Epidemics in the city
Infectious diseases such as plague, cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis and malaria were fundamental problems for preindustrial cities, for which substantial solutions were only developed in the 20th century. As can be read in the “Report on the Mortality of Cholera in England” from 1852, the causes of how diseases spread were by no means determined at the time. “The form of the cholera curve for all England is very remarkable”, it reads; “The successive terraces and pinnacles of the Plate resemble sections of the primitive mountain formations, (…) or recall the lines of a strange Gothic architeclure.” (3) The metaphorical comparison between the shape of the curve and architectural style is some indication of how much for a correct interpretation of the epidemiological data was struggled.
It was only in the second half of the 19th century that an understanding of the connection between urban development, hygiene and epidemiology emerged through a scientific consideration of the city. For example, high outside temperatures in combination with poor hygienic conditions in cities were increasingly recognized as drivers of various types of illness. Investigations into the connection between sewerage and drinking water quality or between swamplands and neighbourhood structures were equal drivers for innovations in medicine and urban planning.
The central subject of the study was the city as a slum and hygiene forming, as the architectural historian Julius Posener termed it, a kind of “slumology” (4). At the First International Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden in 1911 — pioneering for the discourse of modern urban planning — the problems and approaches towards solutions at that time were presented from an interdisciplinary perspective aimed at the reformation of prevailing ways of living. (5) The exhibition included sections for infectious and tropical diseases, medical care and rescue, settlements and housing, profession and work, food and stimulants, games and sports, as well as clothing and personal care. The exhibition served to make a broader public aware of the pervasive relevance of “hygiene” as a domain of knowledge.
With the spread of the coronavirus, architecture and urban planning are once again obliged to deal with hygiene in European cities. As a subject matter, hygiene no longer appears primarily in the context of slums and the “housing question” (Friedrich Engels(6) ), but rather in the light of the new “risk society” and thus a new form of urban “experimentalism” (Ulrich Beck) which in the long run has to deal with unpredictability. (7) Two planning concepts that are used when dealing with uncertainty stand out in particular, both of which have significant implications for architecture and urban planning.
It was only in the second half of the 19th century that an understanding of the connection between urban development, hygiene and epidemiology emerged through a scientific consideration of the city