Table of Contents

Figures, Tables, and Boxes ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Part I. The Condition of the City 41
1. The Evolution of the City 43
2. Epidemics, Cities, and Environmental Reform 69
Part II. Reforming the City 113
3. Wealthy Urbanites: Fleeing Downtown and Privatizing Green Space 115
4. Social Inequality and the Quest for Order in the City 131
5. Data Gathering as a Mechanism for Understanding the City and Imposing Order 181
6. Sanitation and Housing Reform 199
Part III. Urban Park, Order, and Social Reform 221
7. Conceptualizing and Framing Urban Parks 223
8. Elite Ideology, Activism, and Park Development 251
9. Social Class, Activism, and Park Use 296
10. Contemporary Efforts to Finance Urban Parks 338
Part IV. The Rise of Comprehensive Zoning 365
11. Class, Race, Space, and Zoning in America 367
12. Land Use and Zoning in American Cities 380
Part V. Reforming the Workplace and Reducing Community Hazards 405
13. Workplace and Community Hazards 407
14. The Industrial Workplace 446
Conclusion 501
Notes 507
Index 603

Promotional Information

This study of urban environmental history draws attention to environmental challenges faced by American cities over the past four centuries

About the Author

Dorceta E. Taylor is Associate Professor of Environmental Sociology and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Race, Class, Gender, and American Environmentalism and Identity in Ethnic Leisure Pursuits.

Reviews

"Dorceta E. Taylor has set out to write nothing short of a 'People's Environmental History of American Cities.' At the core of her social history are inequalities based on race, gender, class, and ethnicity, as wealthy white elites shaped access to housing, workplaces, parks, and even cemeteries to their wishes, at the expense of everyone else. Taylor's book is a call for broader perspectives on environmental issues, to include segregation, labor market and workplace dynamics, social movements, politics, and social control. A magnum opus chock full of fascinating details of an untold history of the environmental injustices at the root of our society."--J. Timmons Roberts, Director of the Center for Environmental Studies, Brown University "All future research on environmentalism and social change will have to reference The Environment and the People in American Cities. It is a pathbreaking, first-rate work of scholarship. As the first scholar to consider the relationship between social inequality and conservation issues within such an inclusive framework, Dorceta E. Taylor makes stunning links between the terrain of contemporary environmental and social-justice conflicts and those of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."--David Naguib Pellow, author of Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago "The Environment and the People in American Cities is one of those great and versatile books that any environmental social scientist would want to have sitting on her shelf. I have read many books on related topics over the years, and I can't recall any other that does anything like this one. By focusing on racial, ethnic, and class issues as they play out in the urban landscape, against such backdrops as public health concerns, parks, and industrial workplaces, Dorceta E. Taylor makes a major contribution. I'll never view my urban surroundings in quite the same way again."--Valerie Gunter, co-author of Volatile Places: A Sociology of Communities and Environmental Controversies