Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
hands. The experience of both World Wars and the huge power requirements of war
industry as well as the dif
culty to plan and fund the massive investments required
by large power plants and extensive distribution networks had demonstrated in the
eyes of the decision-making forces of the time, that regulatory power had to be
removed from the cities and placed either at the level of nationalized power utilities,
as it happened in the UK, France and Italy after World War II, or that utilities had to
be tightly regulated at the level of national government, leaving ownership with
large regional utilities, frequently with a mixture of public and private shareholders,
as was the case in Germany after 1935.
67
Only in the last two decades, the reluc-
tance or resistance of large power companies towards
energy policies and
the deregulatory drive of the European Union have contributed to a process of
re-municipalizing power systems which is supposed to make energy policies more
susceptible to democratic pressure for more ecologically oriented energy policies.
68
'
green
'
6.10 Planning the City
'
'
In the last decades of the 19th century another response to the
of mid-
century developed, town planning. Whereas networking the city was primarily
concerned with removing obnoxious matter out of the city as quickly as possible
and providing urban residents with energy, water and transport services which
would facilitate their daily life and make it less unhealthy, town planning was
concerned with spatial ordering of the city.
69
Urban life had become so problematic
and unhealthy partly due to increased population densities in central districts of the
cities, partly also due to the effects of industrialization. Factories had been set up at
convenient places, where the decisive locational factors (water, transport accessi-
bility, labour) were given and had henceforth structured their surroundings during
their growth. Due to long working-hours and the absence of affordable public
transport, workers normally had to live close to factories; they and their families
were thus permanently exposed to the unhealthy emissions of smoke, noise and
urban crisis
uid discharges, emanating from factories. This led to a clear pattern of environ-
mental injustice, damaging the health of workers and their families living close to
factories most intensely, a fact which can be deduced from mortality
gures.
70
One
central motive for early town-planning thus was to disentangle and separate, as far
as possible, industrial sites from places of residence. Since the environmental
pollution from factories was then considered a fact which had to be accepted, the
only solution was seen in physical separation. Another problem which had to be
67
Schott (
2008
).
68
Bauer et al. (
2012
).
69
Sutcliffe (
1981
) and Ward (
1994
).
70
Platt (
2005
) and Mosley (
2001
). For a wider discussion of
'
environmental justice
'
see Massard-
Guilbaud and Rodger (
2011
).
