s Source: © Bibliothèque nationale de France

demand (and decreasing transport costs) resulted in remarkable quantities of rags that were traded on international markets and processed in paper production. In the 1850s annually nearly fifty thousand tons of European rags reached North American ports, while nine thousand tons of imported rags were used in the British paper industry, making up onefifth of the total supply (Strasser, 1999, p. 85f.; Clapp, 1994, p. 194f.).

164  Georg Stöger The steady demand for rags let to temporary shortages and again—as in the pre-modern period—the blame was mainly put on the export of rags (Wynne, 2015). During the twentieth century, the recycling markets expanded again and the pace quickened especially after the 1950s: recycling and re-use have increasingly become globalized issues as used consumer durables (clothing, cars), which nowadays mostly stem from urban areas of the Western world, have been exported to less developed economies. Waste too, however, is increasingly transferred to these regions, and this is especially the case with dysfunctional electronic devices (Fontaine, 2008, pp. 221–234; Salehabidi, 2016). Pre-modern urban policies on re-using and recycling differed: when used commodities were traded or reworked outside households, they were usually seen as commercial products and therefore subjected to the rules of local trade and craft. Unsurprisingly, larger cities seem to have implemented regulation earlier—in some places rules are detectable even from the late medieval period onwards. Often urban authorities (magistracies and feudal lords, but also the military) issued formal authorizations for certain segments of the secondhand trade. These licenses were often bound to and administered by guilds, but there were significant numbers of licensed traders outside the guild system and many traders acted without any formal trade permits. By that large parts of these markets remained of an informal and unregulated kind. Some cities—even larger ones such as London—seem to have had a free entrance to the trade with used goods. Attempts at regulation mostly originated in conflicts between traders or craftsmen with other actors (often guild members), in fiscal motives or in general attempts at monitoring the markets. This often concerned ‘disorderly’ activities in the public space, which—to my knowledge—intensified during the second half of the eighteenth century (Stöger, 2011). Regulations for recycling tended to affect only certain materials, and they were either aimed at specific areas (often monopolies) of urban crafts and production or at those materials that were considered scarce. Some German-speaking territories issued ‘privileges’ (monopolies) for the collection of rags already during the fifteenth century, and these were administered by urban magistrates or territorial rulers and assigned to a specific district for collection. These districts were usually bound to paper mills, which subcontracted rag merchants or individual collectors. During the eighteenth century, the increase in paper consumption (and the thriving international rag trade) resulted in a shortage of rags, and this led to a ban on their export in many territories. At the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries these bans were mostly revoked and the trade was liberalized, though some states tried to hinder exports by means of high taxes (Schmidt, 2013, pp. 54–56; Stobart and Van Damme, 2010, pp. 75–90; Woodward, 1985, p. 190). Apart from that, the collecting of scrap materials mostly remained unregulated and

Re-use and Recycling in Western European Cities 165 informal during the pre-modern period. Re-using and recycling formed markets and circulations that were probably seen as a viable solution for both the consumers (including producers) and the local authorities. On the whole, urban authorities seem to have been rather inactive in these fields before the nineteenth century. They repeatedly issued norms banning several practices of disposal that can be traced for many cities from the late medieval period on. In general, however, the areas of supply and disposal were largely left to a market-driven system and to private responsibility. Exceptions are only detectable in the case of guild monopolies and privileges or delinquent behavior, as well as during epidemics, when secondhand trade and the collection of certain re-usable materials were temporarily banned (Fontaine, 2008; Stöger, 2016; Stöger and Reith, 2015). The reforms within the urban governments, which gained momentum during the second half of the eighteenth century, led to a growing professionalization of urban administrations. Efforts to establish ‘order’ and a ‘modern’, and therefore representative, city intensified during this period. These changes were also bound to considerations of ‘convenience’ and aesthetics, while its repercussions can also be seen in certain alterations to urban space, such as the introduction of green spaces, public lighting and the paving of streets. At the same time, the growth in urban population put a higher pressure on traditional systems of disposal. These changes resulted in a shift in responsibility: disposal and cleansing increasingly became issues for the municipalities. Therefore, important changes already occurred before urban ‘sanitation’. However, these developments accelerated during the nineteenth century, boosted by epidemics (especially cholera and typhus) and efforts to ‘sanitize’ urban space, which resulted in disposal systems run by contracted laborers or directly by the municipalities (Schott, this volume; Luckin, 2000; Stokes et al., 2013, pp. 23–27). These changes also affected secondary markets: Secondhand markets were transferred to the urban periphery—as in the case of Vienna—and the work of inner-city collectors was increasingly hindered by hygienic measures and by the introduction of waste bins (Barles, 2011). Urban policies on re-using and recycling have varied significantly during the twentieth century: during the first half of the century urban recycling was still left to the market, to the scrap industry and individual collectors. The two world wars marked deep caesuras, as state policy heavily interfered in urban recycling. During the post-war boom, the amount of household waste increased in a significant way, but this did not directly result in municipality-driven efforts of recycling, as the cities still aimed at a hygienic and cheap way of disposing of wastes, which was done by incineration or the dumping of the waste on landfills. By pursuing this course recycling also began to leave the urban areas (Weber, this volume). Since the 1970s, the ecological movement and state environmental policy

166  Georg Stöger have begun to change recycling practices, also at the municipal level. Since then, municipalities have encouraged the recycling of scrap materials, e.g., by separating bins or through information campaigns, but mostly by subcontracting the recycling of urban waste to private companies (Stokes et al., 2013, pp. 25 and 222–238).

Actors and Their Motives It was not only the value of things and materials that motivated people to re-use and recycle: before the nineteenth century ready-made commodities were often only available in limited quantities—usually clothing or furniture had to be bespoke, while used goods allowed immediate consumption. Within urban production materials could also be scarce, and this fostered strategies of saving, substituting and recycling. By participating in secondhand markets and transfers, expenses could be reduced (when choosing cheaper secondhand commodities), and personal belongings could easily be converted into cash (in cases of bequests, monetary requirements or migration). These transfers constituted a necessity for large sections of pre-modern urban society, but they also created opportunities, which integrated secondary markets into an ‘economy of makeshifts’ that consisted of a variety of consumption and labor strategies (Fontaine and Schlumbohm, 2000; Fontaine, 2008; Stöger, 2016). In addition, these patterns of re-use and recycling were boosted by widespread habits of thrifty behavior that aimed at a frugal and economic usage of materials and goods. Practices of re-using were central to the consumption of clothing: because of the high value, consumers tried to enhance the life span of clothing by repairing or adapting it. Expenses could be reduced by selling and buying used garments, but it also created a possibility for unburdening tight budgets while still dressing in a respectable and representative way. Secondhand garments—if in good shape and made from valuable fabrics—could even be more expensive than newly made equivalents. Thus, garments and other textiles from wealthier households frequently entered the secondhand market and were handed down the social chain (Fennetaux, 2015; Fontaine, 2008; Blondé and Stobart, 2014, pp. 30–45 and 210–225). At the end of their life span garments were usually cut up and used for mending and other household purposes (e.g., cleaning). Even these scraps of cloth were stored carefully as they represented a certain (practical and monetary) value and they were a central resource for papermaking. Even middle class and more affluent households participated in such circulations, as well as urban institutions ranging from poorhouses and orphanages to the armed forces. All of this is well-documented in account books. In addition, re-using, repairing and recycling constituted significant fields of urban employment: craftsmen, especially tailors and shoemakers, but also building and metal workers, dealt with used objects or materials on

Re-use and Recycling in Western European Cities 167 a daily basis. They undertook repair works, accepted secondhand objects as non-monetary payments and even partially relied on the supply of used materials (Woodward, 1985; Strasser, 1999, pp.  22–27; Lemire, 2011; Stöger and Reith, 2015; Groebner, 1993, p. 245f.). The main material of secondhand circulations—used clothing—began to lose its importance during the second half of the nineteenth century (see above), while other objects retained their relevance longer, e.g., household goods and furniture (Stobart and Van Damme, 2010). And there were—and still are—substantial secondhand markets for higherpriced consumer durables, especially for cars or electric appliances (Fontaine, 2008, pp. 186–207; Gregson and Crewe, 2003). Yet the post-war boom, with its decline in prices for commodities and its expansion of consumption, began to fundamentally change the perceptions of ‘old’ and ‘used’. ‘Old’ has increasingly become a sign of backwardness and poverty, while used or repaired clothing has begun to disappear from public settings. Objects were used for shorter periods before being disposed of, and this is reflected in the increase of household waste and the greater occurrence of bulky waste since the end of the 1960s. This transition can be illustrated by the example of used clothing: After having lost its importance already during the early twentieth century, the consumption of used clothing further narrowed down to children’s garments, charity, exports and later—as a niche—to ‘vintage’ textiles, which became both signs of consumer protest and fashion trends (Palmer and Clark, 2005; Ginsburg, 1980). Secondary markets have always formed an important option for earning a living for the urban laboring poor, especially for those partially or fully excluded from the urban labor market, such as women and members of ethnic minorities (mainly Jews). The informal nature of many trade activities and the traders’ social background sometimes contributed to negative perceptions: These notions merged with existing problems, e.g., dealing with stolen or unhygienic clothing, and led to a widespread distrust by the urban authorities, which seems to have intensified during the eighteenth century (Stöger, 2011; Scanlan, 2007). Apart from rag pickers we do not know much about pre-modern urban scrap collectors. Usually the collection of rags was subcontracted by the paper mills or rag merchants to members of the laboring poor. Although being labeled as ‘rag pickers’ many collectors probably also gathered other materials that could be resold and recycled such as bones, food scraps, metal, glass or even pieces of firewood. Materials of some value—like rags—were often bartered for small products or even bought for little money. Most of the collectors seem to have had stable routes and routines of collecting, thus we can assume they were known in their vicinity. But the ‘unclean’ nature of their profession and their endemic poverty made them urban outcasts as contemporary descriptions and depictions suggest (Ratcliffe, 1992; Faure, 1996; Stöger and Reith, 2015; Wynne, 2015).

168  Georg Stöger The loss of importance of the urban secondary markets and the expansion of job opportunities led to divergent developments: to specialization (antiques trade) and concentration (scrap industries) on the one hand, and to pauperization (petty traders and waste pickers) on the other. In Western European cities the common sight of individual waste collectors has disappeared from the 1950s onwards—in German-speaking areas (and territories occupied by the National socialists during World War II) a significant number of collectors had already been excluded from business due to racial policies, pogroms and wartime salvage drives. However, informal waste picking as a way to earn a living could still be found after the 1950s, especially during times of economic hardship and in lesser developed cities (Naggar, 1990; Denton, 2013; Weber, this volume). Until the second half of the twentieth century state policy had only little impact on urban re-using and recycling. Exceptions were the two world wars: in a war-economy many materials and objects were considered as of strategic relevance. Already during World War I the state bureaucracy initiated salvage programs or put pressure on the local authorities to intensify recycling on a local level. Among the materials that were to be ‘rescued’, was paper and cardboard, as it was needed in the ammunition industry, for packing supplies and for administration. These salvage drives mostly ended soon after the war and some urban administrations, e.g., in Germany, even began to advertise the burning of waste paper in the stoves in order to lessen the burden on the waste collection system. State-driven salvage was revived during World War II—in Europe as well as in the US and in Canada. Due to the shortage of male labor these salvage drives heavily relied on women—being responsible for domestic consumption—and children. Apart from metals and paper the campaigns were also partially extended to rubber, textiles and bones. Building on the experiences of the previous war, Nazi Germany launched several recycling programs even before the outbreak of war and later introduced similar drives in the occupied countries. Even if these salvage drives were indeed aimed at saving (or substituting) raw materials, we must not overlook the fact that they had a significant propagandistic impetus and that they could conceal political and economic shortcomings. In the case of scrap paper, the campaigns frequently referred to the saving of the ‘German’ woodland by collecting and recycling paper. However, the import of wood for the German paper industry mainly came from Northern and Eastern Europe and Nazi forestry was not sustainable at all. Interestingly, the topos of forest dieback (Waldsterben) was again used in the German discussion on paper recycling during the 1980s. The salvage programs of Nazi Germany also aimed at disguising the origin of scrap materials and used goods which might stem from concentration camps or from occupied territories. Even if large amounts of scrap materials were gathered—in Britain more than four million tons of waste paper between September 1939 and May 1945—the effects of

Re-use and Recycling in Western European Cities 169 the wartime campaigns stayed limited, as the recycling of the individual materials was far more complicated than their collection (Cooper, 2008, p. 717f.; Thorsheim, 2013; Denton, 2013; Oldenziel and Veenis, 2013; Weber, 2013, 2015; Stöger and Reith, 2015; Berg, 2015; Irving, 2016; Köster, 2016). In Western European cities these recycling practices hardly survived the 1950s (Stokes et al., 2013; Cooper, 2010). If scrap materials were still collected by municipal services, it was often as waste paper. Britain might serve as an example here: In September  1945, the paper industry had detected a ‘famine’ of waste paper, but already during the late 1940s many British cities faced difficulties in selling the waste paper collected, and this contributed to the end of municipal collections from this period on. Not many British cities seem to have provided collections for waste paper from households during the decades before the 1970s, but if they did so, large quantities were collected: in 1966 the ‘kerbside collections’ in London, for example, accumulated 52,731 tons of waste paper. On the whole, however, the costs of collecting paper tended to be higher than possible revenues (Gandy, 1993, p.  94 and p.  144; Stokes et al., 2013, pp. 112–114). Only the socialist states continued and extended their recycling programs during the post-war period. As in a war economy, recycling and other forms of re-use were seen as central elements of resource management, as possibilities for increasing efficiency and reducing the input of raw materials. This was especially relevant for materials that had to be imported. Again, efforts of recycling were promoted by propagandistic measures, and by using female and underage labor force as well as by establishing collecting points and companies (see Figure  7.2). Still, the aforementioned practical problems of recycling scrap materials persisted, as examples from Hungary and the German Democratic Republic show (Gille, 2007; Möller, 2014). The ‘rediscovery’ of recycling in the Western World in the 1970s was triggered by discussions on environmental pollution and by ongoing debates on the limits of resources (Cooper, 2010; Oldenziel and Weber, 2013). The discourse involved actors on quite different levels: State policy promoted recycling as a solution to reduce material inputs and wastes, while municipalities began to introduce a separated collection of used materials or started to sort the waste ex post. Obviously, the increasing costs involved in the dumping of waste were a significant trigger for these municipal efforts. Especially the recycling of paper was promoted, as paper had become the dominant component of household waste by the 1960s. And the amounts of paper that were consumed and thrown away increased further—German paper consumption, for example, more than doubled between the 1960s and the 1980s. By the 1980s many cities had established collection services or collection stations, which offered the possibility for urban households to recycle their paper waste. The recycling itself was usually overtaken by private companies,

