[Editorial justification for the tour: If we want to improve slums, we have to see them as ecosystems – spontaneous self-generated communities, self-organized, economically rational, economically efficient, adaptive and robust.  We may not like the slums (like Dharavi in Mumbai, Kibera in Nairobi, or Sao Paulo's favelas) we may wish them away or wave our hands (or our bulldozers) to disappear them.  Yet they will return, resisting our efforts almost as if conscious, unless we see them as organic and dynamic, and come to understand how a slum dies. – Ed.]

I started this multi-part post, using as text Steven Johnson’s excellent book The Ghost Map that chronicled John Snow’s mapping of the 1854 London cholera epidemic.  Johnson, by background a scientist, makes a hero out of Snow, the scientist who discovered cholera’s truth despite establishment scorn.

Snow is a hero; so too is Joseph Bazalgette, who retrofitted a modern sewerage system under and through London – and by doing so, fatally wounded the Victorian slum.

Eventually, these slums disappeared … but not their buildings

Slums do not simply vanish; nor are they wiped out at a stroke as by an epidemic.  Slums evolve – into formality, into the formal city. 

Buildings endure; like brick hermit crabs, the buildings’ skeletons may survive multiple generations of use, scoured every score of years, periodically reborn as ‘historic renovations’ or ‘period treasures.’  All that can happen only if the buildings are embraced within the formal city.  This takes judicial recognition, which always follows after political recognition, which follows after economic recognition.

Civic acceptance comes in baby steps: painting a street number on a shack, delivering mail to a hovel, enumerating the residents, connecting the toilets to a sewerage system, putting in a legal electric meter.  Bit by it, these increments bring the informal into the formal.

Electric hookup box, Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation, Gujarat, India

Even as the world is urbanizing at a rate unprecedented in human history, so too are our global cities trying to come to grips with that urbanization.

Somewhere in the world, right about now [2006 – Ed.], a villager is moving her family to a city somewhere, or an urban dweller is giving birth, or a farmer is dying—and with that local isolated act, the global scales will tip decisively.  We will enter a new era: a planet whose human population is more than 50% urban.  [It's already happened – Ed.] 

When John Snow and Henry Whitehead roamed the urban corridors of London 1854, less than 10% of the planet’s population lived in cities, up from 3% at the start of the century.  Less than two centuries later, the urbanites have become an absolute majority.  No other development during that period—world wars, the spread of democracy, the use of electricity, the Internet—has had as transformative and widespread an impact on the lived experience of being human.  The history books tend to orient themselves around nationalistic lines: overthrowing the king, electing the presidents, fighting battles.  But the history book of recent Homo sapiens as a species should begin and end with one narrative line: We became city dwellers.  Pages 231-234

People come to cities because, for all their faults, they are richer, livelier, safer, and healthier than rural poverty.

To date, those fears [of cities overrun by population] have proved unfounded.  Modern urbanization has thus far offered up more solutions than problems.  Cities continue to be tremendous engines of wealth, innovation, and creativity, but in the 150 years that have passed since Snow and Whitehead watched the death carts make their rounds through Soho, they have become something else as well: engines of health. 

We forget that in addition to employment, cities also offer access – access to politics (nearly all revolutions and democracies were born in cities), access to education (the world’s universities were all founded in cities), access to services.

Two-thirds of women living in rural areas receive some kind of prenatal care, but in cities, the number is more than ninety percent.  Nearly 80% of births in cities take place in hospitals or other medical institutions, as opposed to 35 % in the countryside. 

Cities are places of enterprise.

Delivering fresh eggs back to the neighborhood: Mumbai

You’re much likelier to become rich if you grew up in a city than in the country.

Future millionaires?

We think of cities as making us dumber; actually, cities are hives of innovation.

Because the table condenses down its data into a power-law variable beta, a bit of explanation may help.  When the authors speak of an increasing beta, they’re measuring the rate of growth in the quantity as a city gets larger (measured in number of people). 

Thus, if a Small city has a patent rate of 1x, when the city becomes Medium sized (growing to 3x its original), it will be producing 35% more patents per capita.  It’ll be 35% more competitive.  If it makes the leap to a Large city (10x the Small size), its patent rate will be 86% higher.  Bigger cities are smarter.

Wages too rise faster than the rate of population.  Bigger cities are richer.  Move to a city 10x your current one and your earnings will probably rise 32%.  (So too will your housing prices!)

We speak of going to the country for our health.  Yet on balance we live longer, happier lives in cities:

For those reasons, as you move from rural areas to urban ones, infant mortality rates tend to drop.  The vast majority of the world’s most advanced hospitals reside in metropolitan centers. 

I know a half-dozen people who would not be alive or healthy today had they not lived in or near Boston.

According to the coordinator of the United Nations Global Report on Human Settlements, “Urban areas offer a higher life expectancy and lower absolute poverty and can provide essential serviced more cheaply and on a larger scale than rural areas.”  For most of the world’s nations, living in a city now extends your life expectancy instead of shortening it.  Thanks to the government interventions of the seventies and eighties, air quality in many cities is as good as it has been since the dawn of industrialization.  Pages 231-234

Cities also are, counterintuitively, greener:

Cities are a force for environmental health as well.  This may be the most surprising new credo of green politics, which has in the past largely associated itself with a back-to-nature ethos that was explicitly anti-urban in its values. Dense urban environments may do away with nature altogether—there are many vibrantly healthy neighborhoods in Paris or Manhattan that lack even a single tree—but they also perform the crucial service of reducing mankind’s environmental footprint. 

Cities sustain greater density for two reasons: they are richer, and being geographically compact, they benefit from square-cube and network effects. 

