Sustainable City

1. PLAN 1900: Sustainable Cities
Week 2: Planning the Industrial City
Anuradha Mukherji
Assistant Professor of Urban and Regional Planning

2. 19th Century Slum City
“Every room in these rotten and reeking tenements houses a family,
often two. In one cellar a sanitary inspector reports finding a father,
mother, three children, and four pigs! In another missionary found a
man ill with small-pox, his wife just recovering from her eighth
confinement, and the children running about half naked and covered
with filth. Here are seven people living in one underground kitchen,
and a little child lying dead in the same room. Elsewhere is a poor
widow, her three children, and a child who has been dead thirteen
days. Her husband, who was a cab driver, had shortly before
committed suicide.”
(Hall, 2014, p.17)

3. Industrialization & Urbanization
Production centralized in cities as factories concentrate in urban areas.
Factory system – needs raw materials, labor, markets
Increased mechanization
Intense use of resources – coal, iron ore, lumber, petroleum
City of factory, smokestacks, steam engines

4. Pittsburg, Pennslyvania, 1902
This image is attributed to T.M. Fowler & James B. Moyer. (PD-US-1923)

5. Ohio Works of the Carnegie Steel Co., Youngstown, Ohio, 1910
These images are attributed to Haines Photo Co. @ 1919 (PD-US-1923) and Seattle Engineering Co. (PD-US-1923)
Seattle Railroad, 1900

6. Industrialization & Urbanization
By 1900, New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia -- three cities with one
million inhabitants
Industrialization: Urbanization in industrial regions, corresponding often to the
presence of railroads.
Internal migration: From farms and small towns to the larger cities
Overseas Migration

7. Overseas Immigration in New York
Immigrants at Ellis Island, circa 1900.
Photograph: Bettman/Corbis

8. Population Increase in New York
Immigrants: Nearly three in five of the city’s population lived in
tenement houses

9. Housing in New York
Late 1800s Manhattan, New York
Rapid urban growth in 19th century
Nearly four-fifths of the ground covered in buildings
Escalating land values forced cities to grow vertically: Density
An ordinary street block (25 x 100 feet block) could house 4,000 people
 In 1900 some 42,700 tenement housings housed more than 1.5 million
people.

10. Crises in the Industrial City
IMPLICATIONS OF INDUSTRIALIZATION
New Agents – Factory & Railroad
New Industries – Smelting & Manufacturing
Rapid Increase of Urban Population
Hazardous Environment - Massive Pollution
• Water (residential & commercial waste)
• Land (household & factory waste)
• Air (smoke from coal consumption, factories
Public Health Impacts – Contamination of Water,
Land & Air
Poor Housing – Lack of sanitation, lack of
clean water, endemic disease

11. Urban Tenements – New York City
This image is in the public domain (PD-US-1923)

12. Housing in New York
HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES
1890
By Jacob A. Riis
•Photographs of tenements in New York
•Stimulus to housing and neighborhood reform

13. Housing in New York
An Italian woman ‘rag-picker’ in her living
space
The cramped living condition's of the Irish
immigrant's in 1889, New York

14. Housing in New York
Tenements in NYC circa 1900 Tenement life; Photo by Jacob Riis 1910

15. Housing in New York
Tenement – Yard In a seven-cent lodging house

16. Housing in New York:
Dumbbell Tenement
• Developed in a competition in 1879
• Multifamily housing widely built in New York
• 24 families on to a lot 25-feet wide and 100-feet deep
• 14 rooms on each floor
• 10 out of 14 have no access to appropriate windows – openings to a
lightless and airless lightwell (lack of light, air, and space)

17. Housing in New York:
Dumbbell Tenement

18. Planning

19. Reform Movements
• Problems arising from urban
growth: Pressure for Reform
• Sanitation and public health
• The disappearance of urban
open space
• Housing quality and
overcrowding
• The ugliness and grimness of
the nineteenth-century
industrial city (aesthetics)
• Traffic congestion
• The problem of providing urban
populations with adequate
mobility

20. The Gilded Age & Progressive Era
4• Gilded Age (1870s – 1900s): Rapid economic growth and serious social
problems
• Influx of millions of European migrants
• Expansion of industrialization
• Railroads, factories, mining and finance increased in importance
• Abject poverty as impoverished European migrants poured into America
• Social and political upheavals after the 1873 and 1893 depressions
• South after the American Civil War remains economically devastated.
• Followed by Progressive Era (1890s – 1920s) – Social and Political
reforms, in particular eradicate corruption in government.

21. 1901 Tenement Housing Act
• Enforced all tenement houses constructed after the law
• Cut lot coverage to 70% on interior lots and 90% on corner lots
• Mandated separate bath for each apartment
• Inner courts or rear yards for light and ventilation
• Improved fire safety measures – all tenement erected thereafter (exceeding 60 feet in
height) should be fireproof.
• At least one window of specified dimensions required for every room, including the
bathroom
• Minimum size of rooms
• Requirement for running water and water closets in each apartment in new tenement
houses
• Permits before occupying the house
• Prohibited use of any part of the building as a house of prostitution
• Set-up Tenement Housing Commission with a staff of inspection and enforcement
powers

22. Municipal Reform
•The Shame of the Cities (1904) by Lincoln
Steffens
•Attacked the blatant corruption of city
governments
•For “City Efficient”
•The separation of politics from administration
and the rule of the expert

23. Public Health – Parks Movement
Background:
• The general secretary of the
United States Sanitary
Commission during the Civic War
• Dedicated to improving the
sanitation of the Union Army's
military camps and the health of
Union soldiers

24. Public Health – Parks Movement
“…(thus) stagnant air and insufficient sunlight
and foliage to disinfect it had caused much of the
higher mortality of cities in the past and still
accounted for variations within many nineteenth-
century urban settings – for example, between the
“closer built parts” of Brooklyn and those sections
with wider streets and numerous gardens.”

