Harold L. Platt

Invisible gases: Smoke, gender, and the redefinition of environmental policy in Chicago, 1900–1920

In 1908, the women of Chicago declared war on smoke. The ensuing, seven‐year debate on environmental policy raised novel questions not only about gender politics but also medical science, public health, and the authority of experts. The reformers drew upon traditional and newer, germ theories of disease to call for a broader public welfare concept, one that encompassed air pollution in ways analogous to the citys water supplies and sanitation. In opposition, businessmen and their expert consultants called for “reasonable” reforms that emphasized improvements in technology. Although the women failed to achieve reform, they helped to redefine policy and planning by linking air quality and public health in the industrial city.

The emergence of urban environmental history

The three books under review represent the origins and promise of a relatively new field of study, urban environmental history. Joel Tarrs collection of previously published essays retraces the intellectual odyssey of its single most important pioneer. Concerned about contemporary pollution problems, he has spent a quarter of a century exploring the frontiers of scholarship on the relationship between cities and their technologies. In contrast, monographs by R. Bruce Stephenson and Andrew Hurley are typical of current trends to build on this foundation, enriching and broadening its parameters from a wide variety of perspectives. Here the insights of town planning and social history illuminate case studies of St Petersburg, Florida, and Gary, Indiana, respectively. Other recent works draw heavily upon the sciences, especially medicine and public health. Reversing decades of academic fragmentation – knowing more and more about less and less – the study of the urban environment is encouraging creative applications of cross-disciplinary and comparative approaches.