Maybe not welcoming but efficient: Habitat 1967

As we saw in Cities and Scale:

Many diverse properties of cities from patent production and personal income to electrical cable length are shown to be power law functions of population size with scaling exponents,   , that fall into distinct universality classes. 

Quantities reflecting wealth creation and innovation have    1.2  > 1 (increasing returns),

As cities get bigger, people in them get richer, cleverer, and more creative.

whereas those accounting for infrastructure display    0.8 < 1 (economies of scale). 

As cities get bigger, they need less infrastructure per person.

It’s much easier to hook a peri-urban neighborhood up to a city’s systems than it is to run pipes and wires into the wilderness.

Compare the sewage system of a midsized city like Portland, Oregon, with the kind of waste management resources that would be required to support the same population dispersed across the countryside.  Portland’s 500,000 inhabitants require two sewage treatment plants, connected by 2,000 miles of pipes. A rural population would require more than 100,000 septic tanks, and 7,000 miles of pipe.  The rural waste system would be several times more expensive than the urban version. 

As the environmental scholar Toby Hemenway argues: “Virtually any service system—electricity, fuel, food—follows the same brutal mathematics of scale.  A dispersed population requires more resources to serve it—and to connect it together—than a concentrated one.” 

Hemenway likes living close together

From an overall ecosystems perspective, if you’re going to have 10 million human beings trying to share an environment with other life-forms, it’s much better to crowd all 10 million of them into a hundred square miles than it is to spread them out, edge-city style, over a space ten or a hundred times that size.  If we’re going to survive as a planet with more than 6 billion people without destroying the complex balance of our natural ecosystems, the best way to do it is to crowd as many of those humans into metropolitan spaces and return the rest of the planet to Mother Nature.  Pages 231-234

The ecology of slums and the ecology of cities are linked.  Slums are an ecology of concentrated poverty; cities are an ecology of distributed wealth.  So in cracking the problem of slums, we are cracking the problem of healthy cities, and hence wealthy city-dwellers.

Buildings survive.  Many of those called slums by Snow, Chadwick, and Whitehead still stand in London.  They’ve been scoured of filth, rewired for broadband, re-insulated, resold, rehabbed, resold again, divided and subdivided and combined and recombined.

Where did the slums go?  As their economic ecology changed, they melded invisibly into the rest of the city.

This is the world that Snow and Whitehead helped make possible: a planet of cities.  Page 234.

If we want a planet of cities, we have to cure a planet of slums.  We kill a slum not with demolition but with dollars:

To improve a neighborhood, raise the shelter-cost-paying power of its inhabitants.  To do that, raise their ability to earn money, and with it their choices about where to live and what to invest.

How do you eradicate slums?  You drive them bankrupt.

The way to win

That’s what Snow and Whitehead sought.

A man who saw the future? Henry Whitehead, 1884

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[Editorial justification for the tour: If we want to improve slums, we have to see them as ecosystems – spontaneous self-generated communities, self-organized, economically rational, economically efficient, adaptive and robust.  We may not like the slums (like Dharavi in Mumbai, Kibera in Nairobi, or Sao Paulo's favelas) we may wish them away or wave our hands (or our bulldozers) to disappear them.  Yet they will return, resisting our efforts almost as if conscious, unless we see them as organic and dynamic, and come to understand how a slum dies. – Ed.]

As previously posted, Steven Johnson’s excellent book The Ghost Map, which tells the story of John Snow’s proof of cholera’s transmission, also provides us with a fringe benefit comprehensive tour of the ecology of a Victorian slum.  Now we can tell the dramatic story of the 1854 cholera epidemic, and Snow’s brilliant solution. 

John Snow: a man who enumerated and mapped

When the outbreak hit, Snow, a biologist and amateur sociologist as well as a courageous man, elected to go into the heart of the outbreak area, from house to house, interviewing the residents. 

SDI’s enumeration of Santa Cruz: every household, every family

This is exactly the same critical work done by Mumbai and around the world by savings co-operatives that belong to Slum Dwellers International – and one of the many reasons I find SDI’s work so important.

Jockin pointing to SDI’s map of the Santa Cruz neighborhood near Mumbai Airport

As he did, he produced a map (later praised in Edward Tufte’s Visual Display of Quantitative Information) showing the streets, houses, pumps, and deaths:

Snow’s first cholera map

Snow was convinced that cholera was a waterborne disease that humans could not catch through breathing contaminated air, but did catch through drinking. 

A graphically better map showing deaths and pumps

Yet Snow was an outsider, neither a celebrated academic nor an aristocrat, and the likes of Edwin Chadwick utterly dismissed his findings, fixated as they were on the malodorous theory that ‘all smell is disease.’  Eventually Snow added a feature to his map: a Voronoi diagram that divided London into districts based on which public well was closest.  Overlaying the Vorondoi boundaries onto his well map produced this decisive graphic:

The decisive Voronoi map – irregular line denotes the Broad Street Well’s service area

Bingo. 

Nearly all the cholera deaths were inside Broad Street’s Voronoi reach; only a tiny handful were outside (and those virtually on the boundary line).  In a visually incontrovertible way, the Voronoi map demonstrated the correlative link, and led to Snow’s dramatic action:

He removed the handle from the Broad Street Pump.

Remove a two-foot length of iron; save hundreds of lives

The epidemic stopped within days.

Though Snow’s action directly saved lives, its great impact was on the city of London, which now realized it had no choice whatsoever but to add costly municipal infrastructure.

9. Infrastructure and municipal government

Unfortunately for storytelling, Snow’s findings did not immediately lift the scales from Edwin Chadwick’s eyes, but gradually, over the ensuing years, his science took hold.

