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BOREAL ENVIRONMENT RESEARCH 9: 519528 ISSN 1239-6095Helsinki 14 December 2004 2004

Urban environmental history: what lessons are there to belearnt?

Dieter Schott

Darmstadt University of Technology, History Department, Faculty of Social and HistoricalSciences, Schloss, D-64283 Darmstadt, Germany

Schott, D. 2004: Urban environmental history: what lessons are there to be learnt? Boreal Env.Res. 9: 519528.

The paper traces the emergence of urban environmental history rst in the UnitedStates and since the 1990s increasingly also in Europe. It identies the development oflarge technical networks which provide cities with water and energy and which serveto take problematic substances and waste out of urban areas as a central theme of thisnew subeld where scholars from urban history, environmental history and historyof technology converge. The concepts of path dependence and urban metabolismare introduced as useful heuristic devices to assess long-term effects of these infra-structures in a holistic manner. The paper shows that the implementation of networks

and related household technologies was accompanied by comprehensive processes ofsocial and cultural adaptation which fundamentally altered the attitudes and behav-ioural patterns towards resource use. Lessons of urban environmental history are seenin providing long-term horizons to current debates over urban technologies and theirenvironmental consequences.

Introduction

Recently urban environmental scholars havebecome increasingly pessimistic about the future

of large cities and their ability to reach levels ofsustainability if current trends of resource use andeconomic development continue (Ravetz 2000: pp.3033, McNeill 2000: pp. 269295, Radkau 2000:pp. 328240, Hughes 2001: pp. 238241). As ahistorian I am in no position to provide modelsand technical solutions for these problems. His-tory, however, can offer perspectives and analysesthat provide scholars of the current environmentand policy makers with a deeper understandingof the evolution of the urban predicament. By sodoing, historians can also help to clarify choicesand options in the formulation of current policy. Inthis paper, therefore, I will discuss the emergence

of a new academic eld, urban environmentalhistory, where scholars from different disciplinescollaborate and which might give current environ-mental policy a greater temporal depth and wider

scope in its problem analysis. The paper will showhow urban environmental history emerged, willthen introduce some of the major themes of thisresearch and in the nal section I will reect if,and in what respect, current policy, todays urbanand environmental planning might learn fromurban environmental history.

What is urban environmentalhistory? How did it emerge?

Urban environmental history emerged in theUSA in the early 1990s as a major subeld of


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520 Schott BOREAL ENV. RES. Vol. 9

both urban and environmental history (Tarr2001: p. 39). Three major inuences can beseen as crucial for this process. First and fore-most the research into urban technical infra-structures, especially systems of water provisionand sewage, waste collection and disposal, as ithad been developed by Joel Tarr, Martin Melosiand other scholars since the 1970s, was fun-damental. This research greatly expanded ourknowledge how and why these systems hadbeen implemented in the rst place (Tarr 1996:pp. XXIXXLVII). The second inuence canbe seen in the seminal work of William Crononon Chicago, Natures Metropolis. In this bookCronon develops an environmental perspectivefor the making of Chicago and its hinterland.He shows how crucial Chicago had been for theenvironmental transformation of the Mid-Westfrom grassland to farmland and how Chicago in turn also transformed itself and itsimmediate environment, the river and the lake.Cronons work questioned the traditional citycountry division and focused the attention on theweb of functional relationships binding city tocountry (Cronon 1991). As a third factor current

political inuences, especially the debate in thewake of the Rio conference of 1992 on climatechange and the UN target to achieve sustain-able development provided a strong motivationfor urban historians to ask to what extent citieshad been sustainable in the past, when and whythere had been qualitative changes and rupturesin the ways cities managed their environmentand used their resources.

It was Martin Melosi who claimed in 1993that the city should have a prominent place

within environmental history (Melosi 1993). Hechallenged the exclusion of the city from envi-ronmental history which Donald Worster, one ofthe pioneers in the eld in the USA, had postu-lated in his 1990 article Transformations of theEarth. Towards an Agro-ecological Perspectivein History (Worster 1990). Melosi criticizedthat Worster would include farmed landscapes,obviously product of human intervention, as anintegral part of environmental history, but not theintervention of building cities. Insisting that citiesare derived from the natural world, that theyinteract and sometimes blend with the naturalworld, Melosi envisaged that urban environmen-

tal history would combine the study of the natu-ral history of the city with the history of the citybuilding process and the possible intersectionsbetween the two(Melosi 2001: p. 126). Melosisintervention was backed by several other histori-ans such as Joel Tarr, Christine Meisner Rosen,Jeffrey Stine and Samuel Hays, who took theirstand against such a reduction of environmentalhistory to natural spaces (Rosen and Tarr 1994,Tarr and Stine 1994, Hays 1998, Platt 1999).