25. 2
Commissioners Plan (1807-11)

26. Central Park, New York City
Olmsted’s Park / Parkway Design
“Good ventilation makes a house healthier, so too would parkland
serve to ventilate cities”
Co-designed by Calvert Vaux, The Greensward Plan
770 acres of city-owned land
Inspired parks in many other cities
Rectangular shape: 1/2 mile east to west and about 2 1/2 miles
north to south
The foundational work in public
parks

27. Central Park, New York City
4
First study of design for the Central Park. Woodcut, after Olmsted and
Vaux's Greensward plan, 1858. (Description of a Plan for the
Improvement of the Central Park, New York, 1868)

28. 5
One. To achieve natural and landscape beauty
Two. To cater to the desperate need of urban neighborhoods for some relief from
their congested environment by way of the provision of recreational areas.

29. Riverside (1868-1870)
Olmsted’s Suburban Design
Planning: The most effective preventives of disease
• Co-designed by Calvert Vaux
• A Chicago suburb
• Close attention to fitting the
street pattern to the
topography  natural
contour drainage
• Consideration of sunlight and
ventilation
• Curvilinear street pattern
• Preservation of open green
space

30. Pre-Sanitary Reforms
4
• Discharged waste upon land
adjoining their dwellings and
shops.
• Within their private lot and into
the streets.
• The sewers needed to be large
enough for a man to enter for
cleaning and repair.
• Sewers system focused on
carrying off storm water to
prevent flooding not carrying
away organic wastes.
• No centralizing planning, a
piecemeal approach.

31. Reform Movements
4
“The elements of popular discord are gathered in those
wretchedly-constructed tenant-houses, where poverty,
disease, and crime find an abode. Here disease in its most
loathsome forms propagates itself. Unholy passions rule in the
domestic circle. Every thing, within and without, tends to
physical and moral degradation.”
(New York Citizen’s Association’s 1865 report, p.xvi)

32. Sanitary Movement:
Movement for Preventive Sanitation
Edwin Chadwick
• Argued against the British
Poor Law Amendment Act
(1834)’s purpose of public
workhouses for “the lazy,
shiftless poor” ???
• “it would be less expensive to
promote and create a
healthier environment for
workers.”
• Conducted a thorough
survey to correlate
class/income and population
density with the incidence of
disease

33. Sanitary map of the Town of Leeds
Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842)

34. Sanitary Reform in England
41842-1844. Edwin Chadwick:
• Adopted the “water-carriage
sewerage system”
• A small, egg-shaped sewer
• Sewage removed by gravity
beyond the city limits.
• Rainwater could wash street
debris into the sewers and out
of the city by paved, sloped,
and guttered streets.

35. Sanitary Reform in United States
4• Borrowed directly from English experience: in Jersey City, in Chicago,
and Brooklyn
• An engineering art, Engineers as civic servants not as city planners
Sanitary survey planning, New York City
• Before Sanitary reform, Dr. Stephen Smith’s unsuccessful efforts against
the slumlord.
• First efforts in 1865, New York City
• A report led by the Citizens’ Association of New York, the city’s
wealthiest merchants group.
• Collaborated work with physicians, engineers, and chemists.
• Total 29 sanitary inspection districts with detailed report
• Rational efforts: Investigating the diseases of a locale and the associated
physical conditions and then formulating solutions

36. 1865 Citizens' Association of New York. Council of Hygiene and Public Health
Report on the sanitary condition of the city

38. New York Five Points Area
Currently Chinatown

39. Sanitary Reform in United States
4
1866 city-wide cleanup began
First six month alone:
• 160,000 tons from streets
• 38,000 human excréments
• 3 dead horse
• 3,800 dead cats and dogs
• 591 people died in Cholera outbreak
(10 times less than the pervious
outbreak 17 years before)
• People started realizing the link
between dirt and disease.

40. Sanitary Survey Planning
4
Memphis, Tennessee in 1879
• In 1878, a yellow fever epidemic: 5,150 out of 45,000 died.
• The National Board of Health treated Memphis as a model of the
technique (rational planning).
• Comprehensive “Sanitary survey”(1879-1880), nine proposals
• Sanitary reformers (surveyors) functioned as city planners (NOT
planners)

41. Memphis’s Nine Proposals
4• Employment of a sanitary officer to superintend all sanitary work
• Systematic ventilation and chilling of all city houses and their furnishings
• Replacement of polluted wells and cisterns with a public water supply
• Condemnation and destruction of numerous buildings ranging from
shanties to large central city structures
• Closing of privies and introductions of sewerage
• Damming of the swamps and the park-development of its shoreline
• Enactment of a sanitary code requiring the lifting of all buildings with
floors less than two feet from the ground
• Abatement of all nuisances discovered by the survey
• The repaving of streets.