After years of bureaucratic waffling, the [1858] Great Stink finally motivated the authorities to deal with the crucial issue that John Snow had identified a decade before: the contamination of the Thames water from sewer lines emptying directly into the river.  The plans had been in the works for years, but the public outcry over the Great Stink had tipped the balance. 

Money is found for slum clearance when the slums’ existence imperils or discomfits our own bourgeois lives.  It is so in today’s Sao Paulo, and it was so in Victorian London:

Slum upgrading in middle-class self-defense: the Guarapiranga project in Sao Paulo

With the help of the visionary engineer Joseph Bazalgette, the city embarked on one of the most ambitious engineering projects of the nineteenth century: a system of sewer lines that would carry both waste and surface water to the east, away from Central London.  The construction of the new sewers was every bit as epic and enduring as the building of the Brooklyn Bridge or the Eiffel Tower. 

Bazalgette standing atop his soon-to-be-buried monument

Its grandeur lies belowground, out of sight, and so it is not invoked as regularly as other, more iconic, achievements of the age.  But Bazalgette’s sewers were a turning point nonetheless: they demonstrated that a city could respond to a profound citywide environmental and health crisis with a massive public-works project that genuinely solved the problem it set out to address.  If Snow and Whitehead’s Broad Street investigation showed that urban intelligence could come to understand a massive health crisis, Bazalgette’s sewers proved that you could actually do something about it.  Pages 207-208

Political action comes when there is political capital, which arises from a combination of technical feasibility and voter imperative.

North of the Thames, the plan for the new sewers involved three main lines, each at different levels of elevation, running eastward parallel to the river.  On the south side, there were to be two main lines.  All the city’s existing surface water and waste lines would empty into one of these “intercepting” sewers, and the contents would then flow—and in some cases be pumped—several miles east of the city.  On the north side, they drained into the Thames at Barking; on the south, the outfalls were located as Crossness.  The sewers only discharged into the Thames during high tide, after which the seaward pull of low tide would wash the city’s waste into the ocean.  Pages 207-208

Creating a subterranean network one massive excavation at a time

It was a demonically complicated undertaking, given that the city already had complicated infrastructure of pipes and rail stations and buildings—not to mention a population of nearly three million people—that Bazalgette somehow had to work around.  “It was certainly a very troublesome job,” he would later write, with typical English understatement.  “We would something spend weeks in drawing out plans and then suddenly come across some railway or canal that upset everything, and we had to begin all over again.”  Pages 207-208

Bazalgette’s (above-ground) memorial

Yet somehow, the most advanced and elaborate sewage system in the entire world was operational by 1865.  The numbers behind the project were staggering.  In those six years, Bazalgette and his team had constructed eighty-two miles of sewers, using over 300 million bricks and nearly a million cubic yards of concrete.  The main intercepting sewers had cost only £4 million to construct, which would be roughly $250 million today.  (Of course, Bazalgette’s labor costs were much cheaper than today’s.)  It remains the backbone of London’s waste-management system to this day.  Tourists may marvel at Big Ben or the London Tower, but beneath their feet lies the most impressive engineering wonder of all.  Pages 207-208

Wonder of the world, this is

10. The planet of cities

Out of slums come cities. 

I’ve spent this whole multi-part post, all 10,000+ words of it, focusing on the Victorian slum, as if today’s London has no slums.  Of course it does, but to those from 1854, what today we call slums they would see as marvels of space, light, environment, and technology. 

Council housing, Hackney Wick

Those Victorians were urban pessimists:

If you time-traveled back to London of September 1854 and described to some typical Londoners the demographic future that awaited their descendents, no doubt many would react with horror at the prospect of  a “city planet,” as Stewart Brand like to cal it.  Nineteenth-century London was overgrown, cancerous monster doomed to implode sooner or later. 

That pessimism is exemplified in The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells (a modernist in his science, a Victorian in his morals if not his personal morality), where the future is ethereal vapid Eloi and Calibanian Morlocks

Young raffish Mr. Wells

Two million people crowded into a dense urban core was a kind of collective madness.  Why would anyone want to do the same with twenty million?  Pages 231-234

Off to a future of Morlocks and Eloi and devastation

Snow is the hero of Johnson’s story; Bazalgette the hero of mine.

[Concluded tomorrow in Part 6.]

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State of the art, thirteenth century

1. Central heating rather than fireplaces

2. Running water instead of basins and pitchers

3. Flush toilet and sewer instead of chamber pots and outhouses

4. Bright lighting instead of candles

5. Electricity for appliances

One of the five great technological advances

So ingrained are these things in our consciousness that by now they’re mandated by every formal building code – and they constitute a sufficiency for the embryo house.

[Editorial note: I toyed with adding sealable clear windows to this list, but decided against it, since we find such windows dating back eight hundred years (Saint Chapelle in Paris).]

Beautiful and delicate, but unlivable: the Sainte Chapelle

Vermeer, Girl Reading A Letter, circa 1658

When did such homes become commonplace?  Over what period of time?

Where else but the world’s fastest growing Industrial Revolution city?

To my surprise, there’s an answer, and it’s unexpected:

By the end of the Civil War, the newest dwellings more closely resembled those built a hundred years later than those erected only twenty years earlier, for technologically housing had advanced half a millennium in a single generation.  To the middle and upper classes of that generation, it was nothing short of a miracle.  Page 45.

The place for this miracle?  The cradle of American apartment living, the birthplace of municipal finance for infrastructure: New York City.

Immigrants landing in New York, 1858

The time?  You’d think it would have been a slow process, but in fact all five innovations came in a headlong rush, a mere quarter-century leading up to the Civil War — and, in the manner of such technological revolutions, they all reinforced each other.

