ABSTRACT
E.J. Hobsbawm [110, p. 10] remarked that a traveler through England’s countryside in 1750 “would be immediately struck by the greenness, tidiness, the apparent prosperity of the countryside, and by the apparent comfort of ‘the peasantry’.” However, the “apparent comfort of the peasantry” did not stop the great rural to urban migration made possible by a rising agricultural surplus. Today, more of the world’s population lives in an urban rather than rural area. In developed countries, like the United Kingdom and the United States, more than 80% of the population lives in a city. London’s rising population tended to be crowded into tenements with high crime rates and “‘common sewers’ which flowed through or past these crowded communities.” [83, p. 77] Hobsbawm tells us that upon arriving in London, the traveler would encounter a rather “gloomy” city that was neither clean nor well-lit. The “dark Satanic mills” of Birmingham and Manchester in the 1800s, and Kansas City, Pittsburgh, and Chicago in the late 1800s, filled the skies with smoke and soot, not unlike many Chinese cities today.
