ABSTRACT
The interactions between environmental and social change are complex and varied. This chapter explores such relationship and views its implications for urban planning, namely, the relationship between the increasingly scientific understanding of infectious disease which made headway in the United States in the middle decades of the nineteenth century and the experience of urbanization, especially the felt sense that rampant city growth had produced socially intolerable conditions. The social costs of urbanization to which sanitarians reacted stemmed from the rapid, often chaotic physical growth characteristic of mid-nineteenth century cities. The chapter examines the several major ways in which sanitary reform yielded urban planning alternatives to the dominant pattern of piecemeal urban growth. It assumes that public health concerns and efforts to cope with abundant water were inextricably related and that neither consideration alone adequately explains the adoption of water-carriage sewerage. The chapter asserts, however, that health considerations play a dominant role in certain phases of the development.