You’d think it would have been a slow process.  For something essential, the technology of housing has advanced throughout human history with extraordinary slowness.  Fireplaces and chimneys, which brought heat to every room in the house and completely changed castle and palace design, were invented around the thirteenth century.  For the next six hundred years, little happened to improve houses beyond the addition of gradually larger windows as glassmaking advanced. 

As readers will recall, I’ve become intrigued by the history of affordable housing globally and of financial institutions and how the US housing finance ecosystem came to be, and it was in that vein that I read

John Steele Gordon’s history of the US banking system, about which I posted in Jefferson’s Curse.  That in turn led me to his history, The Scarlet Woman of Wall Street:

Don’t you want to know my story?

The subtitle is much less racy: Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the Erie Railway Wars.

Vanderbilt bestrides the railroads.  The sign reads,

All freight must pass here and pay any tolls we demand.

In this lively book, Gordon covers executive-suite shenanigans, complete with barricaded corporate headquarters protected by cannon, a zaftig mistress and her handlebar-mustache impresario lover, financial hijinks such as trying to corner the supply of money, and stock-price manipulation of a kind to make Frank Raines green with envy. 

Jubilee Jim Fisk of the Erie Railway

His point is the emergence of Wall Street securities regulation – it was first professionalized through self-governance after the financial catastrophe known as the Erie Railway; government regulation came only later.  [More on this in a future post. – Ed.]  Along the way, however, he includes a chapter, the Great Boom Town, that has little or nothing to do with his eventual story, but is chock-full of terrific details about the transformation of antebellum Manhattan.

Development, speculation, technological improvement, and urbanization all went hand in hand, all driving from the booming economy led by transportation, first the Erie Canal (1817 to 1823):

From Albany to Buffalo

and then the railroads, beginning in 1843 with the celebrated New York and Erie Railroad:

Connecting the Great Lakes to the Atlantic, via New York City

Let’s start with Manhattan’s most recognizable topographic feature, its great grid of streets.  Were they created for urban-planning?  No:

In order to regulate the city’s growth in some coherent way, the government in 1811 produced the grid plan for the areas of the city not yet developed.  This plan ignored both the better aspects of city planning as it was understood at the time and the nature of Manhattan’s hilly, granite geography. 

Unoccupied but fully gridded

The agent of change?  Those profit-oriented entrepreneurial entities, the dreaded real estate developers.

Rather, as the plan forthrightly stated, it was adopted because “straight-sided and right-angled houses are the most cheap to build and the most convenient to live in.”  It was a plan, in other words, that only real-estate speculators could love, and they took it to their collective bosom with a passion.  Page 32.

[At roughly the same time, Boston's Back Bay was being gridded and filled in, and for roughly the same reason: to create easy-to-sell development plots. – Ed.]

Fifth Avenue, looking south from 38th Street

What drove the speculators?  Profits in standardization:

Except for the greatest palaces on Fifth Avenue and its immediate environs, New York’s houses were erected almost entirely by real-estate speculators, who built them in blocks of six, eight, or more identical units and sold them off to individual families.  This produced a formidable uniformity in the appearance of New York’s streetscapes.

Today we find them charming

The speculators were very conservative in taste, each unwilling to be even a little out in front of the pack in style for fear that their equally conservative and socially insecure nouveau riche customers would be scared away.  By the 1850’s the Italianate style, with its brownstone front, elaborate bracketed cornice, carved lintels, high stoop, and double front door beneath a small but ornate portico was virtually the only style of row house being built.  Page 42.

The new houses were marvels of technology:

Primitive forced-air furnaces were first installed in the 1840s, but those worked fitfully and as often as not provided more soot and fumes than heat.  By the 1860’s steam heat, with all its efficiency and technological, if not esthetic, advantages, was being installed in the latest row houses.

Technology reached the kitchen as well:

Two inventions transformed the kitchen at this time as well.  The cast-iron cook stove replaced the open hearth and the icebox came into use.  Soon the stoves were fitted with water tanks, and hot running water –- undreamed-of a generation earlier – became a commonplace, while the icebox made a cold glass of milk in July a marvelous reality.  Page 43.

Better cooking, easier cleaning, greater efficiency: what’s not to like?

If the kitchen was better, so too was the plumbing, giving rise to a new room in the house:

Soon new houses could not be sold unless they had water closets and bathrooms, and the city was forced into a crash program of sewer and water-main construction. 

Mark II: the second generation of toilet, from 1878

Changing household consumption had dramatic unintended consequences:

The drop in demand for well water caused the water table to rise alarmingly and forced the city to construct storm and drainage sewers to overcome an epidemic of flooded basements. 

As always happens, urbanization outstripped municipal infrastructure.  Markets were moving faster than government, which raced to catch up, with an explosion of building:

All this sewer construction – as much as fifty miles a year – added greatly to the city’s appearance of being one huge, never-completed construction site.

That huge demand for capital led New York City, as I’ve posted extensively before, to invent municipal infrastructure finance:

But when water from Westchester’s Croton River first came into the city via aqueduct in 1842 the situation began to change very rapidly.  Croton water gave New York City its undying and richly deserved reputation for having the finest municipal water in the world. 

Like many a global-south city today, New York seemed nothing more than one large construction site:

This incessant change, this constant building up and tearing down, had its consequences.  While New Yorkers were proud of their city, extolled its grandeur, and heralded its future, few of them loved it.  “Why should it be loved as a city?” Harpers Monthly asked in 1856.  “It is never the same city for a dozen years though.  A man born in New York fifty years ago finds nothing, absolutely nothing, of the New York he knew.  If he chances to stumble upon a few old houses not yet leveled, he is fortunate.  But the landmarks, the objects which marked the city to him, as a city, are gone.”  Page 33.