170  Georg Stöger

Figure 7.2 GDR press photo displaying the state-driven collection of glass, paper and scrap metal in Eastern Berlin, 1974 Source: © Deutsches Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-N1011–1011/Hartmut Reiche

which—as market solutions failed—received state and municipal subsidies (as guarantees for fixed prices) and thereby created new markets for recycling (Weber, 2015, pp. 157 and 173–178; Köster, 2016; Stokes et al., 2013, pp. 222–238). The implementation of a separated collection system (or of collection stations) in many cities since the last decades of

Re-use and Recycling in Western European Cities 171 the twentieth century has been seen—or been presented—as a successful story of (urban) environmentalism/sustainability; but even if some products such as paper for example have been manufactured using a high proportion of scrap material, the vision of a closed cycle has not materialized—the amount of scrap material that is not recycled has kept on growing. Interestingly, bottom-up initiatives partially preceded this ‘ecological’ recycling and they were primarily an urban phenomenon. Already during the 1960s, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and city residents—in Germany or the Netherlands for example—opposed the throwing-away of paper by means of self-organized collections or asking municipalities for recycling opportunities. These initiatives were obviously triggered by a certain discomfort at the evolution of the throwaway society, and this was probably rooted in wartime experiences of scarcity and thrift, but it might also have been influenced by the emerging critique on consumerism (Oldenziel and Veenis, 2013; de Jong and Mulder, 2012). However, older forms of re-using by consumers disappeared: disposable articles spread further and the system of deposit bottles began to vanish from retail stores from the 1980s onwards. Since the 1980s international discussions on environmental degradation have resulted in new, sometimes supranational (as in the case of the EU), policies and laws that have put a certain pressure on local governments to recycle waste, even though the realization of recycling infrastructures for household waste differs significantly among Western European cities: in this respect, the German-speaking regions and Scandinavian countries have been taken as forerunners, while Britain has been seen as a latecomer. Starting in the 1990s, ecological concepts (e.g., the ‘transition town’ movement) promoted the idea of sustainable cities and they often included the vision of enhancing the life span of commodities through repairing, or the utilization—and thereby reduction—of urban waste by means of recycling, something subsequently labeled as ‘urban mining’. New media, the internet foremost among them, brought consumers back to practices of re-using and recycling (Gregson et al., 2007, 2016; Bulkeley and Gregson, 2009; Simpson and Zimmermann, 2013; Brunner, 2011; Fontaine, 2008, pp. 165–185; Joergesen, 2013; Wheeler, 2014).

Conclusion—Transitions and Continuities The history of re-use and recycling is strongly connected to the history of urban areas: cities provided used materials and goods in large quantities, they functioned as important marketplaces for them and they partially integrated their hinterland into these exchanges and transfers. During the pre-modern and modern periods, recycling and re-using have been integral parts of urban economies and societies. For a long time, these circulations have primarily been driven by the high value of materials and goods. Consumers and producers treasured objects and materials in

172  Georg Stöger an economy of thrift and scarcity and they aimed to recycle and re-use whenever possible. This also resulted in substantial markets for secondhand goods and scrap materials, and it provided an income for a significant number of urban inhabitants. These conditions began to change during industrialization, as the prices for materials and goods decreased and ‘used’ or ‘old’ things were increasingly perceived in a different way. However, this was not a linear process: while some markets for recycled and secondhand goods (e.g., for textiles) began to lose their importance, others persisted, such as the trade in consumer durables and in materials that could be reprocessed easily or had a higher value. Furthermore, new materials and other innovations reshaped recycling practices, and industrial production itself generated larger quantities of goods and materials to be re-used and recycled. Neither did the collectors/traders involved in recycling and re-using disappear at once: the large-scale recycling of textiles around 1900 was still based on the work of individual—often urban—collectors and implied the need for a large labor force. During the first half of the twentieth century, urban collectors still frequently gathered waste paper from dumps and households and sold it to the paper industry. The post-war boom and the mass consumer society have undoubtedly caused the most profound changes, as the practice of re-using and recycling was put in question by an increase in labor costs and a decrease in the value of many goods and materials. Although there were considerable differences between individual materials, many scrap materials were no longer a useful resource, but became a problem of disposal. Diverging developments of re-using and recycling might as well be explained by the emergence of new actors. The impact of urban policy on recycling and re-using intensified during the nineteenth century, while previously these fields had largely been left to the market. When the cities began to aim for the municipalization of services and for the sanitation of public space, pre-modern practices of, and markets for, recycling and re-using were affected to a certain extent: with the centralized disposal of waste and the dumping at extra-urban landfills recycling practices began to shift away from the cities. State policy gained importance for urban recycling in the course of the twentieth century; especially the two world wars constituted significant ruptures in this respect. The state mostly retreated from this field during the post-war period—an exception was formed by socialist states that still aimed for the recycling of materials and goods for economic reasons. The rise of environmentalism since the 1970s has induced states to implement environmental policies and legislation, which have also affected urban re-use and recycling. Recycling and re-using staged a partial ‘comeback’ from consumers themselves, who demanded recycling solutions from cities or began to re-use themselves. Consumer activism, combined with a

Re-use and Recycling in Western European Cities 173 growing urban waste stream and state legislative pressure, has prompted cities to offer possibilities for recycling. However, the larger picture of this development is ambivalent: urban solutions or initiatives for recycling and re-using have been paralleled by growing amounts of waste and by the large-scale transfer of used goods and scrap materials from urban consumers to less-developed regions.

Acknowledgments An earlier version of this paper (albeit following a different concept) was written together with Isabelle Parmentier (Namur). The author would like to thank Luisa Pichler-Baumgartner (Linz) and Martin Knoll (Salzburg) for editing this text.

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Part IV

Nature as Urban Challenge

8 Hydraulic Experts and the Challenges of Water in Early Modern Times European Colonial Cities Compared Karel Davids Introduction When Europeans began to establish urban settlements overseas in early modern times they were inevitably faced with the challenges posed by water. These challenges were present in more than one sense: the point at issue was not just how citizens could be supplied with a sufficient quantity of water for their daily needs, but also how excessive amounts of water could be effectively removed and in what ways water could be used as a source of energy, as a means of transport, as an outlet for waste or, if necessary, as an instrument for the defense of the city. Settlers from Europe one way or the other had to find answers to problems of shortage, excess, pollution and the spatial organization of water. As such, these challenges were of course not entirely new. Similar issues existed in cities in Europe itself. What was different, at least in some respects, were environmental and institutional conditions. As Bartolomé Bennassar has written, Spanish conquerors in the Americas encountered a kind of nature which they could not have imagined. ‘The mountains were higher, the deserts drier, the temperatures more extreme, the forests deeper’ than they knew at home. ‘They had not experienced such violent storms nor such continuous and massive showers’ (Bennasser, 1993, p. 51). In the tropics, ‘rainy’ and ‘dry’ seasons were much more marked than in Europe. The institutional context overseas was in some ways different as well. European urban settlements overseas in early modern times were often incorporated into a hierarchical set up, whether dominated by imperial authorities, based in London, Paris or Madrid, or controlled by a chartered company such as the Dutch East-India Company or the English East-India Company. In this chapter, I concentrate on the role and background of experts in water management and the contexts in which they operated. Experts were persons considered to possess competence in a specialized field of knowledge; such competence could be acquired by experience and/or by training. The meaning of ‘expert’ or ‘expertise’ in a particular field could change over time. The status of ‘expert’—as the term ‘considered’

180  Karel Davids suggests—was in fact not necessarily stable and sometimes could be fiercely contested between different groups who held different social positions (e.g., artisans or scholars) or who based their claims to knowledge on different grounds (e.g., theoretical skill or practical experience; Ash, 2010, pp. 4–6). Such changes, variations and conflicts may have occurred in the field of urban hydraulic management overseas as well. Following Sara Pritchard, the contexts in which hydraulic experts operated may be referred to as ‘envirotechnical systems’. ‘Envirotechnical systems’ are in Pritchard’s definition ‘the historically and culturally specific configurations of intertwined “ecological” and “technological systems”, which may be composed of artifacts, practices, people, institutions, and ecologies’. They comprise both nature and technology in all its aspects (Pritchard, 2011, p.  19). Like the meaning of ‘experts’ and ‘expertise’, envirotechnical systems, too, show variability according to time and place. This chapter deals with the movements of hydraulic experts and expertise to European settlements overseas. The key question is, to what extent ‘homegrown’ models of urban hydraulic technologies and water management in the early modern period were transplanted overseas, in what respects local knowledge was taken into account and how the development of envirotechnical systems in colonial urban settings can be explained. Was it due to human actors? Was it technology driven? Was it powered by non-human forces? And can we observe a specific ‘agency’ of cities and, if so, in what respect?1 I will approach these questions in a comparative manner, analyzing a variety of urban cases in the Americas and in Asia. The first section discusses the ‘homegrown’ models in European cities. The next three sections look at three colonial towns in different parts of the world and different politico-institutional settings: Mexico City, Batavia and Philadelphia between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These three cities will be examined in time frames which partly differ and partly overlap. The shifting time frame of the case studies allows us to determine whether processes of standardization of knowledge and ‘technologization’ (in the sense of the incremental effect of technologies) occurred, which may have led to an increased need for ‘experts’ and ‘expertise’. The chapter concludes with comparing the colonial cases amongst one another and analyzing connections between European cities and colonial towns.

Experts and Hydraulic Knowledge in European Cities While cities in Europe during the Middle Ages largely worked out their own peculiar practices to deal with challenges of water (Magnusson, 2001), hydraulic knowledge began to circulate more widely from the sixteenth century onwards. The epicenters of this growing movement of knowledge resided in Italy, Spain and the Low Countries. These areas of Europe became the breeding grounds of hydraulic expertise.

Hydraulic Experts and Challenges of Water 181 Special offices for hydraulic affairs were created in various city-states in Northern Italy at an early date. In Venice, for example, a public office for the supervision of canals was instituted in 1224. A Magistrato all’ Acqua, responsible for handling all hydraulic problems, was established in 1501 (Ciriacono, 1994, p.  140; Lane, 1973, p.  16). Another office, charged with taking care of the river Adige, was erected in 1677, with branches in Verona and Padua. The managers of these boards, who were members of the Venetian patriciate, could call on a small staff of technical experts, called proti (Maffioli, 1994, pp. 276–277). Experts from Venice were in the late sixteenth century repeatedly called upon to advise on the solution of hydraulic problems in the environs of Ferrara (Fiocca, 2003, pp. 139–141). Bologna founded a hydraulic area board, too, the so-called Assunti to the waters. These Assunti, recruited from the Senate, likewise received assistance from a staff of practical experts, the periti (Maffioli, 1994, pp. 181–182). Spain, too, was an important center of hydraulic knowledge. Building on a long-standing tradition of Islamic technology as well as know-how borrowed from Italy through the recruitment of Italian engineers and the acquisition of manuscript notes by Italian authors (notably Leonardo Da Vinci), Spain moved into the forefront of the development of hydraulic expertise in the second half of the sixteenth century. Spanish cities, according to Nicolás García Tapia, were at the time well supplied with water for use both by institutional customers such as palaces and religious houses and by the population at large (García Tapia, 1989, p. 76; idem, 1990, pp. 41–54; idem, 1996, pp. 17–18/36–37). A third hotbed of knowledge about hydraulics were the Low Countries, in particular the area at the crossroads of Flanders, Zeeland and Brabant, called the Scheldt delta. Apart from ‘sundrie men of experience’ in diking, draining and reclamation, whose expertise was eagerly sought after in England, France and northern Germany in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (De Hullu and Verhoeven, 1920; Harris, 1961; Ash, 2004; Dienne, 1891, pp.  34–35; Davids, 2008, pp.  283–288), the Low Countries also brought forth expert builders of dredgers, sluices and waterlifting devices (Davids, 2008, pp. 284–288). The City of London, for example, did not only turn for advice to an Italian engineer (Frederico Genebelli) to solve problems of water supply for its citizens, but also contracted with ‘a Dutch or Flemish man’, Peter Morris. In 1582, the mayor and aldermen of London granted a lease to Morris for the building of an engine under the first arch of London bridge to lift water from the Thames, which would be distributed to homes in the eastern part of the city by means of pipes. The London Bridge company, formed to exploit Morris’s device, remained in operation until the first quarter of the nineteenth century (Magnusson, 2001, p. 169; Jenner, 2000, pp. 256–258; Matthews, 1835). The backgrounds of hydraulic experts in European cities, and the basis of their claims to knowledge, diverged markedly. Pamela Long remarked