European urban environmentalhistory

European environmental history had overallnever been dominated by an agro-ecologicalperspective. A broad range of studies on pollu-tion, especially of air and water, and a growinginterest in environmental problems within urbanhistory prepared the ground (for surveyssee Brggemeier 1998, Luckin 2000, Radkau 2000,Delort and Walter 2001). By the late 1990s theimpetus from US scholars such as Melosi andTarr to develop urban environmental history

as a comprehensive and interdisciplinary eldfound fertile ground among European scholars.Over the last few years a European discourse onurban environmental history and an internationalnetwork of scholars active in this eld has grownthrough workshops and publications.

A major session on urban environmentalproblems at the 4th International Conference onUrban History in 1998, organised by ChristophBernhardt, provided the start. From this initiativea series of Round-Table workshops in Clermont-

Ferrand (2000) and Leicester (2002) had beenorganised, where urban and environmental his-torians met to exchange their research ndings.In June 2004, the third round-table in Siena dealtwith The Making of European ContemporaryCities: an Environmental History. Publicationsfrom these meetings take the study of the histori-cal European urban environment to a more com-parative and conceptual dimension (Bernhardt2001, Bernhardt and Massard-Guilbaud 2002,Schottet al. 2005).

Apart from these more focused round-tables, European environmental history has alsoimproved its general standing through setting up


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BOREAL ENV. RES. Vol. 9 Urban environmental history: what lessons are there to be learnt? 521

a European Society for Environmental Historyin 1999 and holding two well-attended confer-ences in St. Andrews and Prague (Jeleek 2003,and http://www.eseh.org/home.html).

What are themes of urbanenvironmental history?

In a state-of-the-art survey Joel Tarr (Tarr 2001:p. 38) recently identied the following ve pri-mary themes in urban environmental history:

the impact of the built environment andhuman activities in cities on the natural envi-ronment,

societal responses to these impacts and effortsto alleviate environmental problems,

exploration of the effect of the natural envi-ronment on city life,

the relationship between cities and an everwidening hinterland,

the role of gender, class and race in regard toenvironmental issues.

The impact of the built on the natural envi-ronment, Tarrs theme number one, and societalresponses to these impacts, number two, havebeen most thoroughly studied in relation to oneof the central research elds, the networkingof the city. Urban environmental historians aswell as historians of technology have investi-gated how since the middle of the 19th century amulti-layered complex of infrastructures for theprovision with and disposal of basic resourcesand services has developed in European and

American cities, a second or invisible cityunderground. This complex of water and sewagepipes, of gas pipes, electricity, telegraph andtelephone cables, and public transport lines hasproven of fundamental signicance for the main-tenance of urban civilization (Hietala 1987, Tarrand Dupuy 1988, Tarr 1996, Schott 1999, Melosi2000, 2001). Special characteristics of these net-works are their capital intensity, their longevityand the path dependence they imply.

Path dependence, a concept which hasfound increasing acceptance in economic historyand history of technology, means that choicesfor certain key technologies and systems

for instance in early electrication the optionfor direct current rather than alternating cur-rent can limit the future room of manoeuvrefor municipal policy and urban development.The chosen path can only be revised at greatexpense, and this clearly inhibits a change ofdirection in how cities manage their resources(Hughes 1983, Schott 1999). When in the wakeof war destruction cities considered radicalchanges in their grid, the restrictive character ofthese infrastructures became strongly apparent:Most plans to radically redraw the basic lay-outof cities, such as the Scharoun plan for Berlinafter 1945, were scrapped after the huge costs ofrelaying the infrastructure, often not destroyed,had been calculated (Diefendorf 1993).

Urban environmental historians like Tarr andMelosi argue that these networks should beunderstood as historical responses to specicconstructions of problems. The networks offersolutions to certain problems as they were beingperceived at the time of their implementation;they document which problems had then beengiven priority. Studying the making of these net-works also drives home the insight that they did

not result from a quasi-natural evolution towardstechnological progress. Rather, they were prod-ucts of a decision-making process, which com-prised scientic concepts, technical expertise,alternative technical options as well as culturalvalues and nancial restrictions (Melosi 2001:pp. 143157).

