ABSTRACT
Social critics in the late-nineteenth century were almost universal in their condemnation of cities and the life-styles of their inhabitants.1 Urban areas were believed to be centres of illness and death, of personal estrangement and rootlessness, of criminality and social revolution. Even though some commentators praised the creative aspects of city life, gloomy portraits of urban conditions were legion. The economist and social commentator Gustav Schmoller likened the city to a primeval forest, where men were gradually but surely stripped of their civilised habits, allowing barbarism and bestiality to reassert themselves.2 More recently Lewis Mumford reflected a long-standing tradition when he declared that ‘between 1820 and 1900 the destruction and disorder within great cities [was] like that of a battlefield . . . Industrialism, the main creative force of the nineteenth century, produced the most degrading urban environment the world had yet seen.’3 A major component of this urban crisis was the existence of slums where poverty and delapidated, insanitary and overcrowded housing apparently combined to threaten public health and private morality as well as undermine the formation of any sense of social consensus. The misery and desperation that Friedrich Engels observed on the banks of the River Irk in Manchester, Jacob Riis found in the tenements of Cherry Street in New York City, Andrew Mearns and George Sims uncovered in central London, and Gustav Schmoller detected in Berlin.4