182  Karel Davids that individuals who were concerned with solving the problems of flooding and water supply in Rome in the 1550s and 1560s had ‘widely differing backgrounds and areas of expertise’. They included a physician, a military engineer, a jurist-cum-magistrate, an architect and a theologiancum-librarian. Unlike contemporary experts in northern Italy, authors and projectors in Rome were not interested in using mathematics and studying physical laws in facing the challenges of water. However, all agreed on the relevance of scrutinizing ancient artifacts, practices and texts as key to the solution of the hydraulic problems that haunted the papal city (Long, 2008). A similar observation holds for other parts of early modern Europe. A single profile for a hydraulic expert did not exist. Experts could include plumbers, architects, engineers and surveyors as well as physicians, magistrates and members of religious orders. Pedro Juan de Lastanosa, for example, who around 1570 composed a wide-ranging overview of all sorts of machines, instruments and hydraulic constructions, was an architect-cum-engineer, who worked in the Low Countries, southern Italy and Spain (García Tapia, 1990). Andries Vierlingh, author of the earliest Dutch treatise on diking (c. 1575) and a much sought-after advisor on hydraulic matters in the Low Countries, was an alderman in Breda and steward of a landed estate (De Hullu and Verhoeven, 1920). In the course of time, experts also became more clearly distinguished according to the basis on which they were considered to possess knowledge in hydraulic matters. Formal schooling in mathematics became a mark of distinction. In northern Italy, new centers of expertise in hydraulics arose in the seventeenth century at universities and Jesuit colleges. Learning hydraulics was no longer confined to training on the job (Maffioli, 1994). In sixteenth-century Spain, a distinction emerged between university-trained, ‘theoretical’ engineers, who claimed a general knowledge of all sorts of technical matters (including hydraulics) and ‘practical’ engineers, who had obtained a specialist knowledge in particular areas through experience (García Tapia, 1990). Many leading hydraulic experts in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not only receive a training on the job, but also studied at the Duytsche mathematicque in Leiden—an adjunct of the university, providing vernacular courses for surveyors and engineers—or at a similar facility at the university of Franeker (Davids, 1990, p. 19; Van Winter, 1988; also on France: Graber, 2007, pp. 319–325). It was at the new centers of expertise at institutes for higher learning in northern Italy, which were not dependent on the hydraulic offices of periti and proti, that a more theoretical approach to fluvial hydraulics gained ground. This theoretical turn, which began in the Papal States in the 1620s and reached the Venetian Republic a few decades later, essentially consisted, as Cesare Maffioli has put it, in reshaping the existing theory of fluvial hydraulics ‘in a geometrical fashion, around the basic

Hydraulic Experts and Challenges of Water 183 concept of velocity’. The aim was to obtain a more reliable knowledge about the motion of water in rivers (Maffioli, 1994; Davids, 2006, p. 68). Champions of this ‘science of waters’ claimed that their ‘geometrical way of thinking’ would generate more reliable, and therefore more useful, knowledge than the empirical approach as practised by the periti and proti (Maffioli, 1994). The ‘science of waters’ spread to the Dutch Republic and other European countries in the eighteenth century. Knowledge of theory became part of the educational background of hydraulic engineers (Davids, 2006, pp. 69–73). As in northern Italy, water management in other cities in early modern Europe was usually brought under the responsibility of public authorities. In addition to the supply of water that could be fetched directly from rivers, creeks, canals or private wells, urban or state governments undertook to construct and maintain aqueducts, conduits, wells and fountains in public places. In some places, small-scale private entrepreneurship supplemented this public system of water supply. In big cities such as Paris, London, Toledo or Seville, water-sellers made a living by carrying water from public sources to private homes (Graber, 2007, p.  317; Jenner, 2000, pp. 251–254; García Tapia, 1990, p. 271). The city of Amsterdam developed an almost all-embracing system of water management. By the end of the seventeenth century, the municipal authorities did not only take care of maintaining banks and quays, dredging canals and harbors with the help of mud mills and regulating the circulation of water in canals by means of a set of sluices, but also operated a public system of refuse collection and a service of supplying water by ship from a nearby sandy region. The number of laborers in the public works department employed to carry out these tasks ran into several hundreds (Davids, 2008; Bakker, 2004, pp. 85–86; Diederiks, 1982). From the late sixteenth century onwards and departuring from this general pattern of public management, the city of London left an evergreater part of urban water supply in the hands of private companies, which delivered the commodity to individual homes by means of networks of pipes. The model of the London Bridge Waterworks company, founded in 1581, was followed by many other groups of entrepreneurs. London’s water supply in the eighteenth century thus presented an early example of a ‘networked city’ (Jenner, 2000, pp.  256–265; Tomory, 2014, 2015, pp. 705–707). In Paris, by contrast, a project by a private company in the 1770 and 1780s to supply water to the city by pumping from the Seine by means of steam engines failed dismally. Even though for a while the London model of distribution became the envy of French engineers after the Napoleonic Wars, Paris clung to its system of public management of water (Graber, 2007, p. 318; Chatzis, 2010). To what extent were these ‘homegrown’ models of urban hydraulic technologies and water management in the early modern period transplanted

184  Karel Davids overseas, in what respects was local knowledge taken into account, and how can the development of envirotechnical systems in colonial urban settings can be explained? To answer these questions, I will now turn to the colonial towns which I  have chosen for comparison: Mexico City, Batavia and Philadelphia. For each of these cases, I will discuss the main hydraulic challenges, the principal solutions proposed to solve the problems in question, the role of hydraulic experts and the contexts in which they operated and the reasons why particular solutions were put into effect—or not.

Draining a Lake: Mexico City Mexico City was built in the 1520s in a lake in a low-lying basin in the interior of Central America. The decision to establish the capital of New Spain in this particular place was inspired by political motives. Building a city at the very spot where the capital of Aztec empire had been, on an island in Lake Texcoco, was supposed the strengthen the legitimacy of the new regime. The flipside of the choice was that the Spaniards saw themselves confronted with the same problem that had plagued the Aztecs before them: how to cope with an excess of water from the surrounding mountains, which repeatedly led to flooding of the city, notably in 1555, 1580, 1604, 1607, 1629–1634, 1647, 1691 and 1697. The threat of flooding loomed ever larger over time, as city canals were filled in to make space for streets and erosion increased because forests were cleared for agricultural expansion (Hoberman, 1980, pp. 388–389; Lopez, 2012; Musset, 1991). The debate about how to respond to the growing risk of flooding in the Mexico Basin became particularly intense after the devastating deluge of 1607. The Aztec system of managing the waters by means of causeways, dikes and floodgates, which the Spanish government had more or less kept in place, proved to be no longer adequate. On the advice of a Germanborn mapmaker-cum-engineer, Enrico Martínez, the colonial authorities opted for a new solution: building a canal and tunnel over a distance of more than thirteen kilometers, called the desagüe, which would drain water from the northern part of the lake to the river Tula and hence to the Gulf of Mexico (Figure 8.1). It has been suggested that the idea of digging and vaulting a six-kilometer long tunnel with a cross-section of 13.5 square kilometers at a depth of nearly fifty meters may have owed something to the technology of the European mining industry. In addition, water from another river, the Cuautitlán, would be diverted from the lake to the desagüe by means of a dam. The desagüe was financed by levying an extra property tax. The entire structure was completed within a year because of the deployment of thousands of native Indian laborers drafted in. It came into operation in late 1608 (Hoberman, 1980, pp. 390–393; Lopez, 2012).

Hydraulic Experts and Challenges of Water 185

Figure 8.1 Entrance of the canal of Nochistongo, constructed in the seventeenth century as part of the drainage system of Mexico City Source: Marrovi (CC BY-SA 2.5 MX), from Wikimedia Commons

Within a few years, however, the desagüe began to show serious failings. The canal and tunnel turned out to be too narrow to absorb large amounts of water. The tunnel became blocked up by earth and debris and its mouth was too high in elevation in relation to the lake and the river Cuautitlán (Hoberman, 1980; Lopez, 2012). On the initiative of the Spanish Crown, another expert from Europe was brought in. In response to a request from King Philip III to look for an engineer ‘well-versed in geometry and the weight and measurement of water’, the Spanish ambassador in Paris recommended the engineer Adriaan Boot from Delft in Holland, who at the time was employed in drainage projects in France. After arriving in New Spain in 1614 (being hired by the Spanish Crown for an extraordinary high salary), Boot surveyed the Mexico Basin and drew up a completely different plan (Lopez, 2012). Instead of draining the lake by the desagüe, he proposed to protect the city by building a large dike encircling the city and improving the existing ‘Aztec’ structures of dams, dikes and canals; the water level in the city would be regulated by means of floodgates, wind-powered drainage mills, man- or animal-powered pumps, and dredging machines to remove the silt in the

186  Karel Davids lake and the city’s canals. Overtooms (devices by which vessels could be hauled over a dike) would be installed to permit canoes to enter or leave the city when the sluices were closed (Lopez, 2012). Boot’s proposal, in short, came down to combining the old, Aztec system of water management with a set of European-style mechanical devices, while allowing the inhabitants of the city and the peasants in the neighborhood to continue using the lake as a means of transport. It promised a more delicate attunement between nature and technology in the Mexico Basin than the rival envirotechnical system represented by the construction and maintenance of the desagüe. Although King Philip III partially endorsed Boot’s plan (ruling that parts of the lake near Mexico city should remain, while the northern parts should be drained) the system of regulation as outlined by the Dutch engineer was never put into effect. The viceroy considered his project too expensive, and the city council of Mexico, which represented the Creole taxpayers and employers of Indian labor, switched its position from initial sympathy for Boot’s plan to renewed support for the desagüe (Hoberman, 1980, pp. 403–405; Lopez, 2012, p. 51). After a new series of disastrous floods hit the city from 1629 onwards, the colonial government decided on a third option, suggested by one of the local engineers, friar Andrès de San Miguel. His idea was to increase the capacity of the desagüe by converting the tunnel into an open trench. San Miguel based his expertise on familiarity with Ancient and Renaissance authors (such as Aristoteles, Vitruvius and Alberti) as well as on his own experience (Hoberman, 1980). In reality, this proved to be an extremely laborious process for both financial and technical reasons. Due to the reluctance of Creole property owners to contribute money to the project and to allow Native American labor to be drafted for construction jobs, the work on the conversion of the tunnel for a long time suffered from a lack of funding and manpower. While operations—under the supervision of Franciscan friars—started in the 1630s, the open trench was not finished until 1789. Its eventual completion owed more to the Mexico merchant guild than to the colonial government. Even then, the capacity of the desagüe was not sufficient to cope with extreme amounts of water, as another series of floods in the 1790s would show. The problem of excess of water was to keep haunting Mexico City until the early twentieth century (Musset, 1993, pp. 63–64; Candiani, 2012; Hoberman, 1980, p. 406). Nature trumped human resources and capabilities for a long time.

Moving a City: Batavia Unlike the capital of New Spain, the seat of the Asian headquarters of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was not established in the interior, but on the coast (see Figure 8.2). Logistical and commercial reasons, not

Source: Jan Janssonius {{PD-1923}}, via Wikimedia Commons

Figure 8.2 Plan of the town of Batavia in the middle of the seventeenth century

188  Karel Davids political ones, were of decisive importance for the choice of the location for Batavia. Situated on the north coast of Java, the new capital of the VOC enjoyed relatively easy connections both with the home country and with ports and company factories in Asia. The location at the mouth of a river, the Ciliwung, had the advantage that Batavia would be assured of a regular supply of water for drinking, drainage and transport; the river could also serve as a moat for the defense of the town. Although the layout of the city in the 1620s and 1630s was an improvised affair rather than the result of a blueprint produced in Holland, it ‘[drew] heavily on the construction practices and theoretical principles that were current in the [Dutch] Republic’ (Raben, 1996, pp. 11–17; Niemeijer, 2005). ‘Typical Dutch’ elements that could be found both in cities in the Netherlands and in newly founded Dutch settlements overseas, such as Batavia, were ‘the orthogonal street pattern, intersected by canals and surrounded by fortification walls and a water-filled moat’ (Van Oers, 2000, pp. 81–85). The ‘Dutch model’ was transmitted overseas by surveyors and engineers, hired by the VOC, who had been trained at the Duytsche mathema­ ticque at the university of Leiden or at similar facilities at universities or at private schools elsewhere in the Dutch Republic. A  few of them received their education in VOC settlements in Asia itself (Zandvliet, 1988, pp. 75–78). However, the particular design of the city and its location at the mouth of the Ciliwung had disadvantages as well, which were not foreseen at the time of foundation. As the flow rate of the water steadily diminished, due to the number and layout of canals and moats, the river left increasing amounts of silt not just in front of the city but also in the canals within the urban perimeter itself. The problem of silting worsened when more and more land in the vicinity of the city was brought into cultivation after about 1660 and other streams and newly dug waterways were linked to the Ciliwung as well as the hydraulic system of Batavia so that the movement of water within the city slowed even further. Soil erosion in the hinterland and the dumping of muck and rubbish in the city’s canals further added to the difficulties. The river and canals, which next to wells, still provided an essential source of water for Batavia’s inhabitants became ever more filthy and foul smelling (Van Der Brug, 1994; Blussé, 1985, pp.  77–79). Even though the waterways were frequently dredged (by hand) by hundreds of corvée workers recruited from other places in Java, the process appeared to continue unabated. The manual cleaning was stopped in the 1770s (Blussé, 1985, p. 79). Nor did Batavia adopt dredging machines, sluice complexes or a public system of refuse collection as seventeenth-century Amsterdam did. Meanwhile, mortality levels among new arrivals from Europe exploded from the early 1730s on. Recent research has shown that this sudden, sharp rise in mortality was in all probability due to the construction of new fishponds in the silted-up area in front of the city, which became a