Let me illustrate this with an example. Whensewage systems were being planned in the Euro-pean capitals and major cities of the mid-nine-teenth century, public health thinking was domi-

nated by the miasma theory identifying dirt andthe lthy stench emanating from it as primecauses of diseases. Consequently the rst prior-ity was given to cleaning city streets and install-ing piped water and WCs in residences in orderto ush away all decaying organic matter fromthe urban environment (Hamlin 1998). The citywas conceived as a quasi organism; water pipesand sewage systems would act like the bodysblood circulation to keep the city functioningand prevent it from being poisoned throughits own waste products. Although the miasmatheory was disproved by bacteriology in the1880s, the general approach towards cleaning


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the urban environment continued to take mate-rial shape in the form of sewage systems andwater works all over Europe and North America(von Simson 1983, Melosi 2000). This was alsodue to the sheer scale of waste disposal prob-lems in rapidly growing cities, which led toa collapse of traditional systems of recyclingdomestic waste on gardens and farmland close tocities. This concept of water works and sewagesystems, eventually merging into an integratedsystem of water provision and waste-waterdisposal, proved rather successful in reducingwater-borne diseases and improving urban clean-liness; it was, however, blind to its effects onthe natural environment. At the input side of thesystem the effects of abstraction of water werehardly considered, and neither were at leastfor some time the effects at the output sidethrough the disposing of waste waters and liquidefuents (Kluge and Schramm 1986, Luckin1986, Bschenfeld 1997). With the combinedsewer as a universal carrier for liquid wastes, itbecame impossible to separate out more danger-ous contaminants before they entered the system(Tarr 1996: pp. 131158). As long as almost all

rubbish and waste on the streets were of organicnature and could be decomposed biologicallythis was not a major problem, but with motorcars replacing horses, toxic substances such asoil, lead, rubber wear-off and asbestos, producedby motorised trafc were all washed down thedrains.

Networking the city was not just a techni-cal task however. The implementation of thesenetworks also generated a social and culturalprocess of adaptation, leading to fundamentally

changed behavioural patterns of urban residentsin their use of resources and disposal of waste.Let us take the example of water. Before theintroduction of piped drinking water systems inEuropean cities the average water consumptionper head was 1020 l per day. All water had to becarried by hand from the well to wherever it wasto be consumed, little wonder that people usedit economically. The Finnish expert on waterengineering Tapio Katko cites a study from the1950s, that all Finnish women together dailywalked the distance from earth to moon and backcarrying water from the well to the cowshed andhouse (Katko 1997, 2000).

In the 20th century, with ush toilets, bath-rooms and electrical household appliances suchas washing machines and dishwashers, domes-tic water consumption rose roughly tenfold to150200 l per head per day, in US householdseven 300 l. (Weizscker 1995: p. 117, Ipsenetal. 1998, European Environment Agency 2001).The physical networking of the city by pipes andsewers was furthermore shadowed and dupli-cated by an evolving complex of institutionaland legal regulations, which came to governthe relations between suppliers and consum-ers of these services. Since these services had at least as compared with most industrialactivities rather high xed costs, invested inthe networks, in reservoirs, power stations andgasometers, and relatively low variable costs,their economic logic drove their managers tostimulate consumption by degressive tariffs; themore you consume, the less you pay per unit,thus favouring higher rates of consumption andconsequently growth of resource use (Hughes1983). With an agenda of sustainable develop-ment, this complex of material infrastructures,mental consumption patterns and economic and

legal regulations today proves a major impedi-ment to short-term changes.I have taken the water cycle here as an exam-

ple, because it makes up the bulk of materialow through cities for Greater ManchesterRavetz estimates it at 90% (Ravetz 2000: p. 133).Todays civil engineers and environmental plan-ners still have to cope with the basic structures ofthis legacy, set in place about 150 years ago.

How far is this now urban environmentalhistory and not simply history of technology?

Historians studying these networks, while origi-nating from history of technology, have in recentyears embraced a wider research agenda byconceptualising the city as an urban metabolism.This concept, derived from human ecology, hasbeen developed in many variations. For urbanenvironmental history I nd particularly produc-tive the concept of social metabolism linkedwith colonization of nature, as it has been sug-gested by a research project directed by MarinaFischer-Kowalski at the University of Vienna(Fischer-Kowalski 1997). This provides a usefulframework for a differentiated understanding ofall kinds of environmental interventions and


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appears particularly suited on the level of cities(Fig. 1).

