The Topography of Wellness

Sara Jensen Carr

Description

The COVID-19 pandemic has reignited discussions of how architects, landscape designers, and urban planners can shape the environment in response to disease. This challenge is both a timely topic and one with an illuminating history. In The Topography of Wellness, Sara Jensen Carr offers a chronological narrative of how six epidemics transformed the American urban landscape, reflecting changing views of the power of design, pathology of disease, and the epidemiology of the environment. From the infectious diseases of cholera and tuberculosis, to so-called social diseases of idleness and crime, to the more complicated origins of today’s chronic diseases, each illness and its associated combat strategies has left its mark on our surroundings. While each solution succeeded in eliminating the disease on some level, sweeping environmental changes often came with significant social and physical consequences. Even more unexpectedly, some adaptations inadvertently incubated future epidemics. From the Industrial Revolution to present day, this book illuminates the constant evolution of our relationship to wellness and the environment by documenting the shifting grounds of illness and the urban landscape.

Preparation of this volume has been supported by Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Wellness and the American Urban Landscape
1. Waste and Super-Infrastructure in the Urban Landscape
2. Work and Play
3. Purified Air in the Progressive Era
4. Germ Theory and Environmental Compartmentalization
5. Urban Decay and the Metaphorical Cancer of Blight
6. Prescriptive Neighborhoods
7. Whose Wellness?
8. The New Ecology of Health
Conclusion: No Green Pill
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• urban planning
• architectural history
• Architecture

Informations

• Publié par: University of Virginia Press
• Date de parution: 05 octobre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9780813946313
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

The Topography of Wellness
THE TOPOGRAPHY OF WELLNESS
How Health and Disease Shaped the American Landscape
Sara Jensen Carr
University of Virginia Press
Charlottesville and London
University of Virginia Press
© 2021 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
First published 2021
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Carr, Sara Jensen, author.
Title: The topography of wellness : how health and disease shaped the American landscape / Sara Jensen Carr.
Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021010961 (print) | LCCN 2021010962 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813946290 (cloth) | ISBN 9780813946306 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813946313 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH : Urban health—United States—History. | Environmental health—United States—History. | City planning—Health aspects—United States—History. | Epidemiology—United States—History.
Classification: LCC RA 566.3 . C 37 2021 (print) | LCC RA 566.3 (ebook) | DDC 362.1/0420973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010961
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010962