Hydraulic Experts and Challenges of Water 189 fertile breeding ground for malaria-bearing mosquitoes (Van der Brug, 1994). Experts in the later eighteenth century sought the explanation in a different direction, which fitted in with the miasma theory then dominant in Europe. The main cause of the increased unhealthiness of Batavia, according to contemporary experts such as physicians and military officers, resided in ‘noxious vapours’ believed to have arisen from the marshes between the city and the sea and from the stagnant, dirt-ridden waters in the canals, which, due to a lack of airing within the city and indoors, were insufficiently dissipated. In addition, these European-trained observers blamed the pollution of the air to such factors as the presence of distilleries and lime kilns and the practice of the burying corpses inside, or close by, the city (Blussé, 1985, p. 78; Duurkoop, 1784; Van Hogendorp, 1800, pp. 127–128; Raffles, 1830; Groot, 2009, pp. 108–110). Under the auspices of the VOC-government, various solutions were tried to reduce the spread and influence of the dreaded vapors. A  few canals were filled in. Rice paddies near the town were raised to diminish the stagnation of water. The course of the Ciliwung was shifted to make it flow out into the sea to the west of the city. None of these measures proved to be sufficient to make Batavia a healthier place (Bleeker, 1843, pp. 284–295). In an essay on the state of affairs in the East Indies first published in 1799, Dirk van Hogendorp, a former military officer and company official, hinted at a much more radical solution: if the causes of the insalubrity of the city could not be removed, Batavia should be abandoned in favor of another site. Or as Sir Stamford Raffles put it succinctly twenty years later: the question was whether ‘it would be easier to remove disease from Batavia, or the inhabitants of Batavia from disease’. In fact, citizens were already leaving the city for healthier environments in increasing numbers from the middle of the eighteenth century on (Van Hogendrop, 1800, pp. 127–128; Raffles, 1830). The revolutionary option suggested by Van Hogendorp was pushed through by Hendrik Willem Daendels, a lawyer turned military officer, who was appointed GovernorGeneral of the Netherlands Indies by the new King of Holland, Louis Napoleon. Shortly after his arrival on Java in 1808, Daendels abandoned the old city and moved the capital inland (Bleeker, 1843, pp. 295–296). The walls of ‘Old Batavia’ were razed, and most of its moats and canals were filled in. Thus, the challenges of water in Batavia were eventually overcome by evasion rather than by the adaptation of existing technological arrangements. At the end of the day, the Dutch authorities opted for a wholesale shift to a different envirotechnical environment rather than for a sweeping overhaul of the established configuration of ecological and technological systems. Compared to Mexico City, the case of Batavia shows both similarities and differences. In both cases, colonial authorities chose to adopt ‘homegrown’ models of urban hydraulic technologies and water management to cope with local challenges of water. Native knowledge was hardly

190  Karel Davids taken into account, except in the early phase of Mexico City’s development. The newly introduced systems relied on the building of fixed structures and the large-scale input of labor rather than on the methodic use of mechanical devices. In both cases, experts from a variety of backgrounds were involved in the discussions about the shaping of the systems and in the processes of construction, maintenance and change. In neither case is there evidence that standardization of knowledge or the incremental effect of technologies led to the increased dominance of a particular group of ‘experts’ possessing a specific kind of ‘expertise’. Choices for particular solutions depended not only on the presence, or absence, of particular technical know-how but also on specific configurations of power relations and financial constraints. In contrast with Batavia, the configuration in Mexico City involved a more varied array of institutions and groups, including religious orders, Creole property owners, the city council and the merchant guild, which resulted in prolonged negotiations and conflicts. Path dependency also proved to be stronger in the latter case than in the former. Whereas the government in Batavia in the face of natural agency eventually opted for a wholesale shift of the envirotechnical system, authorities in Mexico City in the face of equally powerful natural forces were not prepared to abandon the system established on the site that originally had been selected for political reasons.

Networking a City: Philadelphia Like Batavia, Philadelphia in the eighteenth century faced a growing problem of water pollution and unhealthiness, but for quite different reasons. Founded as capital of the colony of Pennsylvania in 1682, Philadelphia was laid out on a peninsula between two rivers, the Schuylkill and the Delaware, a few dozen miles inland but with easy access to the sea. The advantage of this location was, of course, that the city could serve both as hub in an international trading network and as a gateway to an extensive hinterland. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the Delaware side, where the harbor was located, was much more densely settled than the banks of the Schuylkill. In contrast with Batavia, Philadelphia was not intersected by canals or surrounded by moats, and it relied initially on springs, wells and small streams as sources of water for daily needs rather than on input from the rivers. As the demand for water increased, due to the expansion of the city, and the existing sources of water within the city became more and more polluted by refuse and industrial waste, leading to enhanced risks for public health, public authorities and private citizens looked for new solutions to meet the challenge. In 1769, for instance, the Pennsylvania Assembly authorized the building of a number of common sewers discharging into the Delaware River (Albert, 1988, pp.  100–101). Philadelphia’s most famous citizen, Benjamin Franklin, in a codicil to his will drawn up in

Hydraulic Experts and Challenges of Water 191 1788 bequeathed his adopted hometown a sum of one thousand pounds earmarked to bring by pipes, the water of Wissahickon Creek into the town, so as to supply the inhabitants, which (he) apprehend(ed) (might) be done without great difficulty, the level of the creek being much above that of the city, and may be made higher by a dam (eds. Labaree et al., 1959; Will and codicil, 17 July 1788) Franklin thus suggested a system of water supply under public management which would have made Philadelphia less dependent on the wells and springs, but without necessitating the installation of complex, expensive machinery and without leading to extra costs for the citizens themselves. In 1791 a newly formed private company proposed to bring fresh water to the city (and facilitate local transport) by building a canal from the Schuylkill river to the Delaware River, but it was unable to execute its project due to a lack of capital. An outbreak of yellow fever in 1793, which killed 10  percent of the population of Philadelphia and nearby towns, followed by renewed epidemics in the years following, occasioned a massive petition from the citizens to the municipal government, urging it to authorize the construction of a new system to provide the city with sufficient clean water. The urban authorities responded by creating a Joint Committee for Bringing Water to the City, the ‘Watering Committee’, which brought out a report in 1798 (Smith, 2013, pp. 14–15). Like Daendels in Batavia, the ‘Watering Committee’ opted for a radical solution. Instead of adopting Franklin’s or the canal company’s ideas, the Committee decided on a bold plan proposed by a British architect and engineer, Benjamin Latrobe, namely to supply the city with clean water by the use of steam power. According to Latrobe’s scheme, water would be pumped from the Schuylkill River though an underground pipe to the center of Philadelphia by means of steam engines; from there, water would be distributed throughout the city via pine logs and publicly accessible hydrants to private customers who would pay a charge of ten dollars per year. The costs of construction and maintenance would be paid by the city government, which generated extra income by borrowing money and levying new taxes. The new waterworks, supervised by Latrobe, came into operation in 1801 (Smith, 2013, pp. 15–18). Thus, Philadelphia, like London, adopted a network system for the supply of water, but it placed it under public management rather than leaving it in private hands. However, the system proved to be much more expensive than expected. The costs of building and maintaining the waterworks vastly exceeded the budget, while revenues remained low because fewer citizens subscribed to the system than Latrobe had projected. On the advice of Latrobe’s successor as supervising engineer, the city government eventually decided to adapt the system in significant ways. The motive force was changed

192  Karel Davids from steam power to waterpower. A  dam was built in the Schuylkill River to create a reservoir of water whose current would be used to drive waterwheels that would ensure the city had a sufficient supply of clean water. The new system, which came into operation in 1822, began to yield profits by the middle of the 1830s (Smith, 2013, pp. 19–26). Thus, Philadelphia shifted to an envirotechnical system that rested on a different balance between natural conditions and technological artifacts from the steam-powered waterworks that had been installed previously. A crucial difference with Mexico City and Batavia was not only the lack of a large supply of cheap labor and the preference for the adoption of mechanical solutions, but also the decisive role of the municipal government. It was the municipal government which made the choice between the experts and expertise and which assumed responsibility for the creation and adaptation of the system. The urban community was key in the whole process.

Conclusion Mexico City, Batavia and Philadelphia each show a prolonged struggle to find effective solutions to local hydraulic challenges. These challenges were partly site-specific, partly of a more general nature. They were related to particular environmental conditions as well as to common issues of shortage, excess, pollution and spatial organization of water. When Europeans tried to respond to these challenges, they seldom resorted to existing local technologies, except, initially, in the case of Mexico City. Native experts were hardly consulted. The knowledge used to cope with hydraulic problems in the colonial towns discussed in this chapter was largely transplanted from Europe. Constructing a tunnel for draining water, laying out a city in an orthogonal pattern intersected by canals, applying steam engines or waterwheels for lifting water—those were a few examples of technologies imported from European cities into colonial settlements. As in European cities, the backgrounds and claims to knowledge of experts involved in these projects were diverse. Experts included engineers, surveyors and physicians, as well as military officers and Franciscan friars. Their claims to competence were grounded in education in a ‘Great Tradition’ of classical and humanist authors, in theoretical training or in practical experience. The rise of a ‘science of waters’ in Europe from the seventeenth century on did not give a single group of experts in colonial cities an edge over the others. There is no evidence either that standardization of knowledge or the incremental effect of technologies led to the increased dominance of a particular group of ‘experts’ possessing a specific kind of ‘expertise’. While the opinions of engineers weighed heavily in early nineteenth century Philadelphia, they were not of minor importance in contemporary Batavia either.

Hydraulic Experts and Challenges of Water 193 However, technical arguments in themselves were never decisive in settling hydraulic issues. Changes in envirotechnical systems depended not only on the presence, or absence, of particular technical know-how but also on the nature of human power relations and financial constraints. The relative cheapness of labor in Mexico City and Batavia, for example, may explain a distinct preference for labor-intensive techniques, such as digging by hand, rather than for investment in mechanical devices, such as dredging machines or windmills. Inability to generate sufficient income from taxes meant that projects could stall or drag on for decades on end. Changes in envirotechnical systems were thus not technology-driven; they crucially depended on socio-political factors. In contrast with Mexico City and Batavia, Philadelphia by the end of the eighteenth century saw the urban community itself become a key player in hydraulic debates. Citizens as a group pressed for a solution to problems in water supplies and they were even prepared to pay extra taxes (albeit reluctantly) to get the problems fixed. Philadelphia did not embrace a ‘London’ model of commercial networks for supplying water. While after 1800 water as a natural resource was to some extent commodified by being sold to private customers, the management of the system as such was not left to a private company. It became a municipal undertaking. Differences in political context for colonial cities clearly mattered. Although Mexico City and Batavia were endowed with an array of municipal institutions from an early date, they did not achieve the same degree of autonomy as Philadelphia. Both cities after all served first and foremost as centers of government hierarchies dominated by an imperial state or a large trading company. Local administrative institutions in Batavia were always headed by officials from the Dutch East India Company (Blussé, 1985). Throughout the early modern period, the urban communities in Mexico City and Batavia thus remained firmly subordinate to higher powers. These cities showed precious little agency of their own. Nature itself, however, did have agency in European colonial cities. Water was not just conditioned by human action; it was also a powerful non-human actor in its own right. The three cities discussed in this chapter dealt with this force of nature in different ways. Mexico City clung to its drainage trench, Batavia shifted its location, and Philadelphia harnessed the power of water for its own ends. There was thus no standard pattern in responses to challenges of water in European colonial cities in early modern times.

Note 1. Other interesting issues, such as the question of whether principles of governance and power were transferred along with the technology, or the question of whether colonial experiences contributed to increased ecological awareness among Europeans, will not be examined because they are too broad to

194  Karel Davids be discussed within a brief essay. For the relation between cities and water management in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Frank and Gandy (2006).

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196  Karel Davids Niemeijer, H. E., 2005. Batavia: Een koloniale samenleving in de zeventiende eeuw. Amsterdam: Balans. Pritchard, S. B., 2011. Confluence: the nature of technology and the making of the Rhône. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Raben, R., 1996. Batavia and Colombo: the ethnic and spatial order of two colonial cities 1600–1800. Leiden: Raben. Raffles, S., 1830. The history of Java, vol. II. London: John Murray. Smith, C., 2013. City water, city life: water and the infrastructure of ideas in urbanizing Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Tomory, L., 2014. Water technology in eighteenth-century London: the London Bridge Waterworks. Urban History, 42, pp. 381–404. Tomory, L., 2015. London’s water supply before 1800 and the roots of the networked city. Technology and Culture, 56, pp. 704–737. Van Der Brug, P. H., 1994. Malaria en malaise: De VOC in Batavia in de achttiende eeuw. Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw. Van Hogendorp, D., 1800². Bericht van den tegenwoordigen toestand der Bataafsche bezittingen in Oostindie en den handel op dezelve. Delft: J.C. Leeuwestyn and M. Roelofswaert. Van Oers, R., 2000. Dutch town planning overseas during VOC and WIC rule (1600–1800). Zutphen: Walburg Pers. Van Winter, P. J., 1988. Hoger onderwijs avant-la-lettre. Bemoeiingen met de vorming van landmeters en ingenieurs bij de Nederlandse universiteiten in de 17e en 18e eeuw. Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers Maatschappij. Zandvliet, K., 1988. Mapping for money: maps, plans and topographic paintings and their role in Dutch overseas expansion during the 16th and 17th centuries. Amsterdam: The Batavian Lion.

