Navigating by Nose: Fresh Air, Stench Nuisance, and the Urban Environment, 1840-1880
Attitudes toward fresh air and fear of stenches guided choices that restructured and changed the urban environment and governance between 1840 and 1880. This study of olfactory-inspired reforms demonstrates the cultural significance of nuisance beyond the courtroom. City dwellers used their understanding of stench nuisance as detrimental to health to construct smellscapes or olfactory maps of New York City. Such maps identified health threats and guided movements through or out of the city. These maps proliferated before and after the creation of the Metropolitan Board of Health in 1866. Sanitarian concern about stenches echoed lay concerns, and encouraged the creation of standing health boards. These boards mapped air currents that crossed political boundaries rather than pursuing individuals’ stench complaints. Considering individuals’ smellscapes alongside the health board’s maps demonstrates that 1866 was a turning point for the creation of both institutionalized public health and the conflict between lay and expert.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/4/753?rss=1
Living Stones: The House as Actor in Early Modern Europe
This article investigates the metaphor of the "living house" and its concrete ramifications on everyday life in late medieval and early modern Europe. For premodern Europeans, the house was an actor that occupied an important and natural role in their social life and in the urban space in which they lived. Human attributes were explicitly assigned to the house: it had a name and life story, displayed bodily features, and was invested with a specific individuality. This article examines the historical origins of this metaphor and why it became particularly powerful in the early modern period. The author then surveys the various expressions of the anthropomorphic understanding of the house, as reflected both in the architectural theory and the popular discourse of the time. The final part addresses the question of why and when this notion of the house as actor began to decline.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/4/659?rss=1
The International Garden City Campaign: Transnational Negotiations on Town Planning Methods 1913-1926
This article analyzes the garden city campaign of the International Federation for Housing and Town Planning (IFHTP). Available literature suggests the agenda of the IFHTP was dictated by the British garden city militants who had established the IFHTP in 1913. Although the garden city concept dominated the agenda, its treatment was not static. The agenda evolved in the course of time from town planning on "garden city lines" to true independent garden cities, then from a national garden cities program to satellite towns, and finally merged into the broader concept of regional decentralization. This article demonstrates that the agenda of the IFHTP cannot be adequately framed in terms of exclusive agency of its British initiators. The agenda of the IFHTP, as a transnational network organization, was substantially influenced by the structure and substance of its membership and the wider transnational network society, Saunier’s Urban Internationale, to which it belonged.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/4/733?rss=1
Managing School Integration and White Flight: The Debate over Chicagos Future in the 1960s
This article explores the policy conversation and efforts around school integration in Chicago during the 1960s. It analyzes how a conversation that originated in demands for equality for black students was transformed into one about keeping whites in the city and analyzes the consequences of this shift. Worried that integration might produce more segregation as whites fled, the school board responded to the advice of experts and pleas of some white liberals to manage and stabilize integration in racially changing neighborhoods. Civil rights groups tried to keep educational equity for black students forefront in these discussions of integration, but the shift to managed integration put whites’ interests and needs first and stripped the discussion of integration of much of its structural critique. Yet managed integration did not work, undermining support for integration altogether and reinforcing fears and assumptions about the inevitability and undesirability of racial change.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/4/709?rss=1
The Evolution of an Urban Vision: The Multilevel Pedestrian Networks in Hong Kong, 1965-1997
This study explores the spatial, social, and administrative conditions that shape Hong Kong’s grade-separated pedestrian networks. The integrated elevated pedestrian network was initially developed to facilitate internal circulation within the commercial centers when the city was undergoing rapid growth in the 1960s and 1970s. The vision was incrementally incorporated into statutory and administrative instruments as the city embraced a consumer-oriented economy. This study tracks the evolving concept of grade-separated pedestrian networks in Hong Kong, revisiting the critical actions and written notes in Hong Kong’s urban history from 1965 to 1997. The private sector was essential in building the multilevel pedestrian space and in making it a commercially viable urban model. An alternative perspective is proposed from which to consider Hong Kong’s public–private conflicts.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/4/688?rss=1
The Age of Asa: Lord Briggs, Public Life and History in Britain since 1945, ed. Miles Taylor
<span class="paragraphSection"><span style="font-style:italic;">The Age of Asa: Lord Briggs, Public Life and History in Britain since 1945</span>, ed. TaylorMiles (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014; pp. 311. £60.)</span>