Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (review)

I am certain Harold Platt wishes his book were not so awfully timely. His encyclopedic Shock Cities, a comparative environmental history of Chicago and Manchester from the early 1800s to the 1920s, is positively brimming with contemporary relevance, and makes for eerie reading in light of Hurricane Katrina. He writes, for example, that in 1872 in Manchester a flood "submerged homes and shops from the working-class district of Ancoats to the Duke of Bridgewater's wharves at Castlefield, where barges were lifted and deposited on land far from their moorings." Platt thus joins a growing list of commentators – among them Eric Klinenberg, Mike Davis and John Barry – whose work on the social and political dynamics of environmental disaster in times and places variously removed from contemporary New Orleans has something to tell us about modern-day catastrophes.

What is that something? Platt's version of a central trope in this literature is the paradox of progress: while economic growth and technological advances held out the promise of improving the quality of people's lives, that promise was continually subverted by corrupt or greedy public officials and naively overconfident engineers. Too often, it was in too many people's interest to underplay the serious environmental despoliation caused by urban growth and by resource-hungry and profligate industries like brewing and meatpacking. Politicians and planners, for example, consistently underestimated the waste the cities generated, with dire consequences in Chicago in particular as wastewater repeatedly contaminated the drinking water supply, leading to recurring outbreaks of typhoid and other diseases. Thus, the extraordinariness of disaster is misleading, because more permanent undercurrents of inequality, negligence and hubris make disasters possible.

Subsumed within this overarching paradox-of-progress narrative are three intertwined storylines. The first details the massive environmental consequences of the two cities' "industrial ecologies." These include pollution of the air and water, illness, the re-engineering of river flows, and the spread of urban influences over vast stretches of countryside. These cities did not merely knit together and reshape their immediate regions. They also spread their tentacles across hundreds or thousands of miles – to the Lake District for drinking water, India and the American South for cotton, the mouth of the Mississippi for shipping.

A second storyline is political, focusing on corruption, the unresponsiveness of politicians and the failure to build a polity that protected workers' health and interests. Platt richly details the shortcomings of city planning and infrastructural development. One vignette tells the story of a booze-filled 1871 expedition by city fathers to celebrate the "deep cut" canal that reversed the flow of the Chicago River. This story, however, simultaneously displays both the strengths and the weaknesses of the book. Despite his wish to the contrary, Platt is better able to show the impact of industrialization and public policy on workers than to make them into full participants or to invest them with much life.

In part, this failure derives from Platt's third subplot: the rise of middle class professionals who stand between city politicians and capitalists on the one hand and workers on the other. Budding professions and their claims to expert knowledge are in every chapter, and engineers, planners, scientists, reformers and doctors are Platt's main actors. The period was a golden age for the middle class, from the founding of the Manchester Statistical Society in 1833, to the rise of the Department for the Inspection of Steam Boilers and Steam Plants in Chicago city government. All the while, the members of these new occupational groups jockeyed with each other for status. In particular, Platt argues that the prestige of "engineers" (who overshadowed scientists) was bad for cities, as they generated infrastructure proposals that were doomed to environmental inadequacy and failure.

The book is a massive undertaking...