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The Place of the City inEnvironmental HistoryMartin V. MelosiUniversity of HoustonIn the last fifteen years or so, the study of urban environmentalhistory has led to an outpouring of valuable research. Many booksand articles have appeared on topics such as building technology,public works and infrastructure,environmental services, parks andgreenspace,pollutionand public health,energy,environmentalreformand regulation, and municipal engineering. The volume of work isgratifying and adds considerablyto pioneering researchdating backto the 1960s,including Lewis Mumford'ssweeping TheCityin History(New York, 1961), Sam Bass Warner,Jr.'sclassic case study StreetcarSuburbs(Cambridge,MA, 1962),Carl Condit's AmericanBuildingArt2v. (Chicago, 1960, 1961),Nelson Blake's seminal Waterfor the Cities(Syracuse, 1956), geographer Allan R. Pred's TheSpatialDynamicsofU.S. Urban-IndustrialGrowth(Cambridge,MA, 1966),John W. Reps'TheMakingof UrbanAmerica(Princeton,1965),Roy Lubove'sTwentiethCenturyPittsburgh(New York,1969),CharlesS. Rosenberg'sTheCholera

2ENVIRONMENTALHISTORYREVIEWSPRINGYears(Chicago, 1962), and John Duffy's A Historyof PublicHealthinNew YorkCity,1625-1866(New York,1968).ForJoelA. Tarr,the leading figure in the field since the 1970s,urbanenvironmentalhistory is "primarilythe story of how man-builtor anthropogenic structures("built environment")and technologiesshape and alter the natural environment of the urban site withconsequent feedbackto the city itself and its populations."'I would prefer a slightly broader definition in which thephysical features and resourcesof urbansites (and regions) influenceand are shaped by natural forces, growth, spatial change anddevelopment, and human action.Thus the field combines the study ofthe natural history of the city with the history of city building andtheir possible intersections.In practice,however, urbanenvironmentalhistory has yet tomeet the expectationsof such sweeping definitions and suffers fromthree elemental weaknesses:(1) The place of the city in environmental history remainslargely ill-defined. The study of the urban environment has not somuch been pushed to the peripheryof environmentalhistory as nevertruly absorbed-appended ratherthan integrated.Studies focused onthe role of humans in the naturalworld rarelyconfrontor encompassthe city. Forthe most part,the study of the urbanenvironmentremainsin the realmsof urbanhistory and the history of technology.(2) Urbanenvironmentalhistory has broadenedour empiricalknowledge base about cities, but often suffersfrom limited groundingin theory. Some historical studies-but not enough-have drawnintellectualsustenance from the field of urban ecology as developedby sociologistsand geographersin the early-to mid-twentiethcentury.(3) The primary focus of much of the existing research hasbeen internalist,that is, narrow and empirical ratherthan broad andtheoreticalin nature,with moreattentiondevoted to how cities functionratherthan how they grow and what role cities play within the largermatrixof the physical environment.The City and EnvironmentalHistoryThere is no doubt that urban historians must take a large part of theresponsibilityfor not defining cities in adequate environmentaltermsor for not placing the built environment within the larger frameworkof the physical world. But at the same time, historians interestedprimarily in nature-and the place of humans in it-have oftenshunned the city or marginalized it in their studies.2A Round Table

1993MARTINV. MELOSI3on EnvironmentalHistory in the March 1990 issue of the JournalofAmericanHistoryvirtually ignored the urban environment, focusingon Donald Worster's "agroecological"perspective and responses toit, ecology, gender, culture, and "firestick"history. Those unfamiliarwith EnvironmentalHistory will benefit from the essays in the RoundTable because they point out how intellectually exciting this field isand can become. However, while the participants3must be givencredit for the difficult task of trying to establish definitional bordersfor a field which is potentially so expansive and amorphous, I hopethat historiansdo not assume that the parametersof the field are nowfirmly set.In an appendix to the anthology The Ends of the Earth:PerspectivesonModernEnvironmentalHistory(New York,1988),DonaldWorster presented "Doing EnvironmentalHistory," which in largepart is a version of "Transformation of the Earth: Toward anAgroecologicalPerspectivein History"that appeared in the JournalofAmericanHistoryRound Tablediscussion.4In attemptingto develop abroad, but focused definition for the field of environmentalhistory,Worster stated that ".environmentalhistory is about the role andplace of naturein human life."Nature is understoodas the nonhumanworld, "the world we have not in any primarysense created."In thisdefinition he excluded the social environment-"the scene of humansinteractingonly with each other in the absence of nature"-and thebuilt or artifactualenvironment-"the cluster of things that peoplehave made and which can be so pervasive as to constitute a kind of'second nature'around them."IAdmitting that the latter exclusion "may seem especiallyarbitrary,"Worstermade it just the same. He attemptedto distinguishbetween the naturaland the built environment "forit reminds us thatthere are different forces at work in the world and not all of thememanatefrom humans."Whilethe differentiationbetween the naturaland the human-made is a long-standing motif, Worsterjustified theexclusionof the built environmentfromhis definitionof environmentalhistoryby arguing that "thebuilt environmentis wholly expressive ofculture;its study is alreadywell advancedin the historyof architecture,technology, and the city"and concluded that "when we step beyondthe self-reflectingworld of humankind to encounter the nonhumansphere, environmentalhistory finds its main theme of study."6Such a definition of environmental history makes severalassumptions. First,it does not account for the generations-olddebateabout the natureof cities within an environmentalcontext.Australian

