Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
6.6 Wastes and Diseases: The City as a Population Sink
If we conceive the city as a place where metabolism takes place, we need to re
ect
what happens to the output of physical metabolism of human and animal residents
in medieval and early modern cities. Humans and animals produced feces as result
of their physical metabolism. These feces were usually dumped in cess-pools
located in court-yards. As long as cities were relatively thinly populated, and there
was enough agricultural land within and outside the city walls, on which these feces
could be used as fertilizing dung, the problem of waste disposal could be contained.
For economies of scarcity such as the European well into the 19th century, feces
were not simply
since it was essential to regain and
maintain soil fertility. But as cities grew towards the late middle ages and then
'
waste
'
but rather
'
resources
'
—
after a period of population decline following the Black Death in the 14th century
—
again from the late 15th century, spaces within the city were increasingly built up,
houses were built higher. Thus drinking wells in court yards, which originally had
been dug at a distance from cess-pools, moved closer to them and this could mean,
that the ground water became in
ltrated by the liquid parts of the contents of cess-
pools contaminating this water supply. Germs from human and animal feces could
thus re-enter the organism via the water supply but of course medicine then had no
knowledge of
ed by Pasteur and Koch from the
1860s onwards. With the disappearance of agricultural land inside the walls and
the spatial growth of cities it became more dif
'
germs
'
which were only identi
cult to use the contents of cess-pools
as fertilizer. Thus wastes were stored in disused cess-pools or dumped into rivers.
This was only one of many reasons why cities were rather unhealthy places, despite
numerous regulations by municipal authorities on cleansing streets and public
places. Apart from massive pandemias of plague, which haunted European cities
from the mid fourteenth to the late 17th century in successive waves, a plethora of
dangerous diseases particularly of the digestive tract (such as typhus or typhoid
fever) was endemic to European cities, taking a heavy toll every year particularly
among the infants. Life expectancy in large cities was signicantly lower than in the
country and the high residential density linked with rather undeveloped standards of
personal hygiene enhanced mortality. Cities
—
particularly in the early modern
period
; mortality was normally higher than
natality, thus the city could not keep the level of population by its own fertility.
30
For London it has been calculated that the city needed a net in-migration of
8,000 people per year by the late 17th century in order to stabilize its long-term
growth rate. Each year a town of 8,000 people was absorbed by the capital, at a time
when most other English towns had almost no growth. For Paris, its growth was
particularly maintained by in
—
can be seen as
'
population sinks
'
ux from the Ile-de-France where most towns and
villages showed very little growth between 1600
1800.
31
-
30
Knittler (
2000
) and Knoll (
2008
).
31
Boulton (
2000
).
