City Water, City Life: Water and the Infrastructure of Ideas in Urbanizing Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago by Carl Smith (review)

Carl Smith, an urban historian at Northwestern University, has provided a fine account of the initial period of water-supply infrastructure construction in three American cities: Philadelphia, Chicago, and Boston. The book situates the building of these water systems within a social and cultural historical framework. After giving a brief history of the networks’ construction, Smith uses each subsequent chapter to ask questions about water in city life. He first explores how people understood citizenship at this time. Smith argues that “city water … became a form for intense debates about the nature—and value—of urban democracy.” This played out in particular in discussions about public versus private ownership, with some claiming that since water was a public good, it should remain in public hands. Allowing it to be owned by a private company would call into question the collective character of the city. For others, public ownership was merely a form of mob rule, reflecting suspicions about demagoguery and majority rule.

In the next section, Smith asks how urban dwellers conceptualized the cityscape in relation to the natural world that was being displaced. He argues that people thought of waterworks as “expressions of the human desire to overcome, discipline, and even dominate nature.” Most cities were founded on land chosen for its natural endowments, which almost always meant proximity to water. The construction of waterworks was a rupture with this past, freeing the city from its dependence on local watercourses. Although this displacement of the natural world was sometimes celebrated, there also were ambivalent voices such as those of Emerson and Thoreau. Water supply, however, also offered the possibility of bringing nature into the cityscape in new ways. In Philadelphia, Fairmount Park surrounding the reservoir was the largest urban park in the United States. High-pressure supply, moreover, offered the possibility of power fountains within urban parks, and Smith argues that powerful fountains in part “conveyed the hope that city water and city life would never be entirely denatured,” as well as a sense of power.

Smith then asks how the relationship between individual physical well-being and that of the city was perceived. A common metaphor was that the city was a social body, very like a human body, complete with circulatory and digestive/excretory systems. This was clearest in the public health movement, which gave importance to removing filth from the city. Promoters of public health often saw the circulation of water as a cure in moral as well as physical terms. Water was described as the entry of a purifying spirit into the city. Temperance reformers also felt that abundant pure water helped to cleanse people of drunkenness. They argued that alcohol was often mixed with foul-tasting water, and so the purity of water could reduce alcoholism. Finally, others, echoing claims made in earlier times, argued that water was a universal panacea. The more abundant availability of water now offered the possibility of its wider use. In a similar vein, the water cure—long a rural pursuit—now offered the possibility of escaping the ills of city life through water.

Finally, Smith asks where people located city life in the flow of time and history. The introduction of water was thought to assure a city’s future growth and prosperity. Indeed, abundant water was itself a way to invite city growth, with people and businesses moving where it was easily available. Boston set out to build a larger supply than required with such a purpose in mind. There were, however, economic costs, including the cost of the waterworks, their maintenance, and their financing. All three cities accumulated massive new debts building their networks, and these costs had to be set against the savings gained by avoiding fires and epidemics.

If this book has a shortcoming, it is that the author has done relatively little to engage...