9 Stockholm’s Changing Waterscape A Long-Term Perspective on a City and Its Flowing Water Eva Jakobsson Introduction Visitors to Stockholm strolling around the Old Town (Gamla Stan) will probably admire the Royal Castle, take a look at the Parliament and pass the Prime Minister’s residence and office. They are visiting the very center of political power in Sweden, as well as the site where the nation’s political history was shaped. These symbolic buildings are located on, and across, the islets Stadsholmen (the City islet) and Helgeandsholmen (the Holy Spirit islet). These islets belong to the archipelago that Stockholm is built on. In fact, a third of the inner-city area surface is water (Abrahamsson, 1997, p. 65). Here the fresh water of Lake Mälaren meets the brackish water of the Baltic Sea, creating the dynamic and changing waterscape of Stockholm. Few visitors are aware of the historical role of the flowing water surrounding these islets.

City, Land and Water In this version of Stockholm’s history, water is a constant (Figure 9.1). I will place Stockholm’s dynamic waterscape in the foreground, accentuating the interplay between the city and one of Sweden’s large drainage basins, 22,650 square kilometers wide and constituting 5 percent of the nation’s surface. Stockholm lies at the mouth of Lake Mälaren where the lake flows out into the Baltic Sea. Lake Mälaren has an area of 1,140 square kilometers. Over eight thousand islands, islets and skerries are scattered across the lake. The character of the water landscape has been described as ‘one stretch of water reaches inside the city, another outside, and they both look alike, yet essentially different’ (Mårtelius, 1998, p. 289).1 In spite of describing Stockholm as a coastal city, we will look toward the mainland and place the city at the mouth of Lake Mälaren, Sweden’s third largest lake (see also, for different waterscape studies, Mukherjee, 2015). This perspective will highlight Stockholm’s historical dependence and interaction with its waterscape. By using a long-term perspective and

198  Eva Jakobsson

Figure 9.1 Stockholm panorama. Lithograph by Carl Johan Billmark 1868 Source: © Royal Library Stockholm

highlighting the role of the waterscape in history, we can understand the constant and changing connection between the city and its waterscape. The long-term perspective also emphasizes that it is not only modern urban rivers that can change the natural world (Hoffman, 2010).

A Hybrid Urban Landscape The supposition that nature and the man-made world are entangled has made a great impact in environmental history writing (Jakobsson, 2008), particularly in studies of river history (for example White, 1995; Mauch and Zeller, 2008; Langston, 2003; Blackbourn, 2006; Tarr, 2010; Castonguay and Evenden, 2012; Pritchard, 2013; Tvedt and Østigaard, 2014, pp. 12–13). Also, water historians Terje Tvedt and Terje Østigaard have emphasized the importance, especially in urban history, of viewing ‘urban space not just as culture [. . .], or as an engineering relation, but also as nature’. In their perspective, they underline that the connections between cities and water systems are universal, as every city is dependent on water (Tvedt and Østigaard, 2014, pp. 2 and 19). The Swedish capital Stockholm has over hundreds of years both adapted to, as well as tried to control, its changing waterscape. By analyzing Stockholm from the perspective of its water system, one aspect of

Stockholm’s Changing Waterscape 199 the urbanization of nature will be highlighted (see also Barthel, 2008; Elmqvist et al., 2013).2 In this article, the interrelation between Stockholm and its waterscape will be described as a hybrid urban landscape (White, 2004). In this respect Stockholm and its waterscape can—to use some of the concepts that have been introduced to break up the natureculture dichotomy—be described as an organic machine (White, 1995), as a socio-natural site (Schmid et al., 2010), or as an envirotechnical landscape (Pritchard, 2011). The historical dimension of these concepts are of great importance, so ‘that urban places and nature should not be perceived as geographical opposites [. . .], since cities integrate and use water at every level of development and activity’ (Tvedt and Østigaard, 2014, p. 13). To study the history of water is to capture ‘water’s simultaneous universalism and particularism’ (Tvedt and Østigaard, 2014). In this case, the particularity of the water system of Stockholm will be analyzed in relation to the process of land elevation and the flow of water through the city— both from long and short-term perspectives. Because of the waterscape’s universality, on the one hand, and its particularity on the other, it takes different forms at different places and at different times. Stockholm’s water history is therefore created by a mixture of land elevation, hydrological events, seasonal changes between an open and a frozen waterscape, conflicting interests of how to use the flowing water, man-made regulation of the flow of water, incorporation of the waterscape into the city’s water and sewage infrastructure, different societal demands on the management of the regulation, and, finally, planning for future climate changes. In this article, we will also touch on the discussion in environmental history studies of bringing nature into the historical research process both ‘as an agent and object of history’ (Hoffman, 2014, p. 3). Two aspects of what could count as nature’s agency will contribute to this. First, the position of Stockholm downstream in the drainage basin makes the city dependent on other actors in the drainage basin. Second, the always-ongoing land elevation is changing the waterscape, forcing the city, in the past as well as in the present and future, to respond to its both slow as well as sometimes abrupt consequences. This will also add to an understanding of the particularity of this city’s water system.

Stockholm—Between Lake Mälaren and the Baltic Sea Before Stockholm was established, the waterscape used to be the heart of Viking lands. At this time, Lake Mälaren was a bay of the Baltic Sea. The ships were able to sail far into the land, where many waterways were easily navigable. In Heimskringla (c. 1230), Snorre Sturlasson describes the location where Stockholm was later to be founded: Over all of Svithjod [old name for Sweden] all the running waters fall into the Maelar lake; but the only outlet of it to the sea is so small

200  Eva Jakobsson that many rivers are wider, and when much rain or snow falls the water rushes in a great cataract out by Stoksund [Stockholm], and the lake rises high and floods the land. In this text, we are placed at the very locality where all the water from the large Lake Mälaren meets the sea. It is also worth noticing this early perception of this lake’s extensive drainage basin and the understanding of how weather influences the waterscape. ‘Stockholm’ is not documented before 1252. Accordingly, this makes Stockholm, in European terms, a young city. As late as around 1840 the Swedish poet Esaias Tegnér described the Swedish capital as ‘the royal city in the middle of the forest’, where the wolves still wandered in the vicinity (Ahnlund, 1953, p. 38).3 There is evidence of a city administration and burgher rights in Stockholm from about 1280 (Dahlbäck, 1983, p. 58; Dahlbäck, 2002, p. 21). The city was to become the residence of the king (Hillerdal, 2010, pp.  520–521), and around 1300 Stockholm was Sweden’s most significant political center as well as the center of a state stretching out on both sides of the Baltic Sea (Finland). On the other hand, Sweden was not a centralized state before the sixteenth century (Bolin, 1933, p. 260; Ahnlund, 1953, p. 129; Ericsson, 1998, p. 245). There have, of course been many theories as to why a city was built at just this site (Hansson, 1956, p. 16; Dahlbäck, 1987, p. 13). Stockholm’s opportunities to control larger areas in the interior of Sweden is obviously one important explanation for it becoming a political center (Dahlbäck, 2002, p. 19). The city’s strategic position was mentioned already by the sixteenth-century writer Olaus Magnus in his History of the Nordic People: ‘This location is on all sides enclosed by streams—which in bygone days were merely used when fishing—and so well located between sea and lake that it could be called the key to all of Sweden’.4

Stockholm—A City Rising Out of the Sea Besides the water flowing out of Lake Mälaren, we have to consider another natural force in this chapter, namely the land elevation, a theme not often mentioned in environmental history studies. Because of the disappearance of the heavy ice cap after the Ice Age, the coastal areas around the Baltic Sea are still rising. As described in the late 1800s, this land ‘emerged out of ice and water’ (Nordlund, 2001, p. 48). The latest Ice Age ended about ten thousand years ago and it took another six thousand years until the first islands broke up across the water surface (Vattenprogram, 2001). The land elevation in the Stockholm area has been about four to five millimeters per year or 0.4 meter per century since the eighteenth century (Kallstenius, 2010, p. 43). In the middle of the thirteenth century, the water level in relation to the land was consequently about 3.5 meters higher than today (Anderberg, 1986,

Stockholm’s Changing Waterscape 201 p.  9). We can therefore study a slow background force—making the history of Stockholm’s waterscape an environmental history of longue dureé. However, not so slow as to be invisible to a man over one generation. The pace of new land rising out of the sea is dependent on both land elevation itself and the climatic effects on sea levels. Accordingly, warm periods can temporarily counteract land rises (Dahlbäck, 1983, p. 36). If in 2100, due to climate change, the sea were to rise one meter, land elevation would compensate that with half a meter (Andreasson et al., 2011, p.  3). The waterscape in central Stockholm is therefore still constantly changing and the city will also in the future have to adapt to a dynamic nature. The causes of land elevation have been debated among scientists since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Nordlund, 2001). This slow, but visible, phenomenon used to be called water drop (wattuminskning) or shoreline displacement (strandförskjutning), indicating that a correct understanding was not yet reached. In the late nineteenth century, this theory became disputed and it was instead proposed that it was the land that was rising out of the sea (Nordenskiöld, 1889). The rise of land because of the ice cap melting after the Ice Age was introduced even later as an explanation for the land elevation. Initially it was perceived as a linear process (Granlund, 1930). Later on it was documented that the elevation was irregular (Öhman, 1987, p. 45). By using the sites of old oaks, rune stones, burial sites, as well as maps from the seventeenth century and later, the pace of the elevation could be established (Granlund, 1930; Dahlbäck, 1983, p.  37). Land elevation was especially comprehensive during the thirteenth century. One estimates that land elevation was up to one meter during this century. It drastically changed the topography and the possibilities of using land near the shoreline. Bridges became useless, mills lost their waterpower. At the same time, new land was drained and could be built on (Öhman, 1987, p. 70; Hallerdt, 1997, p. 81). During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, one estimated the difference in altitude between Lake Mälaren and the Baltic Sea at as much as one meter. To find out the difference between Lake Mälaren and the Baltic Sea, King Gustaf III in 1774 initiated the systematic recording of water level observations. These observations displayed a difference between lake and sea of about thirty-five centimeters. The erosion in the streams held the lake levels low and at a steady level of difference. In the early 1900s, erosion stopped when the rock under the streams was reached (Dahlbäck, 1983, p. 40; Granlund, 1930, p. 282; Hallerdt, 1997, p. 81; Havståndet, 2009, p. 2). However, it was not only land elevation that shaped the waterscape. There was a dynamic interaction between islets rising out of the water and man filling out the islets shorelines (Anderberg, 1986, p. 9). Archeological excavations demonstrate that these human changes of the waterscape took place all the way back to the thirteenth century (Hedlund,

202  Eva Jakobsson 2002, p. 105). The city’s islet area was doubled during the fifteenth century and the waterscape was shrinking. At this time, the city even forbade dumping waste and rubbish (Ambrahamsson, 1997, p.  59). This process is described as ‘the old bridge became a street’ (Ström-Billing, 1984, p. 86; Ahnlund, 1953, p. 35).5

The Making of a Waterfall In the first millennium ad land elevation had slowly cut off most of the passages out of Lake Mälaren (Hallerdt, 1997, p. 81). Around the thirteenth century, Lake Mälaren was finally close to complete separation from the Baltic Sea. The only remaining outlet was at Stockholm. This passage was concentrated north of the City islet. With only one passage in and out of Lake Mälaren this passage could be controlled (Dahlbäck, 1983, p. 38). Here was the place where a waterfall was in the making. Later on, during the thirteenth century, the difference in water levels between Lake Mälaren and the Baltic Sea became too high to be navigable, especially during spring and early summer. What had been stagnant water slowly turned to flowing waters (Ahnlund, 1953, pp. 42/105; Dahlbäck, 2002, p. 18; Kallstenius, 2010, p. 45; Hedlund, 2002, p. 105). In a document dated 1286, Lake Mälaren was described as ‘stagnum’, which has been interpreted that it was now a lake and that streams had appeared. Consequently, a stream had developed during the earlier part of the thirteenth century between Lake Mälaren and the Baltic Sea (Hansson, 1956, p. 22; Dahlbäck, 1983, p. 40). The names Northern Streams (Norrström) and Southern Streams (Söderström) appear in documents for the first time in 1332 and 1305, respectively (Hansson, 1956, p. 22). It was around these streams that Stockholm developed. In 1907, the role of the land elevation in Stockholm’s foundation was described. The origins of the streams was then placed between 1050 and 1250. From this point—in the early 1900s—the changing landscape received an important role in the historiography of Stockholm (Granlund, 1930, p.  299; Öhman, 1987, p.  22). ‘Our city has developed directly out of the landscape formation, which only after firm resistance loosened its all too firm embrace’ (Ahlund, 1953, p. 35).6 The cutting off and the making of the streams caused by land elevation—‘A landscape rising out of the sea’ (Andersson, 1997, p. 13; Kallstenius, 2010, p. 39)7—became the point of departure for the writing of early Stockholm history (Ahnlund, 1953, p. 35; Dahlbäck, 1983, p. 26; Cronström, 1986, p. 10; Anderberg, 1986, p.  9; Öhman, 1987, p.  45; Andersson, 1997, p.  25; Kallstenius, 2010, pp. 40–45; Dahlbäck, 2002, p. 18; Ojala, 2017). The new theory of land elevation was also intended to give nature in Sweden a unique history, which historian Christer Nordlund describes as a ‘nationalization of nature within the new borders of Sweden’ (Nordlund, 2001, p. 22 and p. 48). For later periods, the water theme disappeared from Stockholm’s

Stockholm’s Changing Waterscape 203 historiography. The waterscape re-emerged in special studies on water supply and sewage history and city planning documents. For historians the waterscape in Stockholm vanished as a historical object.