Metabolism of a society is dened according to Verena Winiwarter as, the sumof all input and output between the biosphere/geosphere and society. Colonizing interventionsare dened as the sum of all purposive changesmade in natural systems that aim to render naturemore useful for society (Winiwarter 2001).

Such a concept redirects the focus away from

the technical networks per se and towards theenvironmental changes their implementation haseffected through colonization of nature on boththe input and output side. In historical long-termperspective we can identify a pattern of effects,which are common to all these systems:

incorporation of resources from an ever-wid-ening hinterland to supply the urban metabo-lism (e.g. water reservoirs, dams),

externalisation of critical substances away

from the human sphere, displacement of pollutants to media wherethey are considered less harmful,

dilution of pollutants to render them harm-less,

redenition of potential resources as waste.

In relation to air pollution, for instance frompower stations, these effects can be shown by theconstruction of higher and higher smoke stacks,a typical approach to air pollution (Clapp 1994,Brggemeier 1998, Mosley 2001). While theimmediate environment around a power stationor a major industrial polluter beneted from

these measures, this externalization affected amuch wider natural environment. The acidica-tion of Canadian and Scandinavian lakes andrivers, far removed from any industrial emis-sions, but polluted by long-distance air transportof SOx emissions from US and British industrialregions, is a classic case here.

Joel Tarr has called this universal tendencyof externalisation and displacement the searchfor the ultimate sink, the place where pollut-

ing materials could as it was assumed bestored safely without affecting human health(Tarr 1996). He has shown how, in dealing withsewage and solid wastes, a series of disposalmethods such as recycling for fertilizer, incinera-tion, and sanitary landll succeeded each other.Whenever regulation set in to prevent or restricta certain kind of pollution, because the negativeeffects had become too obvious and protest hadstirred, disposal strategies shifted to a differentmedium such as compacted landll. It certainly

is one of the major lessons of environmentalhistory in general, that there is no such thingas a safe ultimate sink. Approaches to solveproblems with noxious substances by disposingof them on the cheap have proven far too short-sighted, not sufciently taking into considerationthe natural cycles of material transport throughwater, wind, precipitation, erosion etc. Even thedumping of sludge from sewage treatment on thehigh sea, customary practice in many cities closeto the sea over substantial periods of time, mightcome back on us through decimated, deformedand degenerate sh resources. And although thesmoke emitted from stacks of power stations

Inputs: Food Energy Air Raw materials

City Colonizationof nature

Outputs: Faeces Industrial products

Water Industrialproducts

Sewage Smoke Waste

Fig. 1 . The urban metabolism. The diagram applies the concepts of social metabolism and colonization of natureas developed by Fischer-Kowalski (1997) and her group for the urban metabolism. The aspects listed under inputsand outputs are only meant as examples and do not include the totality of urban inputs and outputs.


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or the water discharged from sewage treatmentplants into rivers is now being ltered and dan-gerous and polluting substances have come tobe extracted by sophisticated modern technologyto an astonishing degree, the problems remainhow to dispose of those highly toxic substanceswhich have been ltered out.

For Pittsburgh, probably the most heavilypolluted U.S. city in the rst half of the 20th cen-tury, Joel Tarr has recently applied the conceptof urban metabolism to examine in a long-termstudy the above mentioned processes of incor-poration, externalization and displacement forwater, air and land (Tarr 2002).

Let me give you two examples of what urbanenvironmental history is about from a book which I am currently editing about the2002 Roundtable on urban environmental his-tory in Leicester: Sabine Barles, by training acivil engineer, is engaged in an ambitious andcomprehensive project on the urban metabolismof Paris. The group traces and quanties the owof water and basic minerals through Paris in the19th and 20th centuries. Barles could show, howhighly integrated these ows still were through-

out the 19th century. Most substances arising inthe course of urban metabolism through eatingand defecation were not in the modern sensewaste but were being recycled and reused ina wide range of production processes. Thesematerial cycles were not simply residuals froma pre-industrial economy of scarcity but devel-oped anew in response to new market require-ments and new technological options. Barleshighlights the keen awareness of natural scien-tists, and economists as to the material value

of waste products and their intensive commit-ment to reconstitute material cycles. Only in the20th century most of these material cycles seemto have broken up and waste ceased to be aresource (Barles 2002, 2005).

