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- Title
The Politics of Hygiene and Modern Urban Planning in Berlin.
- Authors
Hsiu-Ling Kuo
- Abstract
Rapid urbanization during the second half of the nineteenth century confronted the increasingly congested cities of Western Europe with challenges to do not only with social order and cultural identity, but also with public health and living, conditions. The living environment, which already suffered deterioration, was worsened by the spread of contagious diseases such as typhoid, cholera, and tuberculosis. As a consequence, slums and poverty were equated with diseases. In the 1870s German urban planners started to apply the concept of hygiene to urban planning in the name of science. Hygiene referred both to cleanliness of the body and to cleanliness of streets and urban space. Thus based on considerations of science, economy, and health, the creation of an "orderly" (geordnete) city became the prime aim of urban development. Whereas bodily cleanliness was necessary to combat disease, demolishing slums was seen as essential to maintain public health and well being in an orderly city. The dissemination of this knowledge brought industrial hygiene technology into daily life and increasingly manifested itself in urban renewal plans at the end of the nineteenth century. In the inter-war period, proponents of the Modern Movement promoted urban development with the idea of a "white" urban environment built with more sunlight, open space, and cleanliness. However, the urban planning concept based on "progress," "cleanliness," and "order" was not as straightforward as European and American modernist architects claimed it to be, either in theory or in practice. This article focuses on the concept of hygiene in the urban planning of Berlin in order to reconstruct the urban historical discourse through the relevant publications from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Second, this article explores the role the concept of hygiene played in the theory of reconstructing European modern urban space: Finally, it also attempts to clarify how notions containing substantial totalitarian elements, such as sanitation, cleansing the urban "dirt," and creating order, were justified in the name of science during the process of industrialization and modernization.
- Subjects
GERMANY; BERLIN (Germany); HYGIENE -- History; URBAN planning; PUBLIC spaces; MODERN architecture; DISEASES &; society; SLUMS; SANITATION; HEALTH; HISTORY
- Publication
New History / Xin Shixue, 2013, Vol 24, Issue 2, p131
- ISSN
1023-2249
- Publication type
Article