Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
HOW BAD THEORY CAN LEAD TO GOOD TECHNOLOGY:
WATER SUPPLY AND SEWERAGE IN THE AGE OF
MIASMAS
MARTIN V. MELOSI
“Delivering services is the primary function of municipal government. It
occupies the vast bulk of the time and effort of most city employees, is the
source of most contacts that citizens have with local government, occa-
sionally becomes the subject of heated controversy, and is often surrounded
by myth and misinformation.Yet, service delivery remains the 'hidden func-
tion' of local government.”
1
So stated the political scientist Bryan D. Jones
and his collaborators in a 1980 topic. Service delivery is a “hidden func-
tion” largely because it often blends so invisibly into the urban landscape;
it is part of what we expect a city to be.While economic forces are essen-
tial to the formation of cities in the United States, urban growth depends
heavily on service systems which shape the infrastructure and define the
quality of life.
In my topic
The Sanitary City
( Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999),
from which this essay is derived, I focus on sanitary services—water supply,
wastewater, and solid waste systems—because they have been and remain
indispensable for the functioning and growth of cities. For the purposes of
this essay, I will concentrate on water supply, and to a lesser extent, waste-
water. Sanitary services are not organic entities; they are specialized techni-
cal systems—technologies of sanitation—that help to shape the apparatus
of modern cities.
2
The development of technical networks in the nine-
teenth century was a prime characteristic of the modern city. Whereas
industrialization remained local or regional for many years, new techno-
logical innovations were quickly diffused nationally. This suggests that,
although American cities did not uniformly benefit (or suffer) from the
direct economic effects of the Industrial Revolution, they were physically
modernized as a result of new technical systems developing in the era. By
the late nineteenth century, many cities in the United States had entered a