The shock of the new: Five Points, 1859

Note the presence of both old (clapboard) and new (rowhouse) construction

Twenty years later, 1879, the mid-rises are dominant

It also led to traffic jams:

As early as the 1840’s, newspapers were bemoaning how crowded and noisy the streets were and how slow and tangled the traffic.

“Noisy, roaring, tumbling, bustling, stormy, and turbulent – and I don’t mean myself!”

Walt Whitman

In 1842 Walt Whitman wrote in an editorial, “What can New York – noisy, roaring, rumbling, tumbling, bustling, stormy, turbulent New York – have to do with silence?”  By the 1850’s fifteen thousand vehicles a day were counted passing St. Paul’s Chapel on Broadway at the foot of City Hall Park.  Page 35.

Congestion relieving invention: a Broadway walkover bridge, 1860s

It is ever thus.

An intrinsic condition of cities?

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[Editorial justification for the tour: If we want to improve slums, we have to see them as ecosystems – spontaneous self-generated communities, self-organized, economically rational, economically efficient, adaptive and robust.  We may not like the slums (like Dharavi in Mumbai, Kibera in Nairobi, or Sao Paulo's favelas) we may wish them away or wave our hands (or our bulldozers) to disappear them.  Yet they will return, resisting our efforts almost as if conscious, unless we see them as organic and dynamic, and come to understand how a slum dies. – Ed.]

So far in our tour of the ecology of a Victorian slum, using as our text Steven Johnson’s excellent story of defeating cholera, The Ghost Map, we’ve addressed the inflow of clean water and the outflow of dirty euphemisms, all centered around the focus of Johnson’s story: the slums themselves.

6. Housing and density

The mix of artistic vision and entrepreneurial spirit would define the area for several generations.  As the city grew increasingly industrial, and as the old money emptied out, the neighborhood became grittier; landlords invariably broke up the old townhouses into separate flats; courtyards between buildings filled with impromptu junkyards, stables, jury-rigged extensions.

Buildings are exoskeletal, but inside those walls, they are mutable.  Change the economics and you create the slums inside. 

Sao Paulo: how many families live inside?

Dickens described it best in Nicholas Nickleby:

In that quarter of London in which Golden Square is situated, there is a bygone, faded, tumble-down street, with two irregular rows of tall meagre houses, which seem to have stared each other out of countenance years ago.  The very chimneys appear to have grown dismal and melancholy from having had nothing better to look at than the chimneys over the way….

London slum, Victorian era

To judge from the size of the houses, they have been, at one time, tenanted by persons of better conditions than their present occupants; but they are now let off, by the week, in floors or rooms, and every door has almost as many plates or bell-handles as there are apartments within. 

London slum, 1856

The windows are, for the same reason, sufficiently diversified in appearance, being ornamented with every variety of common blind and curtain can easily be imagined; which every doorway is blocked up, and rendered nearly impassable, by a motley collection of children and porter pots of all sizes, from the baby in arms and the half-pint pot, to the full-grown girl and half-gallon can.

By 1851, the subdistrict of Berwick Street on the west side of Soho was the most densely populated of all 135 subdistricts that made up Greater London, with 432 people to the acre.  (Even with its skyscrapers, Manhattan today only houses around 1,000 per acre.) 

I’ve speculated that the two most dense human settlement ever are today’s Kibera and Jacob Riis’ Lower East Side.  Victorian London would not have been far behind.

The parish of St. Luke’s in Soho had thirty houses per acre.  In Kensington, by contrast, the number per acre was two.  Page 17

When you’re measuring density, some context will help.  Our house in Cambridge sites on a quarter-acre lot – four homes to the acre, and one family per home.  Modern garden apartments – two or three-story walkups – typically run 12-15 to the acre, again one family per home, or roughly four families per level per acre.  The Victorian houses were generally single-story – informal construction won’t support much – and probably accommodated five families per house.  Thus 150 families were living in one acre, versus 15 in modern apartments and maybe 4 per level acre.

Ragpicker family and house, Paris, 1913

7. Society, culture, and the world of ideas

Amid all this squalor, despite the unhygienic environment, people thrive:

But despite—or perhaps because of the increasingly crowded and unsanitary conditions, the neighborhood was a hotbed of creativity.  The list of poets and musicians and sculptors and philosophers who lived in Soho during this period reads like an index to a textbook on Enlightenment era British culture.  Edmund Burke, Fanny Burney, Percy Shelley, William Hogarth—all were Soho residents at various points in their lives. 

Fanny Burney, later lady d’Arblay

That’s unsurprising; the neighborhoods were slums because they had great locations.  Some locations with great neighborhoods become the city’s most posh addresses; others nearby become its densest slums.

Leopold Mozart leased a flat on Frith Street while visiting with his son, the eight-year-old prodigy Wolfgang, in 1764.  Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner also stayed in the neighborhood when visiting London in 1839-1840.

Street scene, evening, Mumbai, Santa Cruz neighborhood

“New ideas need old buildings,” Jane Jacobs once wrote, and the maxim applies perfectly to Soho around the dawn of the Industrial Age: a class of visionaries and eccentrics and radicals living in the disintegrating shells that had to be abandoned a century ago by the well-to-do.  

Neighborhoods are always going up and down.  So are the buildings within them.

