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Technology and Culture 45.2 (2004) 428-430



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Constructing a Pipe-Bound City: A History of Water Supply, Sewerage, and Excreta Removal in Norrköping and Linköping, Sweden, 1860-1910. By Jonas Hallström. Linköping, Sweden: Department of Water and Environmental Studies, Linköping University, 2002. Pp. 362.

Jonas Hallstrom, the author of this authoritative monograph, asserts that neither Norrköping nor Linköping, both of which are located to the south of Stockholm, would have been considered large-scale centers within the context of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European urban hierarchy. Norrköping boasted a population of no more than twenty [End Page 428] thousand in 1860, rising to fifty-eight thousand in 1920. Linköping would have had difficulty in scraping into the "small town" category in late-nineteenth-century England. During the period under review in this study its population increased from a paltry six thousand to twenty-six thousand.

Yet both centers experimented with public water supply systems in the 1860s, and in the 1870s both took decisive steps along the path toward major infrastructural change. In largely nonindustrial Linköping the city patriciate convinced itself that piped water would increase salubrity and lead either directly or indirectly to a reduction in the poor rate. In Norrköping profit-driven factors seem to have been in the fore. Not only would increased supplies help to boost production; piped water would also make it possible to pour ever larger volumes of liquid waste into the river Motala Strom.

At this point in his argument, Hallstrom focuses on differing attitudes toward sanitation. In Linköping public health specialists emphasized epidemiological dangers and aesthetic problems associated with substandard sanitation and drainage. In Norrköping, by contrast, fire prevention played a more important role than fear of epidemic disease, and particularly of pandemic cholera. Hallstrom claims that his findings modify a historiographical consensus that has highlighted the ravages of waterborne disease as an explanation for environmental reform. This argument might have been more fully developed. A similar comment could be made of the historical aspects of epidemiological analysis, in terms of the dominant paradigms and perceptions that public health officials brought to the environments they sought to control and improve. Within this context, greater attention should have been devoted to differences in cause-specific mortality in the two cities—a surprising omission given the comprehensiveness of Swedish demographic data.

Hallstrom provides an excellent comparative account of the outward spread of infrastructure between the 1880s and the end of the First World War. Although Linköping required that its householders pay a water rate, supplies appear to have been more widely and evenly distributed in that city than in Norrköping, which provided a free service. Consolidation of basic utilities in the two cities coincided with large-scale debate in the wake of a national Public Health Act in 1874. This was an era in which the state began to take increasing interest in both the quality of urban life and the dissemination of knowledge of technologies designed to reduce levels of pollution and disease. In terms of the removal of human waste—a crucial issue in both cities—Hallstrom confirms that public health specialists supported the introduction of the water closet in Norrköping. Meanwhile, Linköping remained wedded to the dry conservancy method, the environmental logic being that uncontrolled waterborne disposal would lead to a rapid deterioration in the quality of the River Stangan.

Only a small body of research has thus far been concerned with the kinds of appliances adopted in different European communities during the [End Page 429] late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hallstrom's conclusions conform to what is known about Britain during this period. There, a clear majority of the urban-industrial centers that rose to prominence during the first half of the nineteenth century gradually converted to water closets, while most small towns continued to use traditional means of disposal. In the former, river environments...

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