A City and Its Waterscape Even if historians omitted water in narrating Stockholm’s history, the city had to deal with its dynamic waterscape throughout history. As mentioned, Norrström became for a period the only navigable waterway between Lake Mälaren and the Baltic Sea. A fortification was built on a hill south of the streams. This was the beginning of what was to become medieval Stockholm’s Royal Castle, the ‘Three Crowns’ (Tre Kronor). From its high position, one could look out over the short and strategically situated streams. The fortification was complemented through piledriving out into the stream. Archeologists have found masses of piles driven into the bottom. These constructions made it possible both to control trade as well as serving a military purpose of making it harder to sail up into Lake Mälaren. Finally, the piles formed a circle—a fortification—around the town (Dahlbäck, 1983: p. 51; Ström-Billing, 1984, p. 87; Dahlbäck, 2002, p. 18). New shipping technology also became an obstacle for passing through Stockholm. Thus the hanseatic Kogg, and other ships for example, which had deeper draughts, could not navigate the streams when the water increasingly went from being stagnant to flowing (Bolin, 1933, p. 260; Ström-Billing, 1984, p.  86). A  Northern Bridge as well as a Southern Bridge are mentioned in late thirteenth-century documents. They probably also hindered boats when passing through the passageway into Lake Mälaren (Melin, 1930, p. 258; Dahlbäck, 1983, p. 55). Stockholm was situated at a crossroads for land and sea communication, on the lakes and on the dry crests left by the melting inland ice cap (Ahnlund, 1953, p.  53). The islet’s strategic position made it a center for trade and the exchange of goods. Up- and downstream of the small streams there was fishing going on. One can imagine a lively place for handling and trading iron, copper, corn, live cattle, seal blubber, furs, salmon, cod, pike and train oil. This new crossroads developed into the most important locality for local and international shipments and hence was a strategic asset for the state to control. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, Stockholm was the nation’s most important harbor (Ahnlund, 1953, p.  105; Ström-Billing, 1984, p.  85; Ahnlund, 1998, p. 256; Dahlbäck, 2002, pp. 18 and 39–42; Andersson, 2013). However, the seasonal pattern in the pre-industrial city made the waterscape unstable (Hoffman, 2010, p.  167). Due to Stockholm’s mixture of land and water, the waterscape changed between summer and winter and made the city a place where summer—as well as winter—roads met. During winter, considerable parts of the waterscape, both on the western lake side and

204  Eva Jakobsson on the eastern sea side, freezes over, making it suitable for transportation. Thus, the concept of winter ways are important for the understanding of Nordic transport history. A  wet landscape, which was not yet drained (Jakobsson, 2013), full of lakes, ponds, wetlands, bogs and moors was hard to negotiate for overland transport during large parts of the year. When winter came and froze over this wet landscape, it changed into a stable landscape of ice and snow, where sledges could easily, and with low friction, slide across the frozen land- and waterscape. For example, the cold of winter was very important for transporting charcoal, pig-iron and ore on sledges out of the forests and mining districts north of Lake Mälaren (Söderberg et al., 2008). For shipping the winter represented an interruption. Using sixteenthcentury customs records from Stockholm, which describe when the first ships anchored after the winter, historians have estimated that the harbor was ice-free in April between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The ice usually forms in January and during these months foreign trade was closed down.8 However, as the city was growing the waterscape also became warmer, making the icy season shorter (Söderberg et al., 2008). In 1637, Stockholm’s first sluices were built through a small isthmus that connected the south side of the city islet to the mainland. At this time, Sweden was a leading exporter of copper and iron to the European market and these metals were to be found in the Lake Mälaren drainage basin. Hitherto, ships had to be dragged across this narrow land strip between the Baltic Sea and Lake Mälaren. The sluice, the Queen Christina Sluice, opened four times a day. When the waterscape became ice-free, Lake Mälaren was again connected to the Baltic Sea and provided reliable navigation. The Crown from that point on collected sluice taxes instead of stream taxes. Later on, these sluices were torn down by man or by flooding and had to be rebuilt (Schütz, 1964, p. 78; Ström-Billing, 1984, pp. 88 and 96; Abrahamsson, 2004, p. 27; Ahnlund, 1998, p. 277).

New and Conflicting Water Interests As the streams became more permanent, the waterway into Lake Mälaren disappeared. Waterpower, instead of navigation, turned into a mercantile interest for the kingdom. The waterworks made the outflow narrower and this became a problem for the farmers and estates around Lake Mälaren when the water levels were rising. These interested parties upstream were very aware of their dependence on an open outlet in Stockholm. There are records from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that mill owners were forced to tear down their mills, and that the streams were cleared in order to better drain the lake (Öhman, 1987, p. 71; Ahnlund, 1998, p. 274). These up- and downstream conflicts were frequent in a country with abundantly flowing water. The flowing water

Stockholm’s Changing Waterscape 205 made riparians dependent on each other, as every change in the waterways could affect riparians both up- and downstream in brooks, rivers, and lakes. As the water was not public, but private, it provoked many legal disputes (Jakobsson, 2010a). The discourse of water conflicts in Sweden thus has a long tradition. Even in the first law written in Swedish, dating from the thirteenth century, water legislation was well established. Agricultural interests, who preferred low water levels in the lakes, at least before 1900, held a strong legal position in water legislation. This was an era of pro-drainage politics and the rivers and brooks were, by law, to be kept open (Jakobsson, 2010a). Hence, what we experience around the outflow of Lake Mälaren in the very center of Stockholm represents a classic up- versus downstream conflict of interest. In May 1780, the spring flood destroyed the foundations of the first stone bridge over the streams that was under construction. ‘In dismay’, people tore down buildings, pillars, mills and fishing works to open up what it was possible to open up to let the water through (Ericson, 1851; Dahlbäck, 1983, p. 433).9 Such floods threatened both the farmers around Lake Mälaren, far into the Swedish hinterland, as well as those who owned buildings along the streams. When the buildings, such as fishing works, slaughterhouses and mills, were not pulled down by man, the water itself would sweep them away (Ahnlund, 1998, p. 274; Abrahamsson, 2004, p. 25). During excavations, archeologists discovered canals in an east-west direction crossing the islet Helgeandholmen in the middle of the streams10 (Dahlbäck, 1983, p. 380). Traces of the blocking of these small canals, as well as the up- and downstream conflicts that they caused, are even found in the archives. When the canals were filled up in connection with housebuilding, the records reported that ‘the whole nation complained, that their meadows would be damaged’. Despite these man-made measures, the government decided to reopen the canals. Later, land elevation made the canals useless (Dahlbäck, 1983, p. 387). These examples illustrate how dependent the upstream riparians in the drainage basin were on the outflow situation in Stockholm. It also illustrates a widespread and popular consciousness that any changes in the Stockholm waterscape would have effects around the distant shorelines of Lake Mälaren. During the nineteenth century scholars tried to gain more knowledge about the water system, and among other things the interconnection between the different sections in the drainage basin was discussed. Lake Mälaren was, for example, considered too small in comparison to the drainage basin (Jakobsson, 2010b);11 ‘It is an obvious inconvenience between all the large and small tributaries to the lake and its only outlet in Stockholm’. The fact that Lake Mälaren was ‘in direct connection with the sea’ likewise was considered a complication for drainage capacity. This statement led to the conclusion that the lake could not be lowered (Ericson, 1851).12

206  Eva Jakobsson

Backwards and Forwards—Not Quite a Tidal River The streams in Stockholm were known to ‘flow backwards and forwards’, as the sixteenth-century writer Olaus Magnus formulated it.13 When the water flowed back into Lake Mälaren, it disturbed the mills and the sluices were filled with gravel and mud (Hallerdt, 1997, p. 95; Polhem, 1759). This phenomenon, or this particularity, was to become a problem for the city and was a product of the specific hydrological situation at Stockholm. During the construction of the water supply and sewage systems, the unsteady waterscape again came into focus. Why then, did the water flow back and forth? In the late 1800s, when this hydrological phenomenon became a problem for the water supply system, Lake Mälaren was described as neither a lake nor a bay. The lake was ‘at present in its last state of fellowship with the sea’.14 The citation describes that the land elevation had not yet secured a steady flow out of the lake. Depending on the relation between the water level in the lake and the sea level, the air pressure over the Baltic Sea and wind direction, the water could, from time to time, change direction. It was not the tide, as it was hardly visible at Stockholm. Therefore, the changing direction of the flowing water did not happen with the regularity of a river such as the Thames (Jakobsson, 1999; Havsvattenstånd, 2009). Between 1854 and 1889, for example, estimates gave an average of 321 days per year of flow outwards from the lake, thirty-one days of flow inwards into the lake and eleven days of equilibrium. This could vary widely from year to year, and from week to week. In 1859 there were ninety-six days of inward flows into the lake and the next year only four. These phenomena received their own names; flowing out of the lake was called nedsjö (down-tide), flowing into the lake upp-sjö (up-tide) (Sondén, 1889, p. 20; Jakobsson, 1999). It is not surprising that the up-tide phenomenon would cause problems when Stockholm began planning the introduction of a WC-system. Even if the sewers were discharging downstream of the streams, it was also, because of the infrequent up-tide, into the same body of water as the water intake. When the water turned around it was possible to actually see the sewage in the clear seawater streaming up toward Lake Mälaren (Jakobsson, 1999, pp. 126–127). During uptide the water flowed back into the lake that was also the intake into the water supply system. The intake was placed some kilometers upstream at the top of a narrow bay in Lake Mälaren. During the last decades of the 1800s a conflict arose in the city administration over the question of giving permits to incorporate WC into the sewage pipe system. This has been interpreted as a conflict over the safety of, and trust in, the water supply system; how one should estimate the risk of contaminated water reaching the intake at the waterworks during up-tide. The conflict illustrates how different groups can give different definitions of the sustainability of an infrastructure system, in this case a system that was tied up with the waterscape (Jakobsson, 1999).

Stockholm’s Changing Waterscape 207 The Public Health Board in Stockholm city, in coalition with physicians, used hygienic arguments in favor of incorporating WC in the sewage pipe system. They were especially reluctant to keep a system where the waste was stored in the homes. Their priority was to get the excrements out of the apartments. Moreover, they assumed that the bacteria that followed with the up-tide, during their course into Lake Mälaren, would ‘settle’ before reaching the public water plant further into the bay (Jakobsson, 1999, p. 128). On the opposite side, we find that the City Planning Office was in coalition with the engineers at the water supply plant. Their main concern was grounded in system thinking. If even the smallest mistake were to appear, the whole water supply system could be contaminated and affect citizens all over the city. In their perspective, besides the obvious health risk, it would cause mistrust of the water supply system (Tvedt and Østigaard, 2014, p. 9). The City Planning Office opinion was not to allow water closets until the waterscape was under control and any up-tide could be avoided. During this long period of deadlock on the WC-question the city bought a new water supply source. To secure the water quality and quantity for the water supply system, Stockholm city bought Lake Born and its drainage basin in 1900. This lake had no connection with the turbulent waterscape of Stockholm, as it is situated ten meters above Lake Mälaren. It was thenceforth forbidden to swim and wash in Lake Born (Anderberg, 1986; Jakobsson, 1999). Why did the city not opt straight away for greater regulation of Lake Mälaren? This solution was probably hindered by the private ownership of water, as long legal battles with riparians over the lake and on how to manage a regulation scheme could be expected (Jakobsson, 1999, p. 132). When the water intake was no longer threatened by the up-tide, the city still prioritized ‘a badly needed and useful flush’ of the streams for sanitary reasons (Jakobsson, 1999, p. 133).15 As the conflict never concerned WCs as such, the City Planning Office and the engineers at the water supply plant now abandoned their resistance. This ongoing conflict had made the Stockholm politicians hesitate and the owners of WCs in the city had to wait until 1909 to be allowed to connect to the sewer system (Jakobsson, 1999, pp. 135–139). This decision opened the way to bad water quality for many decades of the twentieth century. In the 1920s, Lake Mälaren again became a fresh water reservoir for the water supply system in Stockholm. Even when the water intake was moved further up in Lake Mälaren, the up-tide still constituted a hazard, both by bringing brackish water as well as contaminated water. When up-tide occurred, the Lake Born water source was to be the only source.