4ENVIRONMENTALHISTORYREVIEWSPRINGhistorian Graeme Davison has written widely about the city as anaturalsystem. As he stated:Few ideas have exercised as powerful an influence uponstudents of urban society as the organic or biologicalconception of the city. FromAristotle'sPoliticsto the ChicagoSchool and beyond, social theorists have likened cities tobodies or organisms;dissected them into constituent organs,such as 'heart,''lungs' and 'arteries';and chartedtheirgrowthand decay. These metaphors reflect a long-standing conflictin western thought. On the one hand, cities were exalted asthe intelligent creation of civilized man and were sharplydistinguished from the products of unreflective nature. Yetthey also manifested an astonishing order within their vastcomplexity,and demonstrateda capacityfor growth and selfregulation that resembled the working of nature itself. Akinto nature,cities nevertheless stood apart from nature, and soreflected man's own ambiguous relationship to the naturalorder. From time to time, the balance between these ideasthe city as man-made;the city as natural-has shifted backand forth in response to changing experiences of urban lifeand changingassumptionsabout man and his place in nature.7Worster clearly falls into the camp of the city as humanmade, and his "naturalworld" is incredibly pristine since "the roleand place of nature in human life" is restrictedto a limited range ofexperiences. For example, how can we justify as part of the maintheme of environmentalhistory the study of human intrusion in thenatural world in the form of farming, and not in the building of atown or city? In a largersense, how can we understand "therole andplace of nature in human life" if we create an artificial physicalenvironment devoid of human communities-including cities?Humans have not simply encountered nature as individuals, but asparts of groups, and if not in cities then in towns and villages or asmembers of nomadic clans regularly setting up and breaking downcamps. And finally, while the built environment is expressive ofculture, it is not whollyexpressive of culture, since upon its creationitis part of the physical world, and whether we like it or not, interactsand sometimes blends with the naturalworld.Excludingcities from the maintheme of environmentalhistoryseems to be more of a rhetoricaldevice than a well-crafteddefinition.Fromthe vantagepoint of humanhistory,isolatingthe "naturalworld"

1993MARTINV. MELOSI5in such an unnatural way denies the powerful holistic quality ofenvironmentalhistorywhich demands inclusion more than exclusion,no matter if it is "well advanced in the history of architecture,technology, and the city."However, a simple modification of Worster's definition ofenvironmental history-but more inclusive-would seem to satisfymany of the concerns stated above: "Environmentalhistory is aboutthe role and place of thephysicalenvironmentin human life." The cityhas a place in such a definition, and as such reflectsmore accurately,Iwould argue, the essence of the field.Social Science Theoty and the Urban EnvironmentRarely have historians attempted to confront the city in broadenvironmentalterms as a way of setting context for their work or, forthat matter,of shaping an incisive definition of urban environmentalhistory. I would not deny the value of 'plowing the furrow'to produceempirically sound monographs on important topics. But in order tobring the city squarelyinto the maindiscourseof environmentalhistorya broaderintellectualfoundationneeds to be built. Fashioningmacroenvironmental theory to do so may be pretentious-or at leastunwieldy-but deeper examination of the concepts pioneered bysociologists, geographers, and other social scientists-as WilliamCronon has done so expertly in Nature'sMetropolis:Chicagoand theGreat West (New York, 1991)-may help to establish some usefulconstructsfor expanding our thinking about the urban environment.Just as ecological science has influenced the study of environmentalhistory in general,urbanecology can more deeply influencethe studyof the city.8In a discussion several years ago about the nature of cities,Joel Tarradmonished me by saying, "Melosi,cities are not trees."Butdespite the remonstrance,the notion of cities as naturalenvironmentsis worth exploring-even if the organic theory is vastly overstatedfor no other reason than it helps us to reflect upon what place citiesoccupy in the physical world.Accordingto GraemeDavison, the idea of the city as a naturalsystem "becamethe dominant paradigm among the first generationof middle-class urban investigators"(in GreatBritainat least) in thelate-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. On one level, itreinforced the theories of laissez-faire economists and naturalhistorians-"thechief ideologists of the commercial middle class;-"