ABSTRACT
When James Thomson wrote The City of Dreadful Night in 1880, he was referring to the dirty, gritty city of London in the midst of rapid industrialization. Thomson’s London is beset by disease and doom. His image was accurate for many of Europe’s and America’s industrializing cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The onset of the industrial revolution profoundly and irrevocably shifted human relationships with their physical environment. And while it is probably true that life in the cities was not necessarily worse than that in rural areas, the problems of pollution and poverty and distress were more evident, more massed, and less easy to ignore. For the most part, when cities were smaller and density low, pollution was perceived more as a nuisance than a threat to human health. The industrial era generated new agents in the city: the factory and the railroad. Rapid urbanization and increasing population density created a strained, hazardous and degraded physical environment that had visible and often significant health impacts. But the industrial city was also the cauldron in which new environmental-social relations were forged. New public health measures were introduced and the urban parks movement as well as the garden cities movement were just some of the responses that reshaped, both in imagination and practice, the urban-nature dynamic.