DVD repair shop, Mumbai

The trope is familiar to us by now—artists and renegades appropriate a decaying neighborhood, even relish the decay—but it was a new pattern of urban settlement when Blake and Hogarth and Shelley first made their homes along the crowded streets of Soho.  They seem to have been energized by the squalor, not appalled by it.  Here is a description of one typical residence on Dean Street, penned in the early 1850s:

[The flat] has two rooms, the one with the view of the street being drawing-room, behind it the bedroom.  There is not one piece of good, solid furniture in the entire flat.  Everything is broken, tattered and torn, finger-thick dust everywhere, and everything in the greatest disorder…. When you enter the … flat, your sight is dimmed by tobacco and coal smoke so that you grope around at first as if you were in a cave, until your eyes get used to the fumes and, as in a fog, you gradually notice a few objects. Everything is dirty, everything covered with dust; it is dangerous to sit down.

Living in this two-room attic were seven individuals: a Prussian immigrant couple, their four children, and a maid. 

As I’ve previously posted, what constitutes ‘market quality’ housing changes with the decades and centuries, and the trend is ever upward.  While the quarters might have been cramped, they were warm enough, and safe enough.

Yet somehow these cramped, tattered quarters did not noticeably hinder the husband’s productivity, though one can easily see why he developed such a fondness for the Reading Room at the British Museum. The husband, you see, was a thirty-something radical by the name of Karl Marx.

Dictatorship of the proletariat, my foot!

Would it kill you to dust once in a while, Karl?

That much proximity of humanity in such tiny and unventilated, uncleaned spaces posed, to the citizens and to the city, a significant risk – a health crisis.

8. Health

“All smell is disease.”  So asserted Edwin Chadwick, the villain of Johnson’s story, who believed that cleanliness was the key to health, and fresh air the key to cleanliness.

He knew he was right: Chadwick

But for [Edwin] Chadwick and other social reformers of the period, the primary reason to deal with London’s rising tide of excrement had to do with health, not economics.

A rising tide lifts all privies?

Washing one’s clothes in the filthy river, Jakarta, 2007

Regardless of his flawed epidemiology, Chadwick had a grand and noble idea:

The solution was straightforward enough, at least in theory.  London needed citywide sewage system that could remove waste products from houses in a reliable and sanitary fashion.  It would require a massive engineering effort, but a country that had built a national rail network in a matter of decades and spearheaded the Industrial Revolution could handle a project on that scale. 

The problem, however, was more than merely technological or financial:

The problem was one of jurisdiction, not execution.  The urban infrastructure of early Victorian London was a governed by a byzantine assortment of local boards that had been assembled over the centuries by more than two hundred separate acts of Parliament. 

As we’ve seen in my posts on the economics of water, municipal infrastructure investment seldom if ever pays for itself.

Thus cities that conclude they need infrastructure try to give the job to private companies, hoping they’ll pay for it, but whether with broadband or sewer pipe, the Law of Economic Gravity invariably wins, and there ain’t no such thing as free infrastructure.  Municipal infrastructure has to be funded out of the general revenue:

Paving or lighting the streets, building drains and sewers—these were all acts overseen by local commissioners with almost no citywide coordination. One three-quarter-mile stretch of the Strand was overseen by nine separate paving boards.  To take on a project as epic as building an integrated metropolitan sewer system would require more than engineering genius and backbreaking labor.  It would need a revolution in the power dynamics of city life. 

So far Chadwick’s fiscal and municipal logic is impeccable, but here he makes the classic slum-clearance mistake.

The bottom-up, improvised recycling of the scavengers would have to give way to the master planner.

I try not to rail against planners, who are well-intentioned, hardworking, and very smart, but the chaotic markets are faster and smarter.  Reality will not hold still while we prescribe its improvement:

In this, Edwin Chadwick was perfectly cast for the role.  Brusque and strong-willed to the point of rudeness, Chadwick was in many ways a Victorian rendition of Robert Moses (that is, if Moses had lost grip on New York City’s power structure halfway through his career and spent the last thirty years of his life editorializing from the sidelines).  Pages 117-118

A man who stuck to his ideas and his hair style: Chadwick late in life

Chadwick believed cholera and other diseases were airborne.  This isn’t nuts, it’s just wrong, and Johnson does a surgical job of humiliating Chadwick in absentia for his refusal to see science when the experiments contradicted his preconceptions.  Since disease was airborne, eliminate smells and you would eliminate disease.

In the meantime, the primary focus was on eliminating cesspools.  As Bazalgette would later report: “Within a period of about six years, thirty thousand cesspools were abolished, and all house and street refuse was turned into the river.” 

Chief engineer of London’s sewer system: Joseph Bazalgette

Several times a year, the Commission’s engineers would offer enthusiastic reports documenting just how much waste had been extracted from the city’s houses and deposited in the river: 29,000 cubic yards in the spring of 1848, growing quickly to 80,000 cubic yards in the following winter. 

To us this is horrifying – take sewage out of people’s back yards and pour it into the world’s most heavily trafficked river, in the heart of the world’s most densely populated city?  Yet Chadwick knew, positively knew, that he was saving humanity by removing the noxious vapors.

In the space of about thirty-five years, the Thames had been transformed from a fishing ground teeming with salmon to one of the most polluted waterways in the world—all in the name of public health.  As the builder Thomas Cubbitt observed wryly: the Thames is now made a great cesspool instead of each person having one of his own.”  Page 120

Cubitt’s Belgravia statue

So successful was Chadwick that in 1858 London suffered what was known, then and ever after, as the Great Stink:

In 1858, the summer was unusually hot. The Thames and many of its urban tributaries were overflowing with sewage; the warm weather encouraged bacteria to thrive and the resulting smell was so overwhelming that it affected the work of the House of Commons (countermeasures included draping curtains soaked in chloride of lime, while members considered relocating upstream to Hampton Court) and the law courts (plans were made to evacuate to Oxford and St Albans). Heavy rain finally broke the hot and humid summer and the immediate crisis ended. However, a House of Commons select committee was appointed to report on the Stink and recommend how to put an end to the problem.

