Urban Hygiene and Slum Clearance as Catalysts: The Emergence of the Sanitary City and Town Planning

Abstract

In the context of the rapid urbanization process in England and Germany, environmental and hygiene issues took on a new priority. Above all, the poorer classes and their housing problems and unsanitary living conditions threatened to become a danger for the middle and upper classes as well. With innovations in water supply, engineers tried to make the problem manageable. The urban hygiene movements became the motor for social controls and reforms, which were implemented again as part of urban planning measures to clean up slums. The slum clearance projects of the cities − examined here using the example of Hamburg and London – which were intended reformist, were often Janus-faced and often went hand in hand with conditioning and disciplining measures. Town planning as discipline – emerging in the late 19th century − should contribute to the questioning of “secured” knowledge from other disciplines. The uncritical transfer of “facts” from urban hygiene was often seamlessly translated into normative concepts of town planning. Knowledge stocks from other disciplines are to be contextualized in the social and political context before they are taken over without reflection. The history of town planning offers sufficient examples on the basis of which this can be documented.