Stéphane Frioux

At a green crossroads: recent theses in urban environmental history in Europe and North America

Since the path-breaking work of prominent North American historians such as Joel Tarr and Martin Melosi, as well as more recent roundtables in Europe, urban environmental history is now a mature research field, at the intersection of various related approaches. Time has passed since a leader of environmental history, William Cronon, could write that ‘cities in particular deserve much more work than they have received’. In this field, urban history necessarily crosses with environmental history, but also with the history of technology and social and cultural history; whilst its scholars not only emanate from a traditional historical background, but also from geography, science and engineering. Urban environmental historians, as they are referred to here, have duly established the importance of studying the relationships between ‘nature’ (including non-humans) and humans in and around cities. This ‘nature’ is a complex and shifting entity: recent doctoral studies have, for instance, documented rivers transformed by human action, weeds growing in the spatial and social margins of cities and tidal wetlands progressively filled in and built upon. The recently completed Ph.D.s reviewed in this essay see the built environment more as a hybrid of natural elements, like water, plants, animals and human action. Aided by the environmental lens, the scope of the urban historian has also been broadened by studying the ways in which residents’ lives were transformed by the invention, spread and environmental impact of new technologies, as well as the political responses to environmental crises.

Environmental History of Water Resources

Water resources, indispensable to life, are relatively limited with respect to the Earth surface and unequally distributed in the humanized spaces. They have been targeted by many different human actions through the centuries, which makes environmental history of water a well represented approach, among environmental history in general. In addition to its use for drinking and cleaning, water has contributed to the development of an increasingly productive agriculture with irrigation; and for centuries, rivers and canals have also played a major role in facilitating the traffic of people and merchandise and have structured the economics of many cities. Historians have emphasized in their researches the changes occurred during the Industrial Era (ca. 1780–1960 in the West). This period was crucial for the use of water resources because of the competition between different activities needing water: washing, factories needing pure water, factories using rivers as a receptacle for their wastes, professional or leisure fishing, etc. With the decrease of industrial discharges and boat traffic, in the last decades of the twentieth century (and mainly in the Western countries), water has been integrated in many urban development programs as a source of leisure and of aesthetic value. Restoration projects allowed for the return of salmon and other fish species, but history raises the question of how to restore. After having played an important role in culture and leisure, water resources remain an object of public policies that nowadays defend a very different goal from the post-WW2 modernist ideologies which led to vast dam and irrigation schemes. Nevertheless, great disparities still exist on a global scale. Climate change, making “wars for water” a potential threat for the next century, can be used by environmental historians to find lessons from the past which could be provided to policy-makers.