Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
social changes in health improvement, were also influential. Lower fertility rates de-
creased family size and reduced child mortality. Increases in prosperity led not only
to better nutrition from more food supplies, but better clothing and housing. More
cleanliness and a knowledge of hygiene was also important. In addition there was
a gradual and crucial improvement of medical knowledge and nursing capabilities.
A third trend came from greater acceptance of a
new valuation of nature
and
appreciation of the utility of green space that began with the Romantic revolution
in art. This stimulated the creation of public parks for leisure and escape from the
noise and filth of the city, and cemeteries for the safe disposal of dead bodies (Reps
1965
). These ideas later led to the ideas of adding green space to the planning of
new subdivisions. Restricted at first to wealthy residents, these planning ideas grad-
ually filtered down to middle class developments and to model towns of workers
(Davies and Herbert
1993
) and eventually to the Garden City ideas. They led to a
more comprehensive approach, advocates for a complete town combining the best
of the town and country, whose ideas influenced subsequent suburban designs, is-
sues discussed in Chaps. 2 and 4 especially. New ideas about the restorative values
of nature also led to the belief that it could contribute to better health, which in turn
was assumed to develop an improved morality, unlike the social degeneration seen
in cities and especially slum areas which were thought by many to breed moral,
as well as physical diseases. In Britain it led to many new movements designed to
encourage a more active and outdoors life-style, from the addition of sports and
physical exercise in schools, to the Scout and Guides movement from 1908, with
their outdoor orientation and camping trips, to the 1926 New Health Society which
sought to improve nutrition, as well as to the Sunlight League in 1926, which ex-
tolled the health-giving properties of sunlight (Carter
2012
). Similar movements
occurred in many countries, especially in Germany where there was greater empha-
sis on the need for hygiene to be taught in schools and to be part of everyday life,
stemming from the work of Dr Weyl's 10 volume treatise on Hygiene that began in
1893 (Schott
2012
). Although many these social movements of the early twentieth
century faded during the war period and its austere aftermath, the revival of the
environmental movements from the 1960s and the more recent ideas of the nature
deficit in children discussed in Chap. 4, can, in part, be regarded as the partial in-
heritors of these earlier traditions.
A fourth transforming trend was less a matter of policy or organizations than of
fashion and life-style, namely the benefits of
spa and seaside towns
. These were
regarded as being sited in healthier environments, allowing the opportunity to im-
prove health by sojourns in these centres. The earliest examples came from the
expansion of spa towns from the seventeenth century, places with mineral springs
which were assumed to have therapeutic properties, obtained by either immersion
in, or by drinking such waters (Adams
2012
). Many of the early European spa
towns were revivals of settlements on old Roman mineral water sites and were pri-
marily patronised by the elite, which meant they became as much social, as medical,
centres. Up to the 1930s they were patronized primarily by the elite and their thera-
peutic values were highly regarded. But in the U.K. many declined after the creation
of the National Health Service in 1948 because this nationalized system was not