Regulating Lake Mälaren For some hundred years there had been a variety of plans for regulating Lake Mälaren, to protect agrarian interests, prevent flooding, and

208  Eva Jakobsson safeguard navigation interests (Jakobsson, 2003, p.  19). The inflow of brackish water caused by up-tide was first perceived as a threat when the new sanitary technology systems were built. Now low water in Lake Mälaren did not only cause salt-water intrusion, contaminated water also threatened the water intake into the city; ‘a strong down-tide is of great importance for the city’s water hygiene’ (Lundqvist, 1930, p. 234).16 In 1924 Stockholm experienced exceptional flooding. A commission to regulate the lake was set up, but it could not reach an agreement. In 1940 Norrström, the north arm of the streams, was deepened to be able to drain larger amounts of water. In 1943 a regulation dam was constructed in Norrström, under the Riksbron (the Kingdom Bridge) with the purpose of preventing brackish water and partially treated wastewater from flowing into Lake Mälaren. The regulation came into effect in January 1943. Yet, regulation of the lake was only partial, and this was demonstrated during the dry years of 1955 and 1959 which caused low water levels in Lake Mälaren and flooding by brackish water of the Stallkanalen (the Stable Canal) that was still open. In 1961 a new dam closed this opening in the streams. This dam was only used when the Baltic Sea was higher than Lake Mälaren or when these water levels were even. It was rebuilt to be a completely regulated dam in 1967, also to be able to lower the lake in advance of the spring flood (Anderberg, 1986, pp. 178–181; Melin, 1930, p. 257; Cronström, 1986, p. 36). Accordingly, these regulation dams served many different purposes and interests on how the water levels of the lake should be managed. This made the regulation regime more and more complex. In addition, the regulation became more complicated as regulation for hydropower and lowering of lakes had taken place in the upper part of the drainage basin. Therefore, the run off into Lake Mälaren also changed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The dams at Norrström prevent the brackish water of the Baltic Sea from flowing into Lake Mälaren. The lake is today the only water source for the citizens of Stockholm. Lake Born serves as a backup reservoir. Groundwater has never been an option. The first water treatment plant upstream from Stockholm came into operation in 1934, where its intake was placed at a high level as a security measure, as saltwater tended to sink to the bottom of the lake. This technical solution was changed after the regulation in 1960. From the 1970s all water taken out upstream from Stockholm was mechanically, biologically and chemically treated. At present two million Swedish citizens are dependent on Lake Mälaren for their water supply. The withdrawal is eight cubic meters per second, which is about 5 percent of the average discharge. Together with municipalities and other cities in the drainage basin, Stockholm has worked to protect the water supply system. For example, oil transports are avoided and in 1969 the government even prohibited a pulp mill plant (Anderberg, 1986, p. 177; Norling, 2004, p. 51).

Stockholm’s Changing Waterscape 209 At the beginning of the twenty-first century new ideas about how to manage the regulation regime in Stockholm are being introduced, especially environmental and aesthetic ones. As the regulation dams are to be found in the very center of Stockholm, cultural heritage aspects of the regulation have been included, as it is considered of great value today to get more days of flowing water under the Kingdom Bridge (Andreasson et al., 2011, pp. 11–12). The flowing water in the streams in front of the Royal Castle and Parliament has gained considerable aesthetic value— for Stockholm residents as well as for tourists. The aesthetic aspects of the waterscape have also become of great value to the city of Stockholm and are used to promote Stockholm.

Branding the Stockholm Waterscape Connecting the Swedish capital to its waterscape has a history dating as far back as Jacob Zieglers travel book Scandia from 1532: ‘This is the Swedes’ castle and trading market, fortified by nature and art. It is situated on water just like Venice’.17 Hereafter Stockholm was often called the Venice of the North (Nordens Venedig). The theme was followed up in the late 1900s, when the Stockholm waterscape was used in the marketing of Stockholm as a tourist destination (Ågren, 2013). The city tourist board changed its message from portraying Stockholm as the welfare city, and constructed a message that centered on contemporary environmental discourse. Stockholm was portrayed as the place where city and nature met. As one of Stockholm’s most famous novelists, Per Anders Fogelström, wrote in a marketing brochure: ‘Everywhere the water is close—Stockholm belongs to its archipelago, yet the free spaces and the wilderness jump into the city’ (Ågren, 2013, p. 113).18 Another example is from a famous geography reader—The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgerson—by the Swedish Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf. She termed Stockholm ‘the city that swims on the water’ (Lagerlöf, 1906–1907).19 Later, from the fifties into the seventies, the Stockholm tourist association used this metaphor to capture the meeting of city and nature and branded it as ‘The City on Water’ (Ågren, 2013, p. 111; Ågren, 2011, p. 87).20 In the 1980s this was followed by a new slogan, now in English—‘Stockholm—Beauty on Water’. The city has also marketed itself on the strength of its nearly ‘unnaturally clean water’. A well-known anecdote is connected to the good water quality that had been achieved by the late twentieth century. When Stockholm presented itself as a candidate for the Summer Olympics of 2004, a Swedish politician tried to persuade International Olympic Committee (IOC) members by drinking water directly from Lake Mälaren. The result of the selection process does not indicate if drinking lake water made a difference to the IOC in choosing whether to select Stockholm as host (Jarnhammer, 2008, p. 100; Ågren, 2013, pp. 115 and 255). Since 1991 too, the

210  Eva Jakobsson prestigious Stockholm Water Prize is awarded annually to researchers and activists in the field of water.

Epilogue—The Future Waterscape At present the draining of Lake Mälaren is spread across eight locations and its total capacity is a little over eight hundred cubic meters per second. This amount of water is variable and dependent on the water levels in Lake Mälaren and the Baltic Sea. The larger the difference between water levels, the more water can flow out. During the autumn of 2000 the highest water levels since the lake was regulated were recorded, causing a flood in December of that same year. Once again, the city was reminded that the outflow capacity through central Stockholm was limited when water levels were exceptionally high in Lake Mälaren. Several important societal functions, amongst others, the Stockholm metro system, were threatened by rising water levels. In 2011 a committee suggested a new regulation regime that would achieve a volume of fifteen hundred cubic meters per second of outflow from Lake Mälaren.21 The motives are the same as before—to lower the risk of flooding, lower water levels in the lake and hinder salt-water intrusion. In a distant future—due to climate change—Lake Mälaren could once again become a bay of the Baltic Sea, if the sea level rises sufficiently. The difference between the Baltic Sea and Lake Mälaren will then shrink from seventy to twenty-two centimeters, even if land elevation will compensate it to be fifty-two centimeters. This seemingly insignificant water level difference would make Stockholm lose its fresh water source. To secure the fresh water source, Lake Mälaren would have to be protected by dikes to keep the water level and hinder salt-water intrusion. Alternatives are to tap other large lakes by means of a tunnel 150–200 kilometers long or, like other European cities, build barriers in the archipelago (Mälaren om 100 år, 2011).

Conclusion The interrelationship between the city and the waterscape is described as a hybrid urban landscape. However, this hybridity takes different forms in different places and at different times. The characteristics in this overview of Stockholm’s water history serve as an example of water’s particularity in its meeting with a city. Urbanized nature is a concept that comprehends many aspects of the environment. In this article, one section of nature—flowing water—is studied (Tvedt and Coopey, 2010). By means of this methodological approach, it is possible to establish a longitudinal perspective on the history of Stockholm in relation to its waterscape. One can capture how the characteristics of this distinct waterscape create different challenges for the city, all dependent on what stages of

Stockholm’s Changing Waterscape 211 development are to be found in the city. The intertwined changes made by nature and man create different forms of hybridity between the city and its flowing water. The water is constantly flowing through the city and creates different scenarios in the hybrid urban landscape for the historian to analyze. The article describes three distinct formative phases in this urban hybrid waterscape. During the first phase, beginning in the thirteenth century, land elevation formed a waterfall in between a bay of the Baltic Sea and the Baltic Sea itself. Lake Mälaren was created. On this spot, Stockholm developed around the royal castle, Three Crowns. The king could control navigation as well as trade in and out of the central parts of what was to become Sweden. This small area would become the center of Swedish political power. The changes in the waterscape also created the conditions for its strategic position, to control the land and the waterscape, both inland as well as seaward. The second phase can be placed in early modern times, where especially the connection between the riparians of Lake Mälaren’s shores and a growing Stockholm became more obvious. This relation can be interpreted as a classic up- and downstream relation causing conflicts on how to manage the water flow. The waterworks in the Stockholm waterscape formed an obstacle to keeping the outlet open and through this contributed to high water levels in the lake. This interrelationship was complicated by an unpredictable waterscape. Not only did the lake’s water levels change during the year, the levels of the Baltic Sea also changed, depending on wind and air pressure. In the third phase, from around 1900, this unruly waterscape became a challenge in the development of a secure water- and sewage system. As the waterscape was still evolving, subject to the forces of land elevation, the water of the Baltic Sea, under certain conditions, rose above the water level of Lake Mälaren. Brackish water then flowed back, causing saltwater intrusion, as well as threatening the water intake in Lake Mälaren with contaminated sewage water. The particularity of this waterscape thus created unique problems that demanded to be solved. Different solutions on how to take control of the waterscape to secure safe water for the city of Stockholm were interpreted as disagreements on how to define sustainability criteria for a technical system that was intertwined with the waterscape. The future waterscape of Stockholm was discussed in the article’s epilogue. Questions concerning the Stockholm waterscape were raised in relation to expected climate change and the continuous land elevation process is again a variable in the planning of a future waterscape.

Notes 1. Author’s translation from Swedish. 2. Research on urban nature in Stockholm has mostly dealt with the green aspect of urban nature. 3. Author’s translation from Swedish.

212  Eva Jakobsson 4. Olaus Magnus, 1555, 9th book, 36th chapter. Author’s translation from Swedish. 5. Author’s translation from Swedish. 6. Author’s translation from Swedish. 7. Author’s translation from Swedish. 8. Medeldatum för isläggning, www.smhi.se/oceanografi/istjanst/islaggning. pdf (last accessed 2 January 2018). 9. Author’s translation from Swedish. 10. Remnants of the canals now serve as the entrance to the Mediaeval Museum. 11. The notion that just one single outlet from a lake is too small in dimension was also discussed in relation to Sweden’s largest lake. 12. Author’s translation from Swedish. 13. Olaus Magnus, 1555, 13th book, 12th chapter. Author’s translation from Swedish. 14. Author’s translation from Swedish. 15. Author’s translation from Swedish. 16. Author’s translation from Swedish. 17. Author’s translation from Swedish. 18. Author’s translation from Swedish. 19. Author’s translation from Swedish. 20. However, the water is still a theme that is metaphorically present in Stockholm narratives, as, for example, in the title The City on Water [Staden på vatten] (Nilsson, 2002). 21. Fakta om Mälaren, www.smhi.se/kunskapsbanken/hydrologi/fakta-ommalaren-1.5089.

References Printed Sources Andréasson, J., Gustavsson, H. and Bergström, S., 2011. Projekt Slussen— Förslag till ny reglering av Mälaren. SMHI rapport nr 2011–2064. Ericson, N., 1851. Memorial af herr öfversten och commendeuren Ericsson angående Mälarens flöden under sednaste 76 år, eller från 1774 till 1851, till Stockholms stads Drätsel-Commission ingifvet samt på dess föranstaltande till trycket befordrat. Stockholm. Havsvattenstånd, 2009. Havsvattenstånd vid svenska kusten. SMHI, Faktablad, 41, juli. Lagerlöf, S., 1906–1907. Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige. Stockholm: Bonnier. Mälaren om 100 år, 2011. Mälaren om 100 år Förstudie om dricksvattentäkten Mälaren i framtiden. Rapport 2011:22, Länsstyrelsen i Örebro. Olaus Magnus, 1555 [1976]. Historia om de nordiska folken. D.3. Stockholm: Gidlund. Polhem, G., 1759. Tilläggning til föregående Rön, angående olägenheterna af Upsjö i Mälaren och deras förekommande. Kongl. Vetenskaps Academiens Handlingar För År 1759, 20, pp. 273–274. Sondén, K., 1889. Stockholms afloppsvatten och dess inflytande på vattendragen kring staden: Berättelse till Kongl. Medicinalstyrelsen om allmänna helsotillståndet i Stockholm under året 1888. Bihang till Stockholms stads helsovårdsnämnds årsberättelse 1888. Stockholm.

Stockholm’s Changing Waterscape 213 Sturlasson, Snorre, c. 1230. Heimskringla. Edition www.gutenberg.org/ files/598/598-h/598-h.htm#link2H_4_0239. Vattenprogram, 2001. Vattenprogram för Stockholm 2000. Rapport 2: Allmänt faktaunderlag till strategi för Stockholms vattenarbete. Stockholm: Stockholms stad.

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Stockholm’s Changing Waterscape 215 Mårtelius, J., 1998. Rikets huvudplats: Stockholm kring Norrbro. In: Vattenstäder: Sankt Petersburg—Stockholm. Stockholm: Riksarkivet, pp. 289–322. Mauch, C. and Zeller, T. eds., 2008. Rivers in history: perspectives on waterways in Europe and North America. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press. Melin, R., 1930. Om Stockholms strömmar och Mälaren. In: Huvuddragen i Stockholms geografi. Stockholm: Geografiska förbundet i Stockholm, pp. 256–277. Mukherjee, R., 2015. Approaching a history of water. Water History, 7, pp. 159–177. Nilsson, L. ed., 2002. Staden på vattnet, Del I: 1252–1850. Stockholm: Stockholmia. Nordenskiöld, A., 1889. On the gradual rising of the land in Sweden. Nature, 39, pp. 488–492. Nordlund, C., 2001. ‘On going up in the World’: nation, region and the land elevation debate in Sweden. Annales of Science, 58, pp. 17–50. Norling, B., 2004. Norsborgs vattenverk 100 år. Stockholm: Stockholmia. Ojala, M., 2017. Water and urban space in late mediaeval Stockholm. In: J. Costlow, Y. Haila and A. Rosenholm eds. Water in social imagination: from technological optimism to contemporary environmentalism. Leiden: Brill, pp. 28–48. Pritchard, S. B., 2011. Confluence: the nature of technology and the remaking of the Rhône. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pritchard, S. B., 2013. Joining environmental history with science and technology studies: promises, challenges and contributions. In: D. Jørgensen, F. A. Jørgensen and S. B. Pritchard eds. New natures: joining environmental history with science and technology studies. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, pp. 1–20. Schmid, M., Winiwarter, V. and Haidvogl, G., 2010. Legacies from the past: the Danube’s riverine landscapes as socio-natural sites. Danube News (International Association for Danube Research), 21, pp. 2–5. Schütz, F., 1964. Teknikens utveckling i gamla Stockholm. Sankt Eriks årsbok, pp. 79–112. Söderberg, J., Moberg, A., Leijonhufvud, L., Retsö, D. and Söderlind, U., 2008. 500 års väder i Stockholm. Forskning och Framsteg, 43 (5), pp. 12–17. Ström-Billing, I., 1984. Stockholms hamn genom tiderna. Sankt Eriks Årsbok, pp. 85–118. Tarr, J. A., 2010. The city as an artifact of technology and the environment. In: M. Reuss and S. H. Cutcliffe eds. The illusory boundary. Environment and technology in history. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, pp. 145–170. Tvedt, T. and Coopey, R., 2010. A ‘water systems’ perspective on history. In: T. Tvedt and R. Coopey eds. A history of water, series II, Vol. 2 Rivers and society: from early civilizations to modern times. London: I.B. Tauris, pp. 3–26. Tvedt, T. and Østigaard, T., 2014. Introduction: urban water systems—a conceptual framework. In: T. Tvedt and T. Østigaard eds. A history of water, series III, vol. 1 Water and urbanization. London: I.B. Tauris, pp. 1–21. White, R., 1995. The organic machine: the remaking of the Columbia river. New York: Hill and Wang.

