La ville deletere: Medecins et ingenieurs dans l'espace urbain, XVIIIe-XIXe siecle (review)

La Ville délétère: Médecins et ingénieurs dans l'espace urbain, XVIIIe-XIXe siècle. By Sabine Barles. Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1999; distributed by Presses Universitaires de France. Pp. 373. Fr 185.

One rarely finds so well-researched a volume as this one, and almost never one so short on coherent argument. Most publishers eschew books that lack clear purposes, and readers are therefore usually rewarded with pointers toward the issues the author raises. Alas, one of the subcultural styles of French academe is to avoid insulting the reader by overtly stating one's points. Obliqueness has a certain patina of virtue despite the endless annoyances it elicits in readers. But in a culture where intellectual opacity is taken as a sign of intelligence--Derrida, anyone?--we should not expect monographs to be easy. With that in mind, this reviewer will attempt to explicate the argument of this book, such as it is.

Let's walk through a city. Since Sabine Barles is a French intellectual, there is but one important urban zone: Paris. As we stroll, we see that each person--indeed, each member of other species--experiences the space of Paris differently. In Cognition in the Wild, Edwin Hutchins has told us that space gets cognitively mapped in surprisingly interesting ways by different cultural and social groups. This is not immediately obvious, but it is credible: a dog maps space by the smells of other dogs, by garbage, and the like, while a cabdriver knows the routes between the good areas for hunting fares and the places those fares might wish to go--all done on streets. I recall once telling a Parisian to meet me "on the southwest corner" of a specific intersection, only to be met with a blank stare; she wanted to know, in the direction of which landmark?

Oddly, gridded geographical space was a genuinely elegant invention (one thinks of L'Enfant in Washington, D.C.), but France had too many legacy systems, those (as some might have it) annoyances of the past that urban reconfigurers had to study and live with instead of pursuing their visionary vocations. Open space for gridding was certainly abundant in America, not Europe, during most of the period in which cognitive mapping mastery (in a scientific sense) was flourishing, from about 1750 to 1890.

Barles thus opens her book with a lengthy discussion of the urban mapping done by the eighteenth-century colleagues of Lavoisier. Based on a notion that disease was generated by myriad deleterious miasmas, the medico-scientific construction of Paris was based on the danger zones of odor and (ostensibly) disease. Various varieties of miasma determined different areas of the city, and those bad airs usually correlated with low-lying areas near the Seine. Thanks to careful statistical analyses of correlates between morbidity and miasmas in the cholera epidemic of 1832, the doctors made some progress in breaking out of the odor-disease axiom, but they remained at an explanatory impasse.

Similarly, correlating poverty and proximity to street level (that layer rife with excrement and refuse) with the incidence of disease--while having little grip on distinguishing one malady from the next--doctors made little progress in remapping their conception of urban space. The great investigations of Parent-Duchâtelet and Villermé, which led to a massive effort at sewer building and drainage as well as a veritable public-health movement, were but a few years later. The essential step between bad air and public health was a completely different pas de deux: the entry of engineers and geographers as mappers of Paris.

Enjoying a combination of new surveying techniques and mathematics, a new sort of entity, the civil engineer (as opposed to Napoléon's military engineer), became, in Barles's words, "the man of the hour." By 1800 the [End Page...