Cities and the Mobility of Nature

Despite the sizable body of work on natural disasters, environmental historians have neglected the extent to which small-scale and slow-moving landslides have shaped American cities. The impact of landslides on cities has been misunderstood because of a focus on disasters, the large-scale, sudden failures that disrupt lives and make the news, to the exclusion of long-term damage and influence caused by slow movement. Focusing on Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, two of the most landslide-prone cities in the United States, this article explores the ways in which city builders responded to the mobility of nature—in the form of literally moving earth—with a set of structures, including retaining walls, drainage pipes, gutters, and, eventually, a new layer of regulation to augment these piecemeal responses. Ultimately, however, the need for new development in declining cities such as Cincinnati and Pittsburgh ensured that these efforts would not stop the slow movement of earth and the ongoing, unspectacular, but costly landslides

Cartography · Economic geography · Forensic engineering · Geography · Geotechnical engineering · Landslide · Meteorology · Natural disaster · Natural hazard · Scale (ratio · Engineering · History · Landslides and related hazards · Geology

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