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10 Air Pollution as Urban Problem in France, From the Mid-nineteenth Century to the 1970s Stéphane Frioux Introduction Rather than grovelling in the dust of the past or hesitantly standing on feet of clay, environmental historians need to look to the skies, let their imaginations soar, and realise they have been looking down at the ground for too long —Fleming, 2014

Since (western) European countries entered an age of ‘environmental politics’, around 1970, urban air pollution has constantly remained one of the most crucial topics for politicians and urban activists willing to address ecological challenges. The question encompassed both economic issues—can one ask industrialists to spend money and decrease their profits in the public interest? What is the economic cost of air pollution?—and public health perspectives—what is the human cost of air pollution? Is it possible to fight respiratory diseases with pollution control measures? All these issues were not completely new and had already been raised in the nineteenth century, along with the processes of urbanization and industrialization. Neither are they fully solved yet. Some problems, such as the vast urban fogs provoked by intensive coal-burning and car traffic are now more frequent in Asia, particularly in Chinese and Indian cities. Media coverage of these ‘Airpocalypse’ episodes remind the environmental historian of the deadly London smog of 1952, which proved to be the catalyst for the implementation of political measures designed to reduce urban air pollution in the post-war context of urban and economic growth (Thorsheim, 2006, pp. 159–172). Studying air pollution invites the environmental historian to travel across various timescales, as the weather and natural rhythms do not necessarily coincide with social and economic temporalities. The treatment of this topic also gains from grasping several scales of analysis (Fleming and Johnson, 2014). The nation-state level of environmental legislation is not the only relevant frame of interrogation, particularly when

218  Stéphane Frioux embracing urban issues. For instance, internationally agreed standards, produced by economic development organizations’ expert committees (OECD) or by public health agencies (such as WHO) are used locally to assess urban air quality. Sometimes, experts’ recommendations act as incentives to push local authorities facing ‘pollution peaks’ toward specific measures such as limiting car use depending on license plates or age of the vehicle. American, British and German environmental historians have indeed studied the long story of public initiatives against urban pollution well, from the ‘age of smoke’ that started in the nineteenth century, to our own time of ozone, nitrogen oxides, and other invisible pollutants such as micro-particles.1 Nevertheless, studying air pollution raises questions about how one writes environmental history: what is to be attributed to the ‘natural conditions’ and what is to be attributed to ‘human actions’ in this phenomenon? Depending on the point of view and on the scientific and disciplinary background of the writer, narratives and syntheses start either from the naturalistic framework—‘Urban air pollution depends on the local topography, the structure of the atmosphere above the city’, wrote a geographer in opening his thematic chapter on ‘Smoke, Fumes, Dust and Smog’ (Douglas, 2013, p. 67)—or from the social and political dimension (Uekoetter, 2009). The type of historical narrative about air pollution also depends on the nature of the documents available— and used—for the research work. Of course, scholars often use classical sources from social and cultural history, and investigate both the perceptions that allowed people to endure great smogs and the discourses put forward by smoke abatement pioneers (Mosley, 2008). Several studies examined the administrative efforts that led, locally and nationally, to the passage of municipal by-laws and ‘clean air acts’ (Hawes, 1998; Thorsheim, 2006; Uekoetter, 2009; Temby, 2013, 2016). I would like to point out the importance, for the historian, of also taking into consideration documents which are more ‘disembodied’ though obviously connected with the ‘experts’ sphere’ and whose knowledge could be used in policy making (Lestel, 2013; Longhurst, 2005). Graphs plotted after collections of SO2 rates, scientific journals specialized in air pollution studies, technical papers and advertisements about pollution abatement devices, such as nineteenth-century and early twentiethcentury ‘smokeless furnaces’ deserve to be integrated into the historical narrative. The study thus becomes a story of entanglement between natural characteristics and changes (topography, weather and local climatology), human actions (political measures and social mobilizations) and socio-technical devices designed for air-quality monitoring or for the reduction in polluting emissions. Like climate history (Fleming, 2014), air pollution history involves the agency of ideas, institutions, and nonhuman forces such as atmospheric conditions or fuels, and it fits into a

Air Pollution as Urban Problem in France 219 definition of environmental history upgrading natural elements to the rank of co-actors and co-determinants of historical processes (Cronon, 1992; McNeill, 2001; Bickerstaff and Walker, 2003). Less ‘social’, and less easy to deal with at first glance—but in fact themselves produced through socially constructed processes—historical sources about monitoring processes, and, more generally, scientific and engineering matters, are crucial for understanding the links between expertise and political decision-making, as well as the implementation of regulations. Rather than trying to embrace the whole array of documents, I  will mainly concentrate in this chapter on France. Curiously, urban air has not been studied in detail by French historians so far, if one excepts a PhD dissertation in political science using historical and comparative perspectives (Vlassopoulou, 1999). The study of industrial pollution regulation in general (from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century) entailed much more work, as it also addressed other issues such as urban water pollution, administrative management of polluting industries, and the respective role of citizens, public health specialists, industrialists and local authorities (Massard-Guilbaud, 2010; Le Roux, 2011). Every polluting factory was subject to an ‘overflow’ of gas and various substances (in French: débordement), a heuristic notion that has been used in several case studies revealing the local protests (Le Roux and Letté, 2013; Charvolin, 2015). In comparison, Anglo-Saxon and German historiographies have been able to build on more sources, as produced by civil society and newspapers, than can be found in France. In Great Britain and in the United States, urban and social reformers and civic associations played a major role in putting the issue on the authorities’ agenda, using newspapers as platforms for their campaigns, in contrast to France (and probably many other countries).2 This has led to several studies on major cities such as Manchester, London, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles (Stradling and Thorsheim, 1999; Mershon and Tarr, 2003) and on severe smog episodes (Snyder, 1994), but also national and international enquiries (Knoepfel and Weidner, 1986). This chapter tries to provide a new viewpoint of the French case, thanks to data from various sources gathered from the agglomerations of Lyon and Paris, and builds its argument using administrative archives, especially those from local government and, for the second half of the twentieth century, departmental and national ones. Besides these standard sources I will use earlier scholarly literature in science and engineering in order to understand how the question of urban air, an environmental element co-produced by ‘nature’ and by human activity, has been framed and reframed over time. The main questions about the facts and the actors are ‘what? when? who? where?’ and are crucial to understand decision-making processes in local contexts and to unravel the essential drivers behind the evolution of urban nature.

220  Stéphane Frioux

The Nature of Urban Air Pollution From the Age of Coal to the Invisible Pollutants Coal is the first non-human actor which is linked to a major transition in city-nature relations, with respect to the atmospheric environment. For decades, its combustion released soot and thick, black particles which defined the urban atmosphere as opposed to that of the countryside. On the eve of the nineteenth century coal use was not widespread, except in some parts of Great Britain, including its capital (Cavert, 2016). By 1800, Londoners already burned one million tons of coal a year (Thorsheim, 2006, p. 5). While coal was progressively adopted in industrial furnaces, and also for domestic heating, nineteenth-century city dwellers experienced the beginning of the ‘age of smoke’. Green spaces and blue skies vanished. Nearly every city became subject to black clouds, provoked by large factories, steam-powered locomotives and river boats and, of course, by the domestic consumption of coal—even though experts generally ignored this last factor in most of their writings, at least until the twentieth century. The transformation of the urban atmosphere, quite rapid and radical in booming cities such as Manchester, more progressive in other towns, had profound and long-lasting social and cultural implications. The best example was the equation ‘smoke = prosperity’, illustrated by hundreds of narratives, poems and pictures proclaiming that smoking chimneys were symbols of wealth and personal well being. Changes in the air also provoked new themes of activism. The Manchester Association for the Prevention of Smoke, created in 1842, was probably the first association set up to fight against air pollution and the Manchester-based scientist Robert Angus Smith coined the term ‘acid rain’ in 1859 (Mosley, 2008). The darkened sky of cities gave rise to stories of ‘waste and inefficiency’, and the problem began to provoke reactions from middle-class groups, then from public authorities, and lastly from industrialists. Urban society was divided about how it considered smoke, thus impeding and delaying the intervention of a potential, collective agency. British foggy and darkened skies became ambivalent symbols of the new urban nature produced by industrialization (Luckin, 2015). In London, throughout the century, cartoons ironically depicted the ‘coal’ and ‘smog’ agency when their sketches addressed the question of the urban environmental quality (Thorsheim, 2006). In France, a number of articles written in the 1890s and published in professional journals for local administrators or in public health reviews complained about fogs hanging over cities—the worst reference being that of the British capital.3 Visual apprehension of pollution was not the only sensory experience of the phenomenon. Its other dimension was the problem of smell. Pioneering studies have shown that the sensitivity toward smells in cities dramatically changed between the mid-eighteenth and the midnineteenth centuries (Corbin, 1986). In particular, odors produced by

Air Pollution as Urban Problem in France 221 old-style industries, using putrefying matter, were rejected as potentially noxious, whereas odors coming from new chemical industries (such as sulfuric acid in manufacturing) were even defended by hygienists as purifying substances (Le Roux, 2016). To this day, notwithstanding an obvious trend toward the monitoring of ever smaller, invisible particles, smells remain a crucial topic for people in charge of monitoring air quality. Despite the development of olfactometric analyses, the human nose is still used in public policies targeting stench abatement (Charvolin et al., 2015). During the first half of the twentieth century, the vast majority of cities experienced a regime of partial agency: urban leaders took up the fight against smoke and smells, as long as jobs were not threatened. Economic considerations were able to curb the first inclinations toward regulation. Industry was singled out as the main producer of air pollution; few minority voices emphasized that the city as a whole, with its means of transportation and domestic furnaces, was also affecting natural conditions. The emerging expertise regarding car emissions remained confidential in interwar France, where only investigations from a Parisian toxicologist at the Préfecture de la Seine, Emile Kohn-Abrest, can be observed (Humery, 1933). Local authorities were encouraged to devise by-laws and to recommend to local industrialists that they adopt one of the so-called efficient solutions: raising their chimneystack, adopting a new fuel (coke, for instance), and educating their boilers’ operators (suspected of being careless). After a period devoted to smoke and fog studies, with a strong geographical differentiation according to cities and local stakeholders (see the case of Lyon below as an example of a local attempt to improve knowledge about the urban atmosphere), the rapid rise of automobilecentered transport systems from the 1950s onwards—with high levels of individual car use—led to the introduction of a new air pollution problem. This broadened issue was difficult to control because it did not fit in a system of regulation based on a factory-by-factory approach. Progressively, air pollution appeared as a ransom for progress that could not be accepted any more. The 1950s put an end to the local practices of air pollution regulation typical of the ‘Age of Smoke’ and the problem attained a national and international dimension. After the 1952 London Great Smog, the problem of air pollution was addressed more squarely by national and local governments; new scientific work was produced, as, for instance, in Los Angeles with respect to photochemical smog (Uekoetter, 2009). In Britain, the ‘Great Smog’ entailed the work of a special Committee and the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1956 (Thorsheim, 2006). This law established an important principle in allowing the creation of ‘smokeless zones’ in those cities where lowquality coal was theoretically banned and other fuels encouraged (coke, gas, electricity). During the following years, in the increasingly numerous expert studies published on the problem, air pollution came to be

222  Stéphane Frioux considered as an urban, multi-facetted issue and not only an industrial problem. Car exhausts came to compete with the domestic fireplace and heating systems in pollution ratings. Air pollution became a real concern during what the French economist Jean Fourastié has called the Trente Glorieuses (‘glorious thirty years’), between the end of World War II and the first oil crisis. This period, characterized by a spectacular growth in urban population and car use saw the generalization of government by technocracy. Among its characteristics, one can emphasize the belief in the role of prospective studies, carried out in order to assist politicians in decision-making. New expertise was also working hand in hand with a strong belief in the power of innovation, either technical or managerial, to ‘modernize’ society and the environment (Bess, 2003; Pritchard, 2004). At the same time, experts and governments started to address the subject of cross-border pollution, in the form of acid rain. The local and urban scale was not the only level at which humans had to face air pollution issues. The problem appeared to be transnational, from controversies about acid rain to the banning of chlorofluorocarbon compounds (CFCs) or the question of the ozone layer. For a long time, the impact of acid rain was mainly local or regional, but new scientific research gradually revealed that it was causing environmental damage on an international scale (Mosley, 2014, p. 157). In the 1960s and 1970s, Norway and Sweden began to complain about acid rain that was caused by British chimneys. During the 1980s-1990s ozone peaks became the major concern, before being replaced by nitrogen oxides, then micro-particles (PM10, PM2.5) and perhaps soon, nanoparticles (diameter