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public health in the 19th and 20th century essay
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Alexandria is an independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia and is recognized as one of the best places to live and do business on the east coast. The city’s urban planning showcases the city’s vibrant, diverse, historic, and unique neighborhoods. Urban planning began there in the 19th Century. Urban populations rose drastically, and a host of problems came with it: unsanitary conditions, overcrowding, and corruption of government. Economic depressions promoted a climate of social unrest, violence, labor strikes, and disease (Rose, 1997). In the beginning of the 19th century, development of American cities often took a compact, mixed-use form, reminiscent of that found in places like old town Alexandria. By the early 20th century, the focus was on the geography of water supplies, sewage disposal, and urban transportation (Virginia Places, 2010). This paper will discuss the city’s historical and current sanitation program and housing accommodations for sewage disposal.
Before the 19th Century, sewage disposal was virtually unknown until the first American cities were built around the 1700’s. Human waste was originally disposed of in the woods, but some wealthy Virginians built large houses and used chamber pots to "do their business" indoors, and the contents would be thrown into the back yard. Later, as towns developed, waste was tossed into the streets to decompose or be washed away in the rainstorms (Virginia Places, 2010). Privies or outhouses were also built in back yards and were commonly used to dispose of waste. Toilets, also known as “water closets,” were put into homes in the mid 19th Century in the United States. The water closet had indoor plumbing where piping was run through the roof, and a gravity ...
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...thier ecology – making the city easier to sustain into the coming years.
Works Cited
Frederick Law Olmsted (2009). FrederickLawOlmsted.com . Retrieved December 28, 2010, from http://www.fredericklawolmsted.com/Lifeframe.htm
History (2010). Alexandria Sanitation Authority (ASA). Retrieved December 28, 2010, from http://www.alexsan.com/
Levy, J.M. (2011). Contemporary Urban Planning (9th ed). Upper Saddle River, NJ
Rose, J. K. (1997, November 8). The city beautiful movement. University of Virginia. Retrieved December 28, 2010, from http://xroads.virginia.edu/~cap/citybeautiful/city.html
Sewage treatment in Virginia (2010). Virginia Places. Retrieved December 28, 2010, from http://www.virginiaplaces.org/waste/sewer.html
Urban planning (2010). World Lingo Translation. Retrieved December 28, 2010, from http://www.worldlingo.com/ma/enwiki/en/Urban_planning
Phillips, E. Barbara. City Lights: Urban-Suburban Life in the Global Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Another noteworthy urban sociologist that’s invested significant research and time into gentrification is Saskia Sassen, among other topical analysis including globalization. “Gentrification was initially understood as the rehabilitation of decaying and low-income housing by middle-class outsiders in central cities. In the late 1970s a broader conceptualization of the process began to emerge, and by the early 1980s new scholarship had developed a far broader meaning of gentrification, linking it with processes of spatial, economic and social restructuring.” (Sassen 1991: 255). This account is an extract from an influential book that extended beyond the field of gentrification and summarizes its basis proficiently. In more recent and localized media, the release the documentary-film ‘In Jackson Heights’ portrayed the devastation that gentrification is causing as it plagues through Jackson Heights, Queens. One of the local businessmen interviewed is shop owner Don Tobon, stating "We live in a
Dumenil, Lynn, ed. "New York City." The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Social History. N.p.: Oxford UP, 2012. Oxford Reference. Web. 8 Apr. 2013.
In Jane Jacobs’s acclaimed The Life and Death of Great American Cities, she intricately articulates urban blight and the ills of metropolitan society by addressing several binaries throughout the course of the text. One of the more culturally significant binaries that Jacobs relies on in her narrative is the effectively paradoxical relationship between diversity and homogeneity in urban environments at the time. In particular, beginning in Chapter 12 throughout Chapter 13, Jacobs is concerned greatly with debunking widely held misconceptions about urban diversity.
