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作者

Lionel Frost

来源

JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY,Vol.46,Issue1,P.15–32

语言

英文

关键字

water supply, sewerage, pollution, typhoid, government, San Francisco, Melbourne

作者单位

1Monash University, Frankston, Australia

摘要

The challenges cities face in supplying safe water and disposing effectively of sewage and wastewater are affected by historical and environmental conditions and the long-lasting effects of choices of infrastructure. This article provides case studies of two similar cities, San Francisco and Melbourne, from the mid-nineteenth-century gold rushes to 1920, to show how differences in geography and governance structure can shape water technologies in a path-dependent way. While the two cities developed safe water supplies early in their histories, these were not well integrated with sewerage systems. The use of typhoid death rates, which provide a proxy for water quality and urban pollution, reveals the impact of defective water technology on the urban environment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.