Yet Chadwick, for all his misguided science and righteous intolerance, in fact did a crucial service – by removing the cesspools, he made what had been an out-of-sight, out-of-mind problem a municipal crisis.  In effect, he created the conditions that created his own repudiation.

 [Continued on April 15 in Part 5.]

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[Editorial justification for the tour: If we want to improve slums, we have to see them as ecosystems – spontaneous self-generated communities, self-organized, economically rational, economically efficient, adaptive and robust.  We may not like the slums (like Dharavi in Mumbai, Kibera in Nairobi, or Sao Paulo's favelas) we may wish them away or wave our hands (or our bulldozers) to disappear them.  Yet they will return, resisting our efforts almost as if conscious, unless we see them as organic and dynamic, and come to understand how a slum dies. – Ed.]

As we continue our tour of the ecology of a Victorian slum, using as our text Steven Johnson’s excellent story of defeating cholera, The Ghost Map, we’ve hit the problem of recycling, and professions that seem universal in cities: ragpickers and night-soil men.

4. Work and low-skilled labor: ragpickers

Ragpicking is a profession both modern and ancient.

Manet, The Ragpicker, circa 1869

It requires meticulous and patient labor:

[From an 1854 article]  “It usually takes the bone-picker from seven to nine hours to go over his rounds, during which time he travels from 20 to 30 miles with a quarter to a half hundredweight on his back.  In the summer he usually reaches home about eleven of the day, and in the winter about one or two.  On his return home he proceeds to sort the contents of his bag.  He separates the rags from the bones, and these again from the old metal (if he be lucky enough to have found any).”

As I write this, a lyric has popped into my child from my childhood almost half a century ago: “Any rags, any bottles, any bones?”  I never knew what it meant until just now, when I Googled and found a 1931 Irving Berlin song:

“You know the man who once used to say

Any rags, any bones, any bottles today?”

Ragpickers’ Row, New York City, 1890

[Same 1854 article] “He divides the rags into various lots, according as they are white or coloured; and if he has picked up any pieces of canvas or sacking, he makes these also into a separate parcel.  When he has finished the sorting he takes his several lots to the rag shop or the marine-store dealer and realizes upon them whatever they may be worth.  For the white rags he gets from 2d. to 3d. per pound, according as they are clean or soiled.  The white rags are very difficult to be found; they mostly very dirty, and are therefore sold with the coloured ones at the rate of about 5 lbs. for 2d.”  Page 3

Ragpickers carts, Porte d’Ivry, Paris, 1913

Informal professions have a few advantages:

They require little formal education.

They need no permits.

They reward initiative, enterprise, and a strong work ethic.

The law tends not to enforce against them, since they are peaceable and provide a useful service no one else wants to do.

One of 15 members of a ragpickers’ co-op, Sao Paulo

“Doing the jobs Americans won’t” has become a rallying cry for the immigration debate, and whatever one thinks about immigration, it’s certainly true that throughout history, some professions have been done only by those who could find no other:

Waste recycling is a crucial attribute of the earth’s most diverse ecosystems.  We value tropical rain forests because they squander so little of the energy supplied by the sun, thanks to their vast, interlocked system of organisms exploiting every tiny niche of the nutrient cycle.  The cherished diversity of the rain forest ecosystem is not just a quaint case of biological multiculturalism.  The diversity of the system is precisely why rain forests do such a brilliant job of capturing the energy that flows through them: one organism captures a certain amount of energy, but in processing that energy, it generates waste.  

In economic terms, everybody’s trash becomes somebody else’s job:

In an efficient system, that waste becomes a new resource of energy for another creature in the chain.  Pages 5-6

We all hand off to somebody else

Although in urban America this profession has died out, it has an honorable lineage and is global today:

Night-soil man in India

Waste recycling is usually assumed to be an invention of the environmental movement, as modern as the blue plastic bags we now fill with detergent bottles and soda cans.  But it is an ancient art. Composting pits were used by the citizens of Knossos in Crete four thousand years ago.  Much of medieval Rome was built out of materials pilfered from the crumbling ruins of the imperial city.  (Before it was a tourist landmark, the Coliseum served as a de facto quarry.)

The seats of ease: Roman toilets, Ostia

Waste recycling—in the form of composting and manure spreading—played a crucial role in the explosive growth of medieval European towns. 

Waste recycling turns out to be a hallmark of almost all complex systems, whether the man-made ecosystems of urban life, or the microscopic economies of the cell.  Our bones are themselves the result of a recycling scheme pioneered by natural selection of billions of years ago.  All nucleated organisms generate excess calcium as a waste product.  Since at least the Cambrian times, organisms have accumulated those calcium reserves, and put them into good use: building shells, teeth, skeletons.  Your ability to walk upright is due to revolution’s knack for recycling its toxic waste.  Pages 5-6

An ancient and honorable profession, removing night rubbish

5. Work and low-skilled labor: the night-soil men

Enter the ragpickers, led by the night-soil men:

City landlords hired men to remove the “night soil” from the overflowing cesspools of their buildings.  The collecting of human excrement was a venerable occupation; in medieval times they were called “rakers” and gong-fermors,” and they played an indispensable role in the waste-recycling system that helped London grow into a true metropolis, by selling the waste to farmers outside the city walls.  (Later entrepreneurs hit upon a technique for extracting nitrogen from the ordure that could be reused in the manufacture of gunpowder.)  While the rakers and their descendants made a good wage, the work conditions could be deadly: in 1326, an ill-fated laborer by the name of Richard the Raker fell into a cesspool and literally drowned inhuman shit.  Pages 8-11

Not as pleasant as drowning in a butt of malmsey, but just as dead

Like any other profession, it developed a complicated and interdependent value chain:

By the nineteenth century, the night-soil men had evolved a precise choreography for their labors.  They worked the graveyard shift, between midnight and five a.m., in teams of four: a “ropeman,” a “holeman,” and two “tubmen.” 