Simone Neri Serneri, professor of contem-porary history at the University of Siena andorganiser of the 2004 round-table on urbanenvironmental history, shows, for the case ofMilan, how a sophisticated system of canalsand natural watercourses permeated the city andfullled a range of functions from transport,energy through to waste disposal and the irriga-tion of surrounding agricultural land. When the

sanitary situation deteriorated massively due topopulation growth, this system was supersededin the late 19th century by a modern water provi-sion and sewage system. However, this super-imposition, not taking into account the capacityof the watercourses to absorb organic pollutantsubstances, eventually led to the near-collapseof the regional hydrological regimes and thewidespread pollution of agricultural land nearMilan. This example clearly illustrates that pre-industrial cities did have sometimes quiteelaborate systems in place to cater for theurban metabolism. The intervention of moderntechnical networks, while solving public healthproblems within cities, could easily create arange of collateral problems in their wider natu-ral environment (Neri Serneri 2002, 2005, Bern-hardt 2003).

What lessons are there now to belearnt from urban environmentalhistory?

These remarks do not embrace the full breadth of

urban environmental history; valuable researchis also progressing in other elds such as urbangreen spaces, the history of soil pollution, reg-ulation of industrial pollution or urban noise(http://www.helsinki.fi/ml/maant/UrbanGeo/openspaces/index.html, Bernhardt and Massard-Guilbaud 2002). However, urban networks andtheir effects on urban metabolism are clearlycentral to any discussion on the role of the city inenvironmental terms.

As a rst general point I would claim that

urban environmental history brings to currentenvironmental debates a long-term dimensionand a higher degree of reection. Studying thegenesis of modern water and sewage systems, ofenergy and transport systems will help to dem-onstrate their historical, i.e. to a certain extentcontingent, character. Not necessarily the bestor most advanced technology won the contestbut the technology which in view of the criteriaselected, the expectations of relevant actors, thetechnical expertise available and the nancialfunds at disposal promised to bring the largestbenet at least costs. Such planning discoursesusually were made without any consideration of


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environmental effects, either because they werenot anticipated at that time or because contempo-rary scientic paradigms such as the capacity ofrunning waters to purify themselves and absorblarge quantities of polluted water legitimised theimplementation of such technology (Bschen-feld 1997, Radkau 2000). With knowledge of theenvironmental effects, the criteria might havebeen different, but since the impact of thesesystems on the natural environment did not entersuch calculations as costs, as these costs wereexternalised, they could be disregarded oversubstantial periods of time.

Urban environmental history, my secondpoint, can also demonstrate that engineering set-ting up these networks was dominated by cen-tralizing paradigms. Trained by river improve-ment and railway construction to plan in largerregional dimensions, 19th century civil engi-neers conceived water works, sewage, powerand transport systems as networks, which weredesigned to concentrate the management anddistribution of resources in large controlling andcoordinating premises (Hughes 1983, Gilson1994, Kaijser and Hedin 1995, Cioc 2002). Their

structure and mode of operation was meant toexclude the ordinary citizen from the day-to-dayrunning of the networks. In pre-modern Germancities it had been customary for residents using acertain well to assume and exercise shared nan-cial and practical responsibility for the mainte-nance of this well (Kluge and Schramm 1986).Modern water and sewage networks should incontrast be self-acting systems where no activeintervention of a citizen beyond the normal useof his household appliances would be expected.

To be sure, this normal use only evolved aftera lengthy process of cultural adaptation, whichhas vanished from the collective consciousnessof modern contemporaries, leaving us with theillusion that our current patterns of use of theseappliances are somehow natural. This comfort-able exclusion of urban dwellers from the func-tioning of the networks favoured consumeristattitudes but also implied a practical disempow-erment. Its backside is a complete dematerializa-tion of resource use. Finnish farm women who asa national collective daily walked to the moonwhile carrying water, will have physically sensedthe quantity of water they had transported by

the end of the day. Heating with coal or woodinvolved physical labour, chopping wood or car-rying coal upstairs, and thus made the use ofenergy resources tangible and material. With oiland gas heating such a connection has vanished,the only sensitive issue remaining is the price.Experiences with environmental innovationsover the last years, such as the overwhelminglypositive response of the German population towaste recycling schemes involving extra activity,have motivated environmentalists to challengethis disempowerment of the common citizen, toencourage technological designs which involveand require a higher degree of active citizen par-ticipation (Weizsckeret al. 1995, Ravetz 2000).

