Carl Smith. City Water, City Life

Studies of urban infrastructure development generally emphasize the technological or political dimensions of constructing networks to deliver essential services to growing populations. Carl Smith takes a different approach, using the construction of water systems in three American cities as a vehicle to explore the mental and physical landscape of a rapidly urbanizing country. In this intensively researched study, Smith demonstrates that building extensive water systems was as much cultural enterprise as physical feat. After sketching capsule histories of the water systems of the three cities, Smith explores how urban residents thought about and represented these systems. Water is a particularly apt choice for examining the intellectual and cultural tendencies of nineteenth-century urban America because constructing, financing, and operating these networks raised fundamental questions about the relationship of individuals to the body politic and about the relationship of individual bodies to public health. Citizens generally agreed about the inadequacy of existing water sources, but they clashed when it came to deciding on the details of the new systems.

Environmental ethics · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law