As specialized as an artillery crew

The team would affix lanterns at the edge of the cesspit, then remove the floorboards or stone covering it, sometimes with a pickax.  If the waste had accumulated high enough, the ropeman and holeman would begin by scooping it out with the tub.  Eventually, as more night soil was removed, the men would lower a ladder down and the holeman would descend into the pit and scoop waste into his tub.  The ropeman would help pull up each full tub, and pass it along to the tubmen who emptied the waste into their carts. 

Aside from being filthy, the work was foul, and to keep themselves motivated, the workers turned to civilization’s standby, alcohol:

It was standard practice for the night-soil men to be offered a bottle of gin for their labors.  As one reported to Mayhew: “I should say there’s been a bottle of gin drunk at the clearing of every two, ay, and more than every two, out of three cesspools emptied in London; and now that I come to think of it, I should say that’s been the case with three out of every four.”  Pages 8-11

Because the work was hazardous and difficult, it was lucrative:

London’s underground market of scavenging had its own system of rank and privilege, and near the top were the night-soil men.  Like the beloved chimney sweeps of Mary Poppins, the night-soil men worked as independent contractors at the very edge of the legitimate economy, though their labor was significantly more revolting than the foraging of the mud-larks [Thomas mud scavenger – Ed.] and toshers [sewage scavenger – Ed.]. 

Today scavenging is universal in cities.  

Indian ragpicker

In my neighborhood, the night before trash pickup we can hear the rattling clank of a shopping cart being hauled down the street, full of returnable bottles and cans

Scavenging dumpsters, New York City, present day

The work was foul, but the pay was good.  Too good, as it turned out.

As with modern society, as the rich demand a better quality of life, the cost of sanitation rises.

Thanks to its geographic protection from invasion, London had become the most sprawling of European cities, expanding far beyond its Roman walls.  (The other great metropolis of the nineteenth century, Paris, had almost the same population squeezed into half the geographic area.) 

For the night-soil men, the sprawl meant longer transport times—open farmland was now often ten miles away— which drove the price of their removing waste upward.  By the Victorian era, the night-soil men were charging a shilling a cesspool, wages that were at least twice that of the average skilled laborer. 

I’ve previously speculated that cities incorporate their informal peri-urbs and slums when the cost of ignoring them – because of their negative externalities, like traffic, pollution, and crime – becomes greater than the cost of bringing them into the formal universe.  In Victorian London, as with modern society, as the rich demanded a better quality of life, the cost of sanitation rose – and the cost-benefit balance tilted:

Which is it to be?

First it went backwards:

For many Londoners, the financial cost of removing waste exceeded the environmental cost of just letting it accumulate—particularly for landlords, who often didn’t live on top of these overflowing cesspools. 

From Punch, a London sewer with cesspool outflow

Sights like this one, reported by a civil engineer hired to survey two houses under repair in the 1840s, became commonplace: “I found whole areas of the cellars of both houses were full of night soil to the depth of three feet, which had been permitted for years to accumulate from the overflowing of the privy to the depth of nearly six inches and bricks were placed to enable the inmates to get across dry-shod.” 

Another account describes a dust heap in Spitalfields, in the heart of the East End: “a heap of dung the size of a tolerably large house, and an artificial pond into which the content of cesspits are thrown.  The contents are allowed to desiccate in the open air, and they are frequently stirred for that purpose.” 

From defection to desiccation – and of course, this flowed back into the water supply.

Mayhew described this grotesque scene in an article published in the London Morning Chronicle in 1849 that surveyed the ground zero of that year’s cholera outbreak:

We then journeyed on to London-street …. In No. 1 of this street the cholera first appeared seventeen years ago, and spread up it with fearful virulence; but this year it appeared at the opposite end, and ran down it with like severity.  

As we passed along the reeking banks of the sewer, the sun shone upon a narrow slip of the water.  In the bright light it appeared the colour of strong green tea, and positively looked as solid as black marble in the shadow—indeed, it was more like watery mud than muddy water; and yet we were assured this was the only water the wretched inhabitants had to drink. 

Don’t look too closely at it

As we gazed in horror at it, we saw drains and sewers emptying their filthy contents into it; we saw a whole tier of doorless privies in the open road, common to men and women, built over it; we heard bucket after bucket of filth splash into it; and the limbs of vagrant boys bathing in it seemed by pure force of contrast, white as Parian marble.

Collecting dirty water to sell as clean: Mavoko, Nairobi, Kenya, 2005

And yet, as we stood doubting the fearful statement, we saw a little child, from one of the galleries opposite, lower a tin can with a rope to fill a large bucket that stood beside her.

When it’s the only water you can afford, you drink it

In each of the balconies that hung over the stream the self-same tub was to be seem in which inhabitants put the mucky liquid to stand, so that they may, after it has rested for a day or two, skim the fluid from the solid particles of filth, pollution, and disease.  As the little thing dangled her tin cup as gently as possible into the stream, bucket of night soil was poured down from the next gallery.

Victorian London had its postcards wonders, to be sure—the Crystal Palace, Trafalgar Square, the new additions to Westminster Palace. 

We imagined a shining antiseptic future

But it also had wonders of a different order, no less remarkable: artificial ponds of raw sewage, dung heaps the size of houses.  Pages 8-11

Wonder what’ll happen to all that dump?

[Continued tomorrow in Part 4.]

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