As a third point I would like to emphasize thatthe spatial context of these networks has changedconsiderably: for the fairly compact and denselypopulated cities of Europe in the 19th and early20th centuries centralizing network technologiesdisplayed major economies of scale. In the muchmore dispersed and suburbanised urban agglom-eration of the 21st century costs for installationand maintenance of networks increase over-pro-portionally with decreasing population density

towards the periphery of urban areas. And inshrinking towns and cities, a not unlikely pros-pect for quite a few in the 21st century given cur-rent demographic trends in Europe, the existingwater and sewage networks may soon be grosslyoversized, posing operational and nancial prob-lems. On economic as well as environmentalgrounds it might therefore make sense to rethinkthe general approach, to install local, decentral-ised systems of sewage treatment, close to newestates, rather than linking them up to distant

centralised systems involving extensive networkconstruction as well as energy for the transporta-tion of the sewage. I have read that Finland withits many second homes in the remote countrysidehas a rich tradition of well-functioning technolo-gies to offer here. Thus the economies of scaleof centralised networks should no longer besimply taken for granted.

The same principle, a reconsideration ofbasic philosophies of system building in the lightof new environmental parameters can be appliedto the structure of the electric energy system. Inview of the relatively low energy efciency oflarge thermal powerstations, urban small and


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medium size co-generation power stations, sup-plying power and heat to their neighbourhoodhave recently been promoted as means of reduc-ing waste of fossil fuel (Hewett 2001). In his-torical terms this retraces an approach alreadysuggested by some electrical engineers and man-agers of municipal utilities in Germany in the1920s and 1930s. At that time this approach as ageneral principle to structure the energy systemwas defeated by the hegemony of centraliz-ing paradigms and state interests in rearmament(Hellige 1986, Gilson 1994). Only where citieshad control of the power generation and had pur-sued housing policies enabling the use of dis-tant heating systems could such approachescapture a niche market. This example shows howurban environmental history can uncover pointsof bifurcation in the development of systemswhere technological alternatives, which fromtodays perspective might have been more sen-sible, were excluded and no longer pursued(Schott 1997, Kaijser 2001).

One might argue, what is the use of urbanenvironmental history in the age of globaliza-tion? Despite the undeniably global scale of

major environmental problems, the slogan thinkglobal, act local does make sense. The city andthe city region have been rediscovered as func-tional and appropriate levels of environmentalaction, due to the fact, that the use of resourcesand the disposal of waste products arein nuce and fundamentally a phenomenon occurring at aspecic locality, although with potentially globalramications. The technologies which manageour resource use and waste disposal today, were,as I have demonstrated, developed in cities and

as answers to urban problems. And as the localAgenda 21 processes in many European citieshave shown, it is within an urban environmentthat discourses on how to progress towardssustainable development can be and are beingorganised, that practical steps can be outlined,that changes for the better or worse can be felt.Studies like that of Joe Ravetz City Region2020 on planning for a sustainable GreaterManchester underline the feasibility of such astrategy (Ravetz 2000).

To conclude, analysing the historical genesisof urban material ows and urban metabolismcan show how in the current systems which

manage urban metabolism there are structuresincorporated which are residuals from past prob-lem constructions no longer adequate for theproblems as we see them today, but neverthe-less real and having an impact as integral partsof functioning networks. Urban environmentalhistory thus can raise awareness for the fact thatthese systems in their historical genesis haveenvironmental, social and cultural effects farbeyond their period of primary implementation.This, in turn, should sensibilize for possiblerestrictions and path dependencies implied intodays choices on urban technologies. Suchawareness might inspire a range of questions toput to current decision makers such as:

What will the half-life of the structures cre-ated today be?

How difcult, how nancially demandingwill it be to revise todays decision, if thiswere to be deemed necessary, to nd new,different solutions?

What kind of materials and emissions will bereleased, how can they be recycled or neu-tralised?

Urban environmental history also drawsattention to the software dimensions of envi-ronmental problems, to the fact that certain pat-terns of wasteful and inefcient resource use andpollution have developed as the result of socialand cultural adaptations to historical new tech-nologies. Therefore they may only be altered bya combined approach, reviewing both the mate-rial infrastructure as well as their manifestationsin law, administration and urban culture.

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