Publication of this volume was assisted by a grant from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.
Cover illustrations: Paolo Mascagni, Anatomia universa XLIV tabulis aeneis juxta archetypum hominis adulti . . . repraesentata (Pisa: N. Capurro “typis Firmini Didot,” 1823; left panel ); antique illustration of human body anatomy: neck and head veins (stock illustration/ibusca/iStock; top/bottom panels ); Vitruvian Man (stock photo/Vaara/iStock; background ); William Pistor, Eng., “Map of New York City, drawn to accompany the 4th annual report of the Health Department,” 1874 (Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, The New York Public Library, The New York Public Library Digital Collections; center foreground ).
To Maclean, Wyatt, Maya, and Lily,
who make my world brighter, greener, and happier
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Wellness and the American Urban Landscape
I. Infectious Terrains, 1860s–1940s
1. Waste and Super-Infrastructure in the Urban Landscape
2. Work and Play
3. Purified Air in the Progressive Era
4. Germ Theory and Environmental Compartmentalization
II. The Chorography of Chronic Disease, 1950s–Present Day
5. Urban Decay and the Metaphorical Cancer of Blight
6. Prescriptive Neighborhoods
7. Whose Wellness?
8. The New Ecology of Health
Conclusion: No Green Pill
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The seeds of my interest in how the built environment shapes health were originally sown when I was working at an architecture firm in New Orleans primarily doing healthcare facilities. Immediately after Hurricane Katrina, when the work turned to doing FEMA surveys of damaged buildings and recovery, I spent a lot of time walking around the then half-empty city and thinking about how the landscape itself was serving as a space of harm, healing, and social cohesion for the few that had returned at that time. When witnessing the difficult conversations and efforts regarding how New Orleans should rebuild, I had to confront the divide in perceptions between the architects/planners and the general public, as well as my own myopia. I was driven to see if the guidelines that dictate the design of almost every aspect of health care could somehow be translated to the landscape, which is what led me to pursue study in landscape architecture and environmental planning. The origin of this specific book was as a chapter in my dissertation at the University of California Berkeley, where I was trying to position what I saw as a growing trend in research and practice of “healthy” urban planning and design in other historical movements. The material proved much, much more expansive than a chapter, and this larger, longer study was born.
In 2017, I received a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation’s Initiatives in Urban Landscape Studies, which funded a dream residence at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, where I was allowed the intellectual time and space to really develop the manuscript. A huge thank-you to my colleagues there, especially Jeanne Haffner, John Davis, Peter Ekman, and then-director John Beardsley, who gave incredibly incisive feedback on the structure and arguments.
Another thank-you to my editors at University of Virginia Press, especially Boyd Zenner, who was extremely patient with me extending deadlines through various life events, and Mark Mones, who took over this project after Boyd’s retirement. Many thanks to Jane Curran for her heroic copyediting work on the manuscript.
I am also grateful for support from the Graham Foundation and Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund, which came at crucial points in this book’s journey, to fund image rights as well as printing and publication costs.
Most of all, I draw strength from my personal and professional circle. I have been so lucky to have valuable mentors throughout my academic journey, first and foremost Louise Mozingo, but also Linda Jewell, Judith Stilgenbauer, and Nicholas de Monchaux. Thank you to my former dean, Daniel Friedman at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, and department chair Daniel Adams at Northeastern University, for giving me the time and support to pursue this research. My New Orleans–based cheering squad always keeps me laughing and loved: Toni DiMaggio, Nick Jenisch, Mara LePere-Schloop, and Betsy Johnson are all talented and, most of all, humane designers who make positive impact on the world. Allison Lassiter, an amazing scholar and adventurer, has been a valuable and empathetic sounding board since our days in the PhD program at University of California Berkeley. My parents, Karl and Celia Jensen, instilled me with a deep sense of respect for the land and for other people and cultures. They and my in-laws, Bill and Shelley Carr, never questioned my various career shifts over the past years; hopefully their adorable grandchildren were an acceptable tradeoff. Due to the extremely niche topic, I’m sure none of them will read it, but our various wonderful nannies and babysitters have been perhaps most essential to this book’s completion and deserve recognition. Connie, Alissa, Annie, Lindsay, Sabrina, Masha, and Eva kept my mind at ease as I knew our kids were well taken care of and loved.
Those three children, Wyatt, Maya, and Lily, have made getting the research and writing done more challenging but made the end product so much better by shifting my worldview and making me a more empathetic, if infinitely more tired, woman. Above all, none of this would have been possible without the unflagging support of my husband, Maclean, who has always pushed me to do better, given me space when I needed to step back for a bit, and been a partner in life in every sense of the word.
The Topography of Wellness
INTRODUCTION
Wellness and the American Urban Landscape
In 2016, Karen DeSalvo, interim secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, noted that public health had entered a new era, where “one’s zip code is a better indicator of health than genetic code.” 1 This is an epochal declaration from a government official, but not surprising considering that we are inundated with a plethora of competing lists of the “healthiest” places to live, geographically coded “Wellbeing Indexes,” some scientific, some merely observational in nature. The Blue Zones Project, a private wellness consultancy, advocates for a preventative health model that comes from studying aspects of place in five communities around the world with the highest rate of centenarians, from Okinawa to Loma Linda, CA. 2 Empirical research on how the presence of trees, design of towns, and form of our workplaces and homes make us sicker or healthier has exploded in the past twenty years. However, all this data also reveals a troubling pattern in the United States. In terms of race, economy, and health outcomes, our neighborhoods are showing markedly more segregation and disparity. In an era where the primary causes of mortality are from chronic, environmentally influenced illnesses such as cancer, diabetes, and pulmonary and respiratory disease, the relationship between the landscapes we inhabit, our society, and our bodies is of renewed interest to the fields of public health, design, and planning.
The traditional view of health has traditionally been a binary—are you sick, or are you healthy? If you are sick, we often think the origin of that illness is etiologic, a linear chain of events that leads us back to the germ or gene causing the malfunction. In our new era, the complicated and often multifaceted origins of chronic disease have required an expanded, ecological view of health. The World Health Organization’s Constitution of 1948 defined health as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social wellbeing, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” It states that health “is a fundamental human right and that the attainment of the highest possible level of health is a most important world-wide social goal whose realization requires the action of many other social and economic sectors in addition to the health sector.” 3 This accordingly opened up a new realm of research that looked not only