Today I picked up a copy of Richard Sennett’s new book ‘Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City’. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 2018). From the website: “Building and Dwelling is the definitive statement on cities by the renowned public intellectual Richard Sennett. In this sweeping work, he traces the anguished relation between how cities are built and how people live in them, from ancient Athens to twenty-first-century Shanghai. He shows how Paris, Barcelona, and New York City assumed their modern forms; rethinks the reputations of Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, and others; and takes us on a tour of emblematic contemporary locations, from the backstreets of Medellín, Colombia, to the Google headquarters in Manhattan. Through it all, he laments that the “closed city”—segregated, regimented, and controlled—has spread from the global North to the exploding urban agglomerations of the global South. As an alternative, he argues for the “open city,” where citizens actively hash out their differences and planners experiment with urban forms that make it easier for residents to cope. Rich with arguments that speak directly to our moment—a time when more humans live in urban spaces than ever before—Building and Dwelling draws on Sennett’s deep learning and intimate engagement with city life to form a bold and original vision for the future of cities.”
While the book aims to hit on a much broader range of topics that we typically cover, the first part resonated on the Hidden Hydrology front with some interesting analysis of the work of that prominent figure in the history, that of Joseph Bazalgette. For a bit of a primer to the unfamiliar, check out this good post about Bazalgette as “Scientist of the Day” and also behold his amazing mustache below.
Sennett discusses this in Chapter 2, which looks at the evolution of cities in the mid-19th Century, which was a turning point for urbanization that was leading to overcrowding, pollution, and disease, many issues of which had been somewhat unprecedented in modern cities. As he mentions, “Plague had always been a danger in cities — the Black Death wiped out a third of Europe in the late Middle Ages. As early modern cities became bigger and denser — and so more shit-and-urine filled — they became fertile gardens to feed rats and rat-borne disease.” (21)
Sennett mentions that the first actors in combating this trend were not doctors, but engineers. Working to improve the quality of urban life, he mentions the ideas around paving of streets as a way to encourage cleaner urban areas, as well as the development of the pissoir a simple yet seemingly necessary advance in urban sanitation. The effect of these improvements were functional, but as Sennett points out, the ripple into more livable cities was a unique cross benefit. As quoted:
“… a knock-on effect of removing shit and urine from the street was that it made the outdoors more usable as social space; the huge outdoor cafe fronting a boulevard was the sanitary engineer’s gift urban civilization.” (23)
The idea that engineering was the major driver for public health in the 19th century, and that it had the residual impact of creating better cities, was often “accidential and unintentional” as Sennett mentions, but often it did come with a direct purpose. This action-oriented and experimental approach was best embodied by Joseph Bazalgette, and his engineers, working incrementally and often experimentally, invented technologies through trial-and-error:
“The engineers working for Joseph Bazalgette, for instance, when building London’s sewers in the 1850s to 1860s, invented such technology as solid-waste screens in the course of fitting sections of piping together, experimenting with several different filter designs, rather than knowing right away which size to use. Bazalgette was what to do overall: the realm of the sewer — the realm of Les Miserables — had to be made into a network of pipes mirroring the streets above.” (24)
The concept of experimentation was an interesting point, as he “often built sewers with pipes larger in diameter than seemed to be needed, saying that planning could not predict future needs,” (24) and as Sennett contends, “One of the truly admirable aspects of Bazalgette’s character is that he exuded Victorian confidence without claiming that he knew exactly what he was doing, believing only that he would get it right in the end. This is more largely true of civil engineers in the city at the time; their technical knowledge was open-ended.” (25)
The simplified version of the Bazalgette plan shows the series of cross connected interceptors that are all funnelling pollution away from the Thames.
The other element brought up, which deserves more thinking is the “…experimental process required the engineer-urbanist to develop new visual tools,” and that “the messy compound forms along a dense, disordered street requires a different means of representation” (24).
Classical techniques such as plan and section worked to build the infrastructure, as seen above, however they failed to work to communicate concepts as “the infrastructures the engineers were building below ground were invisible” (25).
An image I did find that hints at these new techniques, via the Linda Hall Library, shows the use of cutaway section-perspective to outline the multiple layers of surface and subsurface systems working in tandem.
While I don’t purely think that Bazalgette was motivated by anything beyond doing the right thing, I think the idea of ‘what was the right thing?’ is perhaps the bigger question. The fact that this ‘modernization’ is often times purely reflected as only a positive move, rubs me the wrong way, as it discounts all the other impacts. Maybe there was a lack of understanding or lack of imagination at the time, and that burying urban rivers, creeks and streams was the only means available to solve the issues of pestilence, smells, and disease.
The implications, in London, but also world-wide, as these approaches were copies and applied often elsewhere around the globe, had such massive ecological consequences on the hydrology of cities that is, without hyperbole, impossible to reverse. A river or creek sacrificed into a pipe is not the same as a more holistic plan understood and valued the myriad benefits of urban streams and saved these waterways while protecting public health. Sennett’s take that the engineers, as mentioned in the photo caption “Joseph Bazalgette, the finest engineering of the modern city…” (Fig. 1) were saviors and their focus on public health saved many lives is indisputable. But the cult of this benefit misleads about the cost, and it would be great to counterpoint this message with the worldwide implications of what he and many future engineers wrought on the urban ecology everywhere.
HEADER: London Sewer Plan Map from 1882 – via Wikipedia