Throughout The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, she writes about the city’s change through a ballet dance and movement surrounding her. “In real life, to be sure, something is always going on, the ballet is never at a halt, but the general effect is peaceful and the general tenor even leisurely” (Jacobs 833). This idea of change she discusses and goes in great depth with, portrays just how constant not just a particular city but the world is. She describes every day to be a ballet of some sort; witnessing everyone’s day as they walk down the sidewalk. Even when a corner is turned, seeing so many different face as they all move at different paces and occupy their time in different manners, it all adds to this dance. Everything changing around her and maybe even things not really making sense but despite all of that, still being able to come together and create something no matter what’s being made of it, relates to Growing up Unrented on the Lower East Side by Edmund Berrigan.
The new problems created by the urbanization in superstar cities is what Richard Florida now calls the New Urban Crisis. In this essay, I will provide a brief summary of the book The New Urban Crisis and show how the book is largely U.S-centric which provides a one-directional argument for solving the new urban crisis of superstar cities across the globe. I will also analyze the author’s arguments to uncover any other inconsistencies that might arise while reading the book.
The fourth chapter of City Politics by Dennis R. Judd & Todd Swanstrom covers the rise of "Reform Politics" with many local governments during the first half of the 1900s as a way to combat the entrenched political machines that took control of many large city governments in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Over the course of the chapter, Judd & Swanstrom quickly cover the history of the "reform movement" with different examples of how the reform movement affected city politics in different areas.
Olsen, Donald J. The City as a Work of Art: London, Paris,Vienna. Yale University Press. New Haven. 1986.
In the documentary, The City (1939), the filmmakers examine the problems of large overpopulated cities and advocates the creation of new suburban communities that will benefit the average modern family. It details the harmful environment that large cities create for the habitants in the area. While, also providing specific facts on the advantages of suburban communities. As in The City (1939,) both articles by Buckley and Wirth tackle the topic of urbanism. In Urbanism as a Way of Life, Wirth describes the nature of a city and the ways a city affect its inhabitants. While, Newcomers Adjust, Eventually, to New York, focuses on the difficulties of living in a city and how hard it is to call it home. Both articles aim to describe the nature and relationship that the city have on its inhabitants, while using similar evidence to define the daunting and difficulties of urban life.
Finally, this paper will explore the “end product” that exists today through the works of the various authors outlined in this course and explain how Los Angeles has survived many decades of evolution, breaking new grounds and serving as the catalyst for an urban metropolis.
Wirth, L. (1938). Urban as a Way of Life. In R.T. Legates, & F. Stout (Eds.). The City Reader (pp. 90-97). New York, NY: Routledge
Kevin Lynch has written an in-depth study and subsequent analysis on “the image of the city” as perceived by him in 1960. The overall purpose of his book was to study “the look of cities, and [determine if the image] is of any importance, and [if] it can be changed” (Lynch, 1960, p. V). Lynch used an on the ground approach of study where he and his team conducted systematic field reconnaissance and lengthy interviews with a small sample of residents within the study area (Boston, Jersey, and Los Angeles) (Lynch, 1960, p. 15).
Le Corbusier. The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1987
In the twentieth century, the world witnessed significant changes and an increase in the city's population. Today more than half of global inhabitants live in cities or towns (Clarke, 1980), and most of the modern cities around the world have similar economic structure and social interests (Sassen, 2001). The observer to these cities will notice the common characteristics are much more than differences (Clark, 1996).
As previously implied, cities are currently the antithesis of even the barest sense of sustainability. To succinctly define the term “sustainability” would be to say that it represents living within one’s needs. When it comes to the city, with almost zero local sources of food or goods, one’s means is pushed and twisted to include resources originating far beyond the boundaries of the urban landscape. Those within cities paradoxically have both minimal and vast options when it comes to continuing their existence, yet this blurred reality is entirely reliant on the resources that a city can pull